January 2, 2004
OPEN LETTER TO
PRIME MINISTER PAUL MARTIN
The Right Honourable Paul Martin, P.C., M.P.
Prime Minister of Canada
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6
Dear Prime
Minister:
Re: THE WHOLE FIREARMS ACT HAS TO GO – NOT JUST THE GUN REGISTRY
I appreciate your promise to reduce the
“democratic deficit” and to give more power to backbench MPs to participate
in the policy debates and decisions of Parliament. I also noted in one of your year-end-interviews with the
media that you committed your government to continue the firearms fiasco without
even completing your new Expenditure Review process. You are quoted as saying: "That money, unfortunately, has been
spent." But
the question voters
will be asking: “Yes a billion has already been wasted but what will you
do when another billion has been wasted?”
One year ago, Auditor General Sheila
Fraser blew the whistle on your government’s waste of a billion dollars on
your ineffective firearms program, and you sir wrote cheques for about $900
million of this boondoggle.
You should really tell Parliament and
the Canadian people how your own 1993 Red Book promises got so far off the
rails. On March 10, 1994, then
Justice Minister Allan Rock testifying before the Standing Committee on Justice
made the following statement: “If I can refer back to the platform
document, the Liberal Party sought election on a platform that contained
specific proposals in relation to gun control, and we intend to implement them.
There’s not much in those proposals that involves legislation.
Mostly, it’s administration.”
…continued on Page 2
-2-
On December 9th, 2003you
promised that
your government would "shut down what doesn't work”.
Well everyone, including your new Solicitor General, knows that the gun
registry doesn’t work. Last week, you announced an Expenditure Review process that
would put all existing programs to a seven-point test. Please find attached my column, describing how your
government’s Canadian Firearms Program fails all seven of your tests.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/publications/Article213.htm
A “secret” communications plan we obtained from
the Department of Justice under the Access to Information Act stated: “Editorial
opinion turned firmly against the program.” Recent public opinion polls show support for the program now
at less than 40 percent. But
because the gun registry was a purely political priority dreamed up by your
predecessor, you may be inclined to try and find a political solution rather
than the logical one. A purely
political solution might be to announce you’re scrapping the gun registration
component but leaving everything else that is bad about your firearms program in
place. This would be a costly
mistake, and that is the purpose of my writing you today.
I have been fighting the Liberal government’s
firearms program since March of 1994. Despite
repeated promises of “openness and transparency” by previous Ministers that
have been in charge of implementing Bill C-68, the Firearms Act, I have
had to file more than 400 Access to Information Act requests to find out
how the program is really operating and how much human and financial resources
are being wasted. I first
forecasted that the program would cost more than a billion dollars in April of
1999. I mention this just so you
might take my advice seriously. If
you’re ever going to fix this firearms fiasco you must scrap the whole mess
and go back to the drawing board.
Here are some of the reasons why you should scrap the
whole Firearms Act – not just the gun registry part of the program:
(1)
Professor Ted Morton’s research reveals that the Firearms Act
violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in a dozen ways.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/publications/violatescharterofrightsandfreedom.htm
(2)
The Minister’s Performance Report on the Canadian Firearms Program
tabled in Parliament on October 31, 2003 contained at least 12 inaccurate
statements. I’ll be raising a
Question of Privilege about this intentional misleading of Parliament just as
soon as the House of Commons resumes sitting.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/guns101.htm
(3)
Your government failed to follow Cabinet approved Regulatory Policy and
has never released the cost-benefit analysis you prepared on the Canadian
Firearms Program. The Commissioner
of Firearms told Senators and Members of Parliament that it was a “Cabinet
secret”.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/guns77.htm
(4)
Your government has refused to release the entire 115-page report
prepared on the economic impact of the Canadian Firearms Program.
This report was also declared a “Cabinet secret”.
You are well aware that the misguided firearms program will cost the
economy far more than the billion dollars spent on the programs implementation
so far.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/Guncontrol41.htm
…continued on Page 3
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(5)
The
Department of Justice’s Canadian Firearms Program Implementation Evaluation
dated April 2003 identified more than 90 problems with the program – not just
the registry. Many of the problems
were not address in the Minister’s Action Plan.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/guns94.htm
(6)
The Privacy Commissioner’s 2001 report found that the Firearms Act
violates the privacy rights of millions of law-abiding firearm owners.
The Privacy Commissioner has yet to receive a response to his
recommendations from the last three Ministers in charge of the firearms program.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/GunControl46.htm
(7)
The Privacy Commissioner reported that the RCMP’s Firearms Interest
Police (FIP) database collected information that is not authorized by Section 5
of the Firearms Act stating: “unsubstantiated and
derogatory information, unproven charges or allegations, hearsay, records that
are older than 5 years, incidents and charges that have been cleared or
acquitted, duplicate entries as well as information about witnesses, victims of
crime and various other associated subjects. People are unaware that they are
being flagged in FIP as possible risks to public safety.”
The problems with the FIP database identified by the Privacy Commissioner
have still not been fixed.
The Auditor General’s
December 2002 report reconfirmed that about
four million records in the RCMP’s Firearms Interest Police database used to
help screen applicants for firearms licences are still not accurate.
http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/domino/reports.nsf/html/20021211ce.html
In April of 2003, the
Department of Justice’s Canadian Firearms Program Implementation Evaluation
was also critical of the RCMP’s Firearms Interest Police database stating that
policing agencies are: “entering data for incidents that were seen as being
irrelevant to firearms ownership.”
(8)
Your government refuses to provide the “major additional costs” for
the firearms program identified by the Auditor General in her December 2002
report to Parliament. According
to estimates provided by the Library of Parliament, the Firearms Act has
cost gun owners an additional $367 to $764
million in compliance costs, and enforcement costs could easily add another
billion dollars to the price tag.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/guns96.htm
(9)
Every year, Statistics Canada’s Homicide Report proves that the program
is off target. Less than 3% of violent crimes in Canada involve firearms, and
it’s the known criminals that are committing most of the violent crimes –
not law-abiding gun owners.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/guns95.htm
(10) The Justice Minister’s
own User Group on Firearms proposed many well reasoned
changes
to the firearms program and amendments to the Firearms Act, but most of
their
recommendations
were ignored.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/guns90.htm
…continued on Page 4
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(11) With the passage of Bill C-68, the Firearms Act, in 1995, you
automatically banned
568,460 registered firearms
owned by law-abiding citizens without any evidence to show that these firearms
were unsafe in any way while in the hands of a law-abiding citizen.
Subsequently, your government denied these same citizens their
fundamental property rights by refusing to compensate them for the loss in value
of their property that the government banned.
This government edict also confirmed that registration undoubtedly leads
to confiscation (without compensation). This
is one of the main reasons that more than a million gun owners refused to obtain
a firearms license and why to this day more than 8 million guns remain
unregistered.
(12) Finally, the level on
non-compliance with the licensing of gun owners has been a dismal
failure,
especially in Aboriginal communities – some of who have completely boycotted
the government’s licensing scheme. Constitutional
challenges by the Territory of Nunavut and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian
Nations are still pending in the courts.
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/guns89.htm
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/GUNS92.htm
I could go on but I think there’s enough in this
short list to make you realize your mistake in ramming Bill C-68 through
Parliament in 1995. If this
doesn’t convince you to scrap the whole Firearms Act and sit down to
work cooperatively with the provinces and responsible firearm owners in Canada,
then everyone will at least realize you are still playing politics with gun
control instead of putting the tens of millions you’re wasting on the firearms
program every year into real police priorities that actually improve public
safety.
Yours sincerely,
Garry Breitkreuz, MP
Yorkton-Melville