by Garry Breitkreuz, MP – Tuesday, November 17, 1998

1. Since January of 1994, I have been documenting the ineffectiveness of the government’s gun control laws. Finally, after almost 5 years, I get a personal response from the Minister of Justice. It’s amazing that one of the government’s top cabinet ministers would feel compelled to take the time out of their busy schedule to answer a Letter to the Editor. The efforts of thousands of my own constituents and millions of law abiding responsible gun owners (who are unrepresented because they happen to live in Liberal or Bloc ridings) are finally starting to pay off.
2. The Minister declares Bill C-68 is constitutionally valid even before the Supreme Court of Canada has heard the arguments of the government of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Yukon and the NWT. Four of the five Justices in the Alberta Court of Appeal said that Bill C-68 intruded into an area of exclusive provincial jurisdiction, namely, property rights. Unfortunately, only two of the five Justices decided that "exclusive" provincial jurisdiction actually meant "exclusive" – meaning not able to be overridden whenever the Federal Government decides to abuse its Criminal Law power.
3. The Minister of Justice says the police support Bill C-68 but she fails to explain all the evidence demonstrating that police on the street do not support gun registration at all. Police opposition includes 91% of the RCMP officers in Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers and the Ontario Provincial Police Association. The national police organizations she listed in her letter are playing Ottawa-style politics. The Canadian Police Association even refuses to let individual police officers vote on the issue, as the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers did. The Minister also fails to explain why the Commissioner of the RCMP refused to allow Gary Mauser, Ph.D., a professor from Simon Fraser University, to conduct a scientific survey of serving RCMP officers in British Columbia.
4. Even if registration of 20 million legally-owned firearms could reduce crime (which it can not) both police officers and the general public know there are far more effective ways to spend a billion dollars to fight real crime and real criminals. Police, like the public, place higher priority on public safety measures such as putting more police on the street, beefing up crime prevention programs and keeping violent criminals in jail for their full sentence.
5. Rather than point fingers at the Reform Party, why doesn’t the Minister of Justice give us at least one piece of evidence that demonstrates exactly how the registration of 20 million legally-owned firearms in the hands of 7 million law-abiding citizens will help police investigate crime? I’ve waited five years for the government to explain how laying a piece of paper beside my gun will help the police investigate crime and stop criminals from smuggling firearms into the country. I’m still waiting.
6. Honest, law-abiding gun owners have never been a problem with the law and never will be. Statistics Canada figures on the number of firearms involved in crime prove that. In 1996, Statistics Canada reported that only 5.3% of all violent criminal offences involved firearms and; of these, 74.9% involved handguns (almost all unregistered despite 65 years of registering handguns) and only 6.9% involved rifles and shotguns. This is why the Minister of Justice had to have her department fabricate numbers about the number of long guns involved in crime. The Commissioner of the RCMP complained about the Minister’s use of these misleading statistics in a four page letter to her department. The Canadian Police Association also wrote the Minister criticizing this as just one of the examples they referred to as "this phenomena of unreliability" in the Justice Department.
7. Nor has the Minister of Justice ever answered concerns raised by Ontario Solicitor General Bob Runciman, that the registration of handguns since 1934 has never reduced the criminal use of handguns (as evidenced by the Statistics Canada numbers above). The answer, Madam Minister, is that criminals don’t register their firearms. Now who doesn’t get it?
8. The Minister says firearm owners have nothing to fear but fails to explain why the government gave the Minister of Justice and her new Firearms Officers such unlimited and unprecedented powers in Bill C-68. Powers such as:

• the power to ban any and all firearms in Canada (Section 117.15)
• the power to violate the property rights provisions of the Canadian Bill of Rights
• the power to confiscate any and all firearms in the country without compensation
• the power to "inspect" (search) businesses and homes without warrant and "take samples" of anything (seize)
• the power to force citizens to incriminate themselves or face 2 years in jail
• the power to violate a persons Charter right of a "reasonable expectation of privacy"
• the power to violate the equality provisions of the Charter by applying Criminal Code differently depending on your race.

1. If the Justice Minister really believes that law-abiding firearm owners have nothing to fear, she should try and tell that to the owners of the 553,000 registered handguns arbitrarily banned by Bill C-68. Her department is about to commence the confiscation of their legally acquired, lawfully-owned private property without compensation. Of course, real criminals are exempt from this arbitrary gun ban and planned confiscation because they never have registered their handguns in the first place.
2. The Minister says Bill C-68 will create a "culture of safety". Unfortunately, the citizens she is targeting with this anti-gun legislation are incredibly law-abiding. Madam Minister, it makes far more sense to have police spending hundreds of millions of dollars targeting criminals. Fighting crime and real criminals is what will create a "culture of safety", not chasing duck hunters!
3. The Insurance Bureau of Canada and the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association already maintains that a "culture of safety" already exists in Canada. That’s why insurance companies don’t ask applicants if they own a firearm when applying for life, health and liability insurance. These national insurance associations say gun owners are "not an identifiable risk group."
4. For anyone who believes that the Firearms Registration Form is as "simple" as the Minister of Justice claims, I’ll be happy to send you a copy of the forms so you can see for yourself. The system will be riddled with errors and the Minister and her bungling bunch of bureaucrats know it. The Minister of Justice also failed to explain what an acceptable error rate would be for the new gun registration scheme. The existing handgun registration is 40% garbage and the new registry will be worse.
5. In her letter the Minister of Justice said, "An evaluation of the 1977 firearms control legislation concluded that the law contributed to a 20% reduction in homicides, or 55 lives per year." The Minister states this as a fact but her own department’s report used fudge words like "suggest," approximately," "multicollinearity and aggregation bias." The Minister and the biased report produced by her department gives the impression that the 1977 gun control laws (much of which actually didn’t come into effect until 1979) caused the drop in homicides. The truth is that the downward trend started in 1975 and the government is trying to take credit for it.
6. The Minister concludes her letter by trotting out the results of another bogus poll the government paid the Angus Reid Group to conduct. The fact is that if the government asked an honest question, they would get an honest answer. The only really honest survey ever done on gun control (conducted by Gary Mauser, Ph.D. and H. Taylor Buckner, Ph.D. found that yes, 86% of the public support the universal registration of firearms. However, this support drops to 43% when respondents are informed of the significant cost and trade-offs that need to be considered when considering the question. Over 75% of Canadians agree that gun control laws only affect law-abiding citizens, and that criminals will always be able to get firearms. In fact, more Canadians support the return of capital punishment than support gun registration, but you don’t see the Minister of Justice responding to this more legitimate democratic demand from the people.
7. In her letter, the Minister of Justice has failed to describe the benefits to society for this bureaucratic boondoggle and consequently has also failed to justify the huge costs for implementing Bill C-68. The government’s own estimates show that they will have spent $200 million by the end of March 1999 and then will spend another $50-60 million a year operating the gun registration scheme. I’ll save you picking up a calculator – that’s $1 BILLION by the year 2015. Don’t believe the government when they say they don’t have the money to fight crime. They have it, they’re just not spending it to fight real crime and real criminals.
8. If you’re looking for the truth about gun control you would be better off calling your local gun club, your Provincial Wildlife Federation, the National Firearms Association. the Ontario Handgun Association or the Sport Shooting Federation of Canada than the government. If still in doubt, talk to a police officer in your community.

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The Office of Garry Breitkreuz, M.P.

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