The committee voted 6 to 5 (chair only votes in a tie) to recommend the house to drop the bill. If you want to see the opposition parties’ shenanigans to obstruct the work of the Security committee’s study of this bill, read the minutes linked above. They agreed to let the patron of the bill, Ms Hoppner, speak for one hour to introduce the bill to committee and then prevented her from doing so on the day, for instance. Let us hope the House ignores this advice and passes the bill on third reading to end this boondoggle billion dollar waste of taxpayers’ monies.
For those unaware of the issues, the government of the day in the 1990s forced through Parliament of Canada a bill to require registration of every firearm in Canada as a measure to promote safety. The constitution give regulation of property to the provinces so this undermines the constitution and removed the rights of ordinary folks who use firearms to go about their business. The prime minister at one point publicly stated that it is not a right in Canada to own firearms. Tell that to people who live in bear country. I have taught in places where bears hunt people because they have never seen anything that moves that was not food. I have seen women and children out picking berries packing rifles for protection. I was in a camp where a grizzly came right into a camp of 30 men, women and children, on the tundra, looking for food.
This legislation drove a wedge between rural and urban folk who saw firearms as tools or weapons, between men and women who saw firearms as tools for hunting or murdering and rich and poor who saw the cost of the registration as tiny or large. Folks in the aboriginal communities saw their treaty rights eroded because many could not even pass the tests required to get licences and registrations. The police found the registry useless because half the firearms were never registered and much of the data in the registry was erroneous. Many prosecutions resulted against people caught up in bureaucratic paper-shuffling.
After more than ten years where experience demonstrated repeatedly that the registry was useless and expensive, the current bill is intended to discard the registration of firearms typically used for sporting/hunting purposes. The minority government is not strong enough to push the bill through so it requires cooperation from opposition MPs. Write your MP to let him/her know what you think of the situation.
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I don’t like firearms. Too much energy in too small a package. My countrymen seem to love them. They seem to love them a lot. My father in-law was a gunsmith. He worked for Savage. He had quite a collection of firearms and a whole shed full of ammunition (half of it good). Thanks to him I got to fire a very expensive Belgium shotgun. I could have been a contender in skeet shooting. Next was the M14 (my brother’s weapon in Viet Nam). What a beautiful weapon if such a word could be used to describe a weapon. My father in-law disdained full auto weapons like the Thompson submachine gun (it was actually a terrible weapon for any kind of accuracy). I soon discovered that the safest place to be when I’m firing the 45 (1911 model) is about 10 yards in front of me. I couldn’t hit a damn thing with that pistol. It was a fun afternoon but it didn’t change my mind about guns, not that that was the intention. It was more of a history lesson and both of us loved history.
After reading your post Robert, a simple chart began to develop in my mind. It’s a map of North America. It starts in the northern most part of Canada where the need for guns is high but the ownership is small (ish). Moving down the need for guns drops but the level of ownership goes up until you reach the southern tip of Texas where need and ownership levels are reversed to that of norther Canada.
I don’t know how accurate a chart like that would be but I do know the number of non-military firearms in my country is huge (like more than one for every citizen).
Thankfully I don’t live in a area frequented by large carnivorous, an occasional Moose maybe, Coyotes and Black Bears more rarely. Where I live people are the most dangerous predators and all a gun would give me is a false sense of security. Kind of like Microsoft’s Windows.
Thanks for the comment. Firearms are extremely useful when you are going on an expedition into hunting or predator territory but of limited usefulness with random encounters with two-legged predators. One cannot leave firearms quickly accessible and still be safe with kids around. Still, firearms should be a choice of the person at the place and the time where he or she knows the situation. Legislation done in a city far away is almost certainly irrelevant. There have been cases where a mother chased a bear out of the yard with a broom but there have also been cases where bears killed humans serially. Generally, our homes give us some protection and warning of an attempted intrusion by a bear and it is good to have a suitable firearm available. Same goes for farmers with livestock in a barn. Who are you going to call if the cows start balling at 2am? The berry pickers on the tundra keep a look-out and have one or two rifles handy. It is the sane thing to do. Folks who insist firearms are irrelevant/dangerous/useless in modern times do not live in the bush. In principle registration of property is not evil but the stated purpose of the folks proposing the rules was to restrict access to firearms when many of us feel it is a right.
When I was a boy, my father and my uncle both made sure I knew how to use a firearm for hunting. It was the way we lived just as we used tractors, horses, saws and other tools. You use the right tool for the job. A firearm is the best tool for harvesting food at a distance or stopping a predator at a safe distance. All my children have fired a rifle and my son has taken the Manitoba Hunter Safety Training Course. I also had him visit my uncle who was a paratrooper during the second world war and an avid hunter. I made sure my children respected firearms by having them help cleaning and oiling them. There is nothing like doing a dirty job to appreciate that something is a tool for work and not a toy. I also brought home deer and grouse for food. When I retire, we will hunt together again. Lately I have been in the North for hunting season and hunting is quite different here, almost always being done using a vehicle. I like to walk around when I hunt.
So what are you afraid of, Robert? The law does not prohibit the ownership and use of firearms, it only requires that the ownership be registered. That seems like a good idea to me. If someone is found guilty of a crime or is determined to be insane or otherwise incapable of rational judgement, any firearms registered to that person should be confiscated and/or re-registered to a responsible person.
Do you want loonies and criminals to have guns? Perhaps you are fearful that people will find out about your own questionable sanity? What is it that troubles you?
I am not afraid. I am concerned that the legislation is ineffective for many reasons, drives a wedge between police and citizens, and causes far more harm than it addresses. It is a strange law in that law-abiding people are punished while criminals are rewarded handsomely. The firearms licence is supposed to filter out loonies but it is far from perfect. The serial killer of a dozen people in an hour in UK recently used “legal” firearms until the day. A baddie who wants a firearm can always steal one or make one so tight control of supply is doubtful. The legislation presumed that firearms could be uniquely identified and they cannot. The firearm, technically, is only the receiver. According to the legislation and regulations (1200 pages and counting) every firearm has X characteristics to identify it. You could swap the barrel, magazine, calibre, and stock and mess up the system. Half the data in the database was faulty because identifying a firearm is so difficult. Many firearms had no serial numbers, so they produced stickers which promptly came off with use of solvents. There were just so many problems no one could rely on the data for anything. Examples of where it went wrong:
Those were events in the first year of the boondoggle. Since then the thing has been patched several times and still did not work. Billions have been spent on the system and it never worked. The government finally ordered the police not to enforce the law so it has not been updated properly in a while. It is useless. Under the constitution, property is a provincial matter and most provinces see no merit in the database so they do not have their own. It certainly has little relevance to life in large parts of Canada. In the North, where I have worked for 13 years, many of the old-timers who use firearms to hunt and trap, are illiterate and innumerate. How are they able to comply with the law? Many speak neither English nor French, the official languages.
None of that is very compelling, Robert. Any system anywhere has flaws, just look at Linux! For every police officer inconvenienced by having to locate original material to prove his innocence there are tens of thousands of genuine criminals who have been tossed in the lockup due to prima facie violations of the firearms registration laws.
You would throw the baby out with the bath water, Robert, and that is just plain ignorance at work.
Nope. The way the law has worked millions of innocent citizens have been raked over the coals for nothing while the criminals have free reign to traffic in stolen/smuggled firearms. They don’t register their firearms and so are off the radar. That is the essence of the problem, the law is aimed at law-abiding citizens and not the criminals. There have only been a handful of convictions based on the registry. It just does not stand up in court where criminal proceedings require “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The registry is defective beyond a reasonable doubt. Where lawyers for the defence were too lazy to fight, they plea-bargained the charges away to confess to theft, armed-robbery or whatever. The increased penalties for doing wrong with a firearm registered or not, were rarely applied.
At the same time as the law was giving criminals increased business and a free ride in courts, the ordinary Joe had to jump through crazy hoops. Many legitimate gunsmiths, hardware, sporting goods stores that had a large segment of their margin in firearms-related sales and services went out of business leaving higher prices for consumers. When I was a boy, there were dozens of gunsmiths in Winnipeg and sporting goods stores all over that sold firearms. Now there are very few. The cost and delays the system imposed on dealers made the business unprofitable. The system set up to interface the database with retail outlets was hopeless and in fact did not comply with the law that required a real certificate to be issued before transferring possession. In fact, all the buyer and seller got was a transaction number, useless if the matter ever came to court. The bona fide certificates sometimes took weeks to issue. Firearms acquisition licences were so backed-up they were effectively not available. Some people tested the system by legally transferring firearms back and forth and the system became totally confused about who was the owner. The error rate on registry transactions was near 50% by some accounts. The Auditor General for Canada pronounced it was not proper spending of the taxpayers’ monies. Read what she said to the committee recently studying the bill to revoke the law. Here is how she costed it out. The government tried to hide many millions of cost overruns from Parliament.
Here is an excerpt from her report:
4.47 Officials told us that in calculating performance for the two service standards, they did not include applications that had client eligibility failures (applications with issues to be investigated), even if the application had been properly completed. Investigations to determine eligibility can add days or weeks to the processing time, and the Centre has not established service standards for applications that involve such investigations. Applications with eligibility failures accounted for 46 percent of licence applications from August 2004 to August 2005.
4.48 We examined the processing times for properly completed registration and licence applications in 2003–04. We found that 45 percent of registration applications had taken longer than 30 days to process and 35 percent of licence applications had taken longer than 45 days. We concluded that the Centre had not met its service standards, as it had stated in its performance report.
4.49 In its performance report for 2004–05, the Centre reported that 89 percent of registration applications had been processed within 30 days and 86 percent of licence applications within 45 days. We analyzed the data and found that only 73 percent of registration applications met the 30-day standard, not 89 percent.”
What business or consumer would welcome such sluggishness and error rate in business-critical activity? By comparison, the province of Manitoba processes insurance, licences and registrations for automobiles and drivers in minutes.