Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Senator Gold, I will put on the record part of a Montreal Gazette article dated August 13, 2021. It concerns the court case brought by the families of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy to obtain information from the Parole Board of Canada and Correctional Service Canada as they prepared for Paul Bernardo’s parole hearings. It states:

As legal victor, the government wanted the families to pay its legal costs for fighting for the killer’s privacy — in a lump sum of $19,142.27.

Lawyers for the government argued the families weren’t pursuing public interest litigation but a personal pursuit: “Their personal motivation is to use the information sought to make statements to the parole board,” the government agreed.

I have a hard time even talking about this, leader. It is so shameful and so horrific that these families have been tortured by this government.

Leader, your government wanted these families to pay the government’s legal bills because it was personal to them. It was personal to them that their daughters had been tortured, raped and murdered.

The judge later reduced the amount. Seeking the amount of costs in the first place, leader, was wrong, was it not?

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Preoccupation? “The preoccupation of those”?

Leader, in a delayed answer from the Department of Justice tabled last fall, the Parole Board said it was aware of the concern with respect to costs. Costs had not been collected, and the Parole Board was considering its position. The answer was tabled more than a year after the original court case ended, yet they were still “considering” it.

Costs never should have been sought. And you’re right, they continue to suffer. Why do they continue to suffer? Because now the government has decided — but they haven’t said it — that somehow it is okay to move this murderer to a medium-security institution. And they say they have no recourse.

Leader, contrary to what you said yesterday, Minister Mendicino has not explained what he meant by saying that “corrective steps” have been taken with the staff, but the buck stops with the minister.

Again, contrary to what you said yesterday, leader, I cannot find on what date Katie Telford knew about Paul Bernardo’s transfer. She testified before the House committee that nothing is ever kept from her boss, Prime Minister Trudeau.

Leader, Canadians want to know what happened here. What, leader, are the answers to my questions? What has Minister Mendicino done to take “corrective steps”? On what date did Katie Telford know? These are simple questions that require simple answers.

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): I will be brief. But I do want to make a few comments. Senator Woo will be the most surprised person in this chamber when I say I agree entirely with everything Senator Woo said today. I also agree with everything Senator Shugart said. I’m in agreement today. I’m in a good mood.

Colleagues, we have spent I don’t know how many hours of debate on an amendment that the sponsor of the amendment said doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of making it, and here we are debating it. We have the government leader who doesn’t know how to take yes for an answer when he already has the sponsor telling him that this will never pass, and then he gets up and gives us every reason why we should vote for it because that’s actually what the government leader did. He said we should not do this because it’s the eleventh hour; the House might not be able to deal with it. The House might be rising so they won’t be able to deal with this issue.

The fact of the matter is, colleagues, the House doesn’t care what we do here, which is evident by when they send us the bills. We don’t have supply. We want to rise tomorrow and we don’t have supply now. We don’t have Bill C-18 now. We’re going to have to vote on a message on Bill C-18; we don’t have it, yet we want to rise tomorrow.

Senator Gold somehow defends what this government is doing. This government over there cannot organize a two-car parade, and we are somehow supposed to carry their water.

Then Senator Gold and Senator Loffreda, quite frankly, both said, “But trust this government.” I haven’t seen anything in the last couple of weeks that makes me want to trust this government. We have ministers and the Prime Minister telling us things that aren’t true, and yet we’re supposed to trust them.

We have the right to amend legislation here, no matter what time of the day, no matter what time of the month and no matter what time of the sitting. For the government leader to say, “Don’t do it now because they won’t have time to deal with it,” they don’t really care if we have time to deal with supply; we don’t have it. So are we going to deal with it on Friday? Are we going to come back here after Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day and deal with it? We don’t know; we don’t have it. But we’re supposed to not do something on the eleventh hour.

Senator Tannas and I talked earlier, and since it was me saying this, I don’t think it was confidential. I told Senator Tannas I wasn’t going to vote for this amendment. Now I find myself in a quandary. I may change my mind. I’m sure if my colleagues are going to support whatever I do, then Senator Deacon is going to say we’ve all been whipped.

As Senator Tannas said at the start of his speech, he was making it as Senator Tannas, not as the leader of the Canadian Senators Group. That’s what I’m doing here today. But one thing I do tell you, colleagues, if there is a standing vote on this and there is a bell, then myself and my colleagues are going to go up and we will discuss the pros and cons of this bill. When we come back, we may all vote the same way, and we may not. We will put our arguments forward.

For people to say we are whipped because we are like-minded, I actually find that offensive. Like-minded people do like-minded things. That’s why we’re all Conservatives because, at least philosophically, we are on the same page. But we don’t always vote the same. If Senator Deacon wasn’t in the far corner, he may occasionally see that some of us vote differently than others.

We have unanimous consent motions that we’re told all the time we are supposed to vote in favour of because it was unanimously decided over there, so we should vote for it here because it was unanimously decided over there. And I’m arguing both sides of the coin here, just in case anyone was wondering about that.

Colleagues, we had unanimous consent on this issue. One thing I did agree with Senator Gold on, four parties over there voted on this and decided this should be there. I don’t agree with omnibus bills. I do agree that both parties in the other place have done that, without question. I was part of the government when we received omnibus bills and it made it very difficult because there were parts of a bill sometimes that I didn’t want to support, but I had to support it because it was an omnibus bill.

I don’t believe in defeating budget bills. I don’t think this would defeat the budget bill, I agree there. But it was unanimously decided by the four elected parties over there that this should be where it is.

Senator Shugart was quite correct when he said we need to find a way of correcting some of this. One of the ways that we need to have of correcting this is to have a government leader in the Senate tell the House leader in the other place that here is the last date we’re going to deal with your legislation. If you don’t have it to us by that date, you’re not going to get it through, and that includes the budget.

They are treating us with contempt. I was told on Twitter — before Bill C-21 was introduced in this chamber, the parliamentary secretary in the other place tweeted Senator Plett should stop stalling Bill C-21. It had not yet been introduced. That’s the way they treat us.

Then the day after my good friend made his speech, on June 1, the minister tweeted again saying Senator Plett should stop stalling Bill C-21. Tomorrow, we’re going to have at least two speeches on Bill C-21 before I’m speaking, according to the list, and yet I’m stalling it. That’s the way they treat us.

Then Senator Gold says to us, but trust us. I’m sorry, I don’t trust them.

Now I’m going to see what my colleagues tell me what to do, how they whip me. They might convince me to vote one way on this bill, they might convince me to vote the other way. I’m not sure how I’m going to vote. I’m going to let them tell me how to vote. We’re going to discuss this properly.

But colleagues, let’s not defeat this amendment because it’s late in the day or late in the chamber. Let’s defeat the amendment if the amendment deserves defeating, and I’m leaning towards that. But not because it’s the last hour of the last day. They can be here. If they want to send us legislation this late, then maybe they have to spend a couple of extra days here. That’s not our concern. We do our job; they do theirs.

Colleagues, I’m going to leave it at that. I will vote my conscience in due course, but others want to speak. I know Senator Dupuis suggested she wanted to speak. But when the leader says that we should do things because we want to get out of here — so do I; it’s 10 to 5 — if we want to get out of here this week, let’s make our speeches and move on. Thank you.

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.

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, with leave of the Senate, I move, seconded by the Honourable Senators Saint-Germain, Tannas and Cordy:

That, notwithstanding the order adopted yesterday, today’s sitting continue to the end of Commons Public Bills – Third Reading, or midnight, whichever comes first.