Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Another thing about the good old days was we had a bit more room in our seats. That has nothing to do with the makeup of the Senate but, rather, of the building.

Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill C-21. Before I get into the meat of my remarks on this bill — and I have a lot of meat here — I wish to devote a few comments to the unjustified pressure that this government has attempted to exert on us here in the Senate to simply adopt this bill without even hearing from witnesses, as they have with so many other bills.

I find it extremely objectionable that both the minister and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons have, in recent weeks, been pressing for the Senate to simply rubber-stamp this bill. Even before Senator Yussuff or a single senator spoke on this bill in the chamber, the Parliamentary Secretary tweeted that I should stop delaying the bill.

To set the record straight, I believe it is useful to go over the timeline of Bill C-21.

Bill C-21’s journey began in the House of Commons with first reading on May 30, 2022. Second reading occurred on June 23, 2022, and the bill was then sent to the House committee. There, the bill ran into multiple and serious problems.

As I will explain in my remarks, this is a very badly thought‑out bill, and its problems were made worse by the amendments that the government itself attempted to make to the bill in the late fall of 2022. As we shall see, these amendments were proposed with no meaningful consultation and certainly without meaningful consultations with the Indigenous people whom they seriously impacted.

The government was forced to withdraw these amendments from the bill itself, though I do not believe that it had actually abandoned the objectives behind those amendments. I will discuss this matter as well in my remarks later on, but I think it is fairly clear that the government will now attempt to leave further changes to future regulation and orders-in-council, just as they have already done through the arbitrary gun ban they imposed in 2020 and through their arbitrary ban on the purchase and sale of legal handguns held by licensed sport shooters and collectors, which they imposed last year through an order-in-council.

To stifle all further debate, the government then introduced time allocation in the House and forced the bill through third reading on May 18, 2023. It was only then that Bill C-21’s journey in the Senate began. Although the bill was introduced in the Senate on May 18, debate did not begin until May 31, when our colleague Senator Yussuff, the sponsor of the bill, delivered his speech over a period of two days. But even before Senator Yussuff had said one word, the parliamentary secretary to the Government House Leader was again accusing me of delaying the bill.

The minister then followed this up with a letter sent to the leaders of the different Senate groups on June 8, demanding that we pass the bill. The minister even had the gall to write to the chair of the Senate National Security and Defence Committee with this demand. Colleagues, the Senate itself determines which committee will study any piece of government legislation, and the minister attempted to intervene in that process before we had even taken a decision.

The minister not only demanded that the bill be passed without any substantive debate; he also prejudged which committee might review the bill. In effect, he made additional demands about how exactly the committee should review it. This represents an unprecedented level of interference in the business of the Senate, and it fully exposes the very little respect the government has for this chamber.

Since June 8, we have had a number of senators who are not from the official opposition speak to this bill, and I submit that these senators had every right to prepare their remarks to be able to speak to this bill. We have an unwritten rule here that the critic is typically the last person to speak. I have done the same as my colleagues and spent a fair bit of time preparing my remarks. I was also informed by a critic briefing that I received from officials. My remarks are also informed by the research that my staff had to do on this bill. That research work reveals how deeply flawed this bill actually is, and I submit that it will be absolutely the duty of the Senate to hear from a broad cross-section of Canadians who are very concerned about this bill and who have views on all sides of this issue in relation to this legislation.

In that regard, colleagues, I want to assure the government that up until now, the official opposition has not delayed this bill. However, having personally reviewed the very negative implications of this bill, I wish to say that since the last speaker in this chamber spoke on the bill literally two minutes ago, I have now officially begun to delay Bill C-21. So let there be no question, and let the minister know so the minister and his parliamentary secretary can mark that in their calendars for future reference.

Colleagues, this bill amends the Firearms Act and other legislation to impose new requirements and restrictions on Canada’s legal firearms owners. There are currently well over 2 million gun licences in Canada, and in almost all cases, Canadian gun owners are extremely responsible members of our society. That has been the case throughout Canada’s history.

I think we need to understand who Canada’s gun owners are. They are, of course, Indigenous peoples who have used firearms as an integral aspect for their sustenance for centuries. They are Canadian hunters who have also used firearms responsibly for centuries. They are rural and urban Canadians. They are sport shooters and collectors who use firearms at clubs across the country. They are shooters who use pistols in a variety of disciplines, including Olympic competition.

These are people like Linda Thom from Ottawa, who won the Olympic gold medal at the 1984 Olympics in the 25-metre pistol competition. They include people like Lynda Kiejko, who won double gold at the 2015 Pan American Games, also in the 25‑metre pistol event. They include thousands of Canadians who participate in International Practical Shooting Confederation matches across the country. They are people who will be subject to the new restrictions being proposed by Bill C-21, a bill that the government claims is “. . . part of a comprehensive strategy to address gun violence and strengthen gun control in Canada.”

Bill C-21 does no such thing. It does not do so since there actually is no strategy from this government to address gun violence in Canada. In fact, this bill not only fails to address gun violence, it also significantly weakens gun control in Canada, and it may even destroy it.

In my remarks today, I will examine the policy rationale for this bill. In doing so, I will need to speak about the many flaws of this bill.

Second, I will discuss some of the implications of this bill and, in particular, about how I believe this bill will actually contribute to a growth in violent crime on our streets.

Third, I will address what I believe are the negative implications of all of this for gun control in Canada.

I want to begin by looking at the government’s policy rationale for this bill. At a core level, I believe this legislation illustrates the fact that ministers in charge of this bill don’t know very much about firearms. I believe this ignorance explains many of the serious flaws of this bill. It also explains why, over the past year, this bill has faced so many tumultuous ups and downs.

This became particularly evident late last year when a series of amendments were hastily proposed to the bill, which made it clear that ministers themselves did not understand the key issues. The government now claims to have abandoned these amendments, but I believe the mistaken ideas that led to the amendments remain at the heart of this bill. It is reasonably clear that the government will now attempt to do by regulation what they failed to do as completely as they would have liked through legislation.

The amendments in question were proposed by Liberal MP Paul Chiang, and what they did was expand the scope of the bill significantly to try to introduce bans on a wide range of hunting rifles. The amendments opened to complete prohibition any semi-automatic centrefire firearms that were designed to accept a detachable cartridge magazine and whose magazine capacity was greater than five cartridges. The provision would have immediately applied to as many as 1 million legal firearms in Canada, most of them non-restricted and almost all of them owned by hunters. I do not believe ministers gave the slightest thought about the likely impact these measures would have on Indigenous hunters, many of whom rely on them for subsistence hunting. I do not think that ministers really understood that when one talks about semi-automatic firearms, these are actually employed by hundreds of thousands of Canadian hunters.

For the information of colleagues who may also not be familiar with long guns, rifles and shotguns are actually manufactured in several different firing modes called actions. Some firearms are pump-action firearms, where the cartridges are moved into the chamber based on a pumping action. Some are lever-action firearms, where the same process is accomplished through a lever-action mechanism. Some are bolt-action firearms, where the process is accomplished — you guessed it — through a bolt‑action mechanism. Some are semi-automatic firearms, where the process is accomplished automatically when a previous round is discharged.

All of those actions can be fast, particularly when the firearm is in the hands of an experienced shooter. It is a commonly held belief that the semi-automatic action is the fastest, but that is not necessarily the case. Much depends upon who is using the firearm and how well it is maintained.

In Canada, semi-automatic long guns are legally limited to no more than five rounds in the firearm. That has been the case for decades, colleagues. There is no similar limitation for lever‑action, pump-action or bolt-action firearms. Those firearms might commonly hold 10 rounds, for example.

What colleagues should understand and what ministers should have understood is that semi-automatic long guns are very common among hunting firearms. They should also have understood that semi-automatic firearms already have magazine restrictions that are greater than those imposed on other long guns.

I think a reason that was overlooked and not well understood is because the government has consulted so inadequately on this bill. They certainly did not consult with Indigenous authorities on this amendment. We have often heard government ministers claim that when it comes to laws impacting Indigenous peoples, the slogan “nothing about us, without us” applies. But the reality is that this slogan is observed more in its omission than in its implementation.

Despite the government’s repeated claims that the enactment of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires them to consult with Indigenous peoples on issues affecting them, that certainly did not occur in any systematic way on Bill C-21.

The question, “With whom did you consult?” was posed to the officials during my critic’s briefing on the bill. When the officials were asked to describe their process of consulting with Indigenous peoples, they turned and looked for answers to the representative who was present from Minister Mendicino’s office. Departmental officials did say they had consulted on the previous Bill C-21, which died on the Order Paper, but they engaged in no such consultations with Indigenous peoples in advance of introducing this bill, which has different provisions from the previous bill.

Subsequent to my critic’s briefing, officials sent my office a list of meetings they held with Indigenous groups after the bill was introduced. In other words, those were meetings held between January and May this year. But that was months after Bill C-21 had been introduced and only occurred after the public opposition to the government’s amendments had arisen, colleagues.

As on so many other occasions, Indigenous peoples were only an afterthought. That really makes a mockery out of the claim that when it comes to Indigenous peoples, it is “nothing about us, without us.”

On Bill C-21, officials also failed to consult with outside experts who are well-informed on firearms.

All of that makes Bill C-21 remarkably similar to another Liberal gun bill, Bill C-68 in the 1990s, which enacted a universal firearms registry. Like that earlier bill, Bill C-21 will achieve almost nothing when it comes to enhancing public safety. Yet it will prevent legal handgun owners from buying or selling their firearms, but it still allows them to keep those guns and use them. Where, exactly, is the public safety benefit in that?

The bill will also set up a red flag law that will permit Canadians to take other Canadians to court if they fear that those other Canadians have guns and might pose a risk to others. Colleagues, Canadians can already call the police to deal with those sorts of concerns, so where is the public safety benefit in that?

That is what makes Bill C-21 so similar to Bill C-68 of the 1990s. Bill C-68 was ultimately rejected and, in large measure, repealed because it could not be explained how creating a universal gun registry at an enormous cost would enhance public safety.

Remember, colleagues, that the Chrétien government originally claimed that creating a universal firearms registry would carry a net cost of $2 million, but those costs subsequently exploded to $2 billion. By the time the Harper government repealed the long-gun registry, the public safety benefits of the costly long-gun registry had become impossible to explain.

Like Bill C-68, the provisions of Bill C-21 are already proving difficult to explain and to justify, and the bill has not been enacted yet. Ultimately, the Canadian public lost confidence in what was being claimed would be the benefits of Bill C-68. The same is already happening with Bill C-21, and once again, we have a piece of Liberal legislation that risks undermining the very foundations of gun control in Canada.

What, then, is the government claiming that it will achieve with this bill?

When he spoke on the bill in June 2022, Minister Mendicino stated that this bill is “. . . how we will eradicate gun violence and protect all Canadians.”

Reluctantly, I take the minister at his word that this is actually his objective and the objective of his government. In that sense, it is an emotive reaction to the scourge of gun crime. I’m sure that every senator in this chamber would agree that gun crime is a scourge on our society, but the minister says that his government’s goal is to eradicate gun violence. The word “eradicate” is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “to do away with as completely as if by pulling up by the roots.” That is a very noble objective in theory, but the sad reality is that no piece of government legislation can hope to accomplish such a sweeping objective when it comes to any criminal activity; it is simply not possible.

We do not know if the minister literally believed what he said, but if that is actually his goal, then he simply doesn’t know what he is doing, and we’ve raised that issue in the Senate a few times here in the last few weeks.

If we consider the other bills the government has enacted when it comes to criminal justice — ones like Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 — those bills have actually undermined the ability of law enforcement to fight gun crime.

Under Bill C-5, the government repealed a number of mandatory sentences for gun crime, including the following: using a firearm or imitation firearm in the commission of an offence; possession of a firearm or weapon knowing its possession is unauthorized; possession of a prohibited or restricted firearm with ammunition; possession of a weapon obtained by commission of offence; discharging a firearm with intent; robbery with a firearm; and extortion with a firearm.

The mandatory sentences for all of those offences were repealed. Many of those provisions had actually been put in place not by the previous government, but by previous Liberal governments.

In 1995, Justice Minister Allan Rock said the following about the need for mandatory penalties for gun crimes:

The right approach to firearms control in Canada is to find an efficient way to fight criminal use of firearms while respecting legitimate uses and interests of law-abiding firearms owners.

. . . we must strengthen controls at the borders and impose tougher sentences for smuggling and trafficking in illegal firearms.

. . . the longest mandatory minimum penitentiary terms in the Criminal Code for those who use firearms for any one of ten serious crimes, including robbery; the prospect of a mandatory jail term for possessing stolen or smuggled firearms . . . .

The minister continues:

Our efforts at the borders must be more effective. It makes a mockery of our domestic controls if we cannot staunch the flow of illegal arms coming into Canada.

That, colleagues, is what the Liberal Minister of Justice said in 1995.

To be sure, what Allan Rock did in creating the long-gun registry was foolish, but he was at least right when he spoke about the need to prevent firearms trafficking and the criminal use of firearms.

Is it not strange for today’s Liberal government to declare that its objective is to completely eradicate gun violence, and then to turn around and deliberately eliminate mandatory sentences for those very same crimes?

As Allan Rock argued, the reality is that mandatory sentences can assist in reducing gun crimes. They are particularly useful in removing violent and repeat offenders from circulation on our streets and in preventing them from committing new violent crimes. Mandatory sentences provide some measure of assurance that gang members and other violent criminals won’t be back to prey on people in vulnerable communities that are most often plagued by gun crime.

But keeping measures in place to stop that sort of crime has not been a strong consideration in this current government’s policy-making. Instead, this government decided that a range of firearms offences should no longer attract any mandatory sentencing. How is that consistent with the government’s pledge to eradicate gun violence?

And, of course, the government did not stop these contradictory measures with Bill C-5. Under Bill C-75, the government also introduced a new legislative “principle of restraint” for police and the courts to observe when it comes to granting bail. The government argued that these specific measures would “. . . ensure that release at the earliest opportunity is favoured over detention . . . .”

The impact of this policy has been nothing short of devastating, and I now want to discuss some of these impacts.

In British Columbia, a recent study looked at 425 bail hearings involving a suspect both accused of a violent crime and with a breach of bail conditions on their file. Of those 425 hearings, the Crown sought detention orders in only 222 cases, or 52% of the time. That meant that in nearly 50% of the cases, violent criminals with bail breaches on their files were back on the streets.

If we look at Ontario, this province has experienced a 57% increase in serious violence and weapons cases before the courts between 2018 and 2021. Who was in government?

Constable Greg Pierzchala of the Ontario Provincial Police was shot and killed last year. He was murdered by a repeat criminal, Randall McKenzie, and another man. McKenzie was out on bail on assault and weapons charges. He also had a warrant out for his arrest.

At the time that Bill C-75 was passed, the eradication of gun violence was supposed to be the goal of this government. But somehow that goal did not impact the provisions of Bill C-75. When Bill C-75 was passed, the government already knew that crimes committed by repeat offenders were skyrocketing. And Bill C-75 added fuel to that fire.

The Toronto Police Service reports that in the last two years, 17% of accused in Toronto charged with shooting-related homicides were already out on bail at the time of the alleged fatal shooting. Think about that, colleagues: Of the perpetrators of fatal shootings in Toronto, 17% were out on bail. Once again, how did the government’s supposed goal of eradicating gun violence fit with this outcome?

Colleagues, we can only come to two possible conclusions when we consider facts like these: Either the eradication of gun violence is really only a slogan for this government, or this government is completely and totally incompetent. If we are honest, colleagues, it’s probably a mixture of both.

This is a government and a minister who pay far too little attention to the details of policy. Like the Prime Minister who leads them, they somehow believe that slogans are sufficient and that slogans themselves will determine and set policy. We see this approach time and time again, and it is leading to disastrous policy outcomes. The government’s policy approach in Bill C-21 is only the latest illustration of this incompetence.

In his second reading remarks on Bill C-21 a year ago, the minister referenced the experiences of numerous Canadians who have been impacted by gun violence. No words can ever comfort those whose loved ones have been murdered in senseless acts of violence, but if he actually wants to eradicate gun violence as he claims, then the problem is that he has absolutely no idea how to accomplish that objective. That is because this government blames society for the actions of criminals. It is a government that identifies legal gun owners as the primary problem when it comes to gun crime. And it is a government that somehow believes that shorter periods of incarceration, even for repeat violent offenders, will produce less crime.

Colleagues, this is an incompetent approach, and it has significantly contributed to increasing violent crime in the past eight years. According to Statistics Canada, in 2021, 788 people were murdered in Canada. Let’s contrast that with 2013, when there were only 509 murders. Now, 509 murders are still way too many, but just eight years later, the number of murders increased by more than 50%. And in 2021, one quarter of those murders were gang-related.

Shootings, always using illegal firearms, represent three quarters of all gang-related homicides. In Winnipeg, there were a record 53 homicides in 2022. Firearms were used in more than 30% of Winnipeg’s homicides, but knives were involved in about 28% of homicides.

Senator MacDonald: Ban knives too.