First Reading February 9th, 2009

Rationale and Questions and Answers

This Bill accomplishes many things designed to lower the excessive costs and unnecessary complexities of the Firearms Act while having no negative impact to public safety.

The Long Gun Registry: The Long Gun Registry is an iconic symbol of wasted taxpayer dollars, poor management and negligible impact on the safety of Canadians. This Bill finally ends the hated Long Gun Registry while retaining the Licensing portion of the Firearms Program. Individuals will still require a license to purchase and possess all firearms. It does not affect background checks, user screening, police information access, nor does it create a safety risk to Canadians.. Police will still have access to the information contained in the Canadian Firearms Registry Online and will still be able to retrieve relevant data. While the Canada Firearms Centre reports the police accessed this data 9,413 times per day in 2008, only 19 inquiries involved a registration certificate. There is no breakdown as to whether these were long guns, restricted, prohibited or business inquiries. Clearly, the vast majority of information required by police will still be available. The elimination of the Long Gun Registry will save millions of dollars per year that can be put into effective crime fighting programs, saving lives.

Merges Authorizations to Transport for Licensed Individuals: The Authorization to Transport is an obsolete document pre-dating the Firearms License and is currently issued by the Chief Firearms Officer for each province. Its term is normally as long as three years and allows the transport of registered restricted and prohibited firearms to be taken to shooting ranges, gunsmiths, etc. It is normally a 24/7 document and every one is unique, requiring enormous man-hours of work every year. Since 1999 over half a million of these documents have been issued to trustworthy Canadians. They are virtually never refused, since anyone applying for this document is a current license holder and meets all the safety standards required by law anyway. This Bill does not change the reasons for lawful transport of these firearms but re-established the reasons formerly written in the Act. It does not change safe transport requirements or safe storage requirements; it merely eliminates a useless piece of paperwork from the system and reallocates taxpayer dollars and wasted manpower to more productive crime fighting programs.

Combining the POL and PAL: Currently, there are three kinds of individual Firearms Licenses, the Possession and Acquisition License (PAL), the Possession Only License (POL) and the Minor's License. This Bill seeks to combine the POL and the PAL in order to simplify the system. In 2001, Possession Only Licenses were originally given to firearms owners that possessed firearms but did not wish to acquire more. They were exempted from the Canada Firearms Safety Course at that time. Eight years later, the accident rate with firearm is recognized as statistically no different for POL holders than PAL holders. This Bill recognizes that these individuals have empirically proven their safe and responsible usage of firearms and seeks to combine these two license types together, again to permit reallocation of valuable funds and manpower to more productive crime fighting programs. In addition to cost savings, it will reduce confusion regarding these different license types within the general public, by establishing one type of license for adult firearms owners. Once again, this measure has no impact on public safety whatsoever.

10 Year Licensing: With the establishment of the RCMP's enormously successful Continuous Eligibility System, the need for 5-year license renewals has been eliminated. The Continuous Eligibility System cross-references the individual license holder's name with every police computer in Canada. This virtually amounts to an individual's license being renewed daily. Such a modern, high tech data management solution eliminates the costly paperwork system developed in 1995 and will save significant costs spent in unnecessary renewals. Additionally, a two-year license suspension period has been added to allow owners to renew without inadvertently falling into criminality. Once again, a benefit with no impact on public safety.

12 (6) Grandfathering Dates: In May 2003, Bill C-10A was passed into law. The Bill was intended by Parliament to change the grandfathering date for Section 12(6) firearms in order to grant grandfathering to lawful owners who purchased their firearms between February 14, 1995 and December 1, 1998. Because of unforeseen delays in the Coming into Force of this legislation, the will of Parliament was never realized, leaving these lawful owners in a legal limbo. Since then, thousands of Canadians (and the Government of Canada) have spent considerable money on court actions in an attempt to rectify this problem. This provision of the Bill seeks to restore fairness to the Firearms Program by reinstating the will of Parliament to grandfather these owners. As many of these owners still have their firearms in their possession, there is no compromise in public safety, and all Canadians will benefit without the vast sums of taxpayer dollars currently being spent in unnecessary court actions.

Auditor General Cost/Benefit Analysis: When Sheila Fraser delivered her report on the Firearms Registry in 2002, she spoke to the vast sums of money spent without accountability and the negligible impact the Firearms Program had on the safety of Canadians. This Bill reiterates the concerns Canadians have for cost effective programs and government accountability. As per many recommendations, this Bill calls for the Auditor General to conduct a cost/benefit analysis on all aspects of the Firearms Program every five years to ensure Canadians receive the best quality programs possible.

"The program became excessively regulatory" ­ A-G's Report 2002

"10.67 In February 2001, the Department told the Government it had wanted to focus on the minority of firearms owners that posed a high risk while minimizing the impact on the overwhelming majority of law-abiding owners. However, the Department concluded that this did not happen. Rather, it stated that the Program's focus had changed from high-risk firearms owners to excessive regulation and enforcement of controls over all owners and their firearms. The Department concluded that, as a result, the Program had become overly complex and very costly to deliver, and that it had become difficult for owners to comply with the Program.

10.68 The Department said the excessive regulation had occurred because some of its Program partners believed that

• the use of firearms is in itself a "questionable activity" that required strong controls, and
• there should be a zero-tolerance attitude toward non-compliance with the Firearms Act."

QUESTION #1: The major costs of the Firearm Program have been addressed by the Auditor General. The money has already been spent. Will there really be a significant savings by eliminating the Long-Gun Registry?

ANSWER #1: All Parliamentarians have a duty to make sure that scarce tax dollars are spent where we will get the most bang for your bucks. The government rejected our warnings in 1995 that the program would cost more than a billion dollars to implement. It's time for us to do more than say, "We told you so!" It's time for Parliamentarians to start cutting those costs without jeopardizing public safety. That's what this bill does. Suffice it to say that the measures proposed in this bill will save millions every year. That's millions more that can be spent fighting real crime and putting real criminals in jail and keeping them there.

QUESTION #2: The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police considers the registry a valuable tool. Why not keep it?

ANSWER #2: While the Chiefs say one thing, we hear the opposite view from front-line police officers. Police officers on the street have little or no use for the long-gun registry in their daily work. Some RCMP supervisors advise their trainees not to query the gun registry before responding to a domestic violence call because if the system says "no firearms present" it creates a false sense of security; thereby, endangering the safety and lives of his officers. One O.P.P. officer said, he checks it all the time because if the system says there are registered guns present he goes in "with a little more care." He was unable to answer when asked by a fellow officer: "So if the system says there are no guns present, do you go into the house with less care?"

QUESTION #3: The Canada Firearms Centre reports that police access the Canada Firearms Registry Online 9,413 times per day. If the police are using the system that often, doesn't it stand to reason that the registry is useful?

ANSWER #3: The truth is that one firearms transfer creates three hits on the system. The RCMP admitted that many police services have their computers programmed to automatically query the gun registry every time they make a routine check a driver's license and registration. The government's own statistics also show that 19 queries a day deal with gun registrations (of all types of firearms). Over 9,000 deal with Owner/Address license information and that information will still be available to police as will the registration information for Restricted and Prohibited firearms.

QUESTION #4: Do these changes make it easier for someone to acquire a handgun?

ANSWER #4: No. There are no changes in the qualifications required to purchase and own a restricted firearm. The intent of these amendments is to streamline the administrative process to redirect valuable resources to higher priority public safety initiatives.

QUESTION #5: Why do we need to shift the grandfathering date for existing owners of 12(6) handguns?

ANSWER #5: It was the will of the 37th Parliament (under the Liberal government) that this date be shifted in 2003. This amendment reinstates the role of Parliament as the maker of our nation's laws. It does not make any other changes to Section 12(6).

QUESTION #6: Does the merging of Authorizations to Transport into Licenses let gun owners take their handguns anywhere they want?

ANSWER #6: Absolutely not. There are no changes to the current transport of firearms. This amendment merely eliminates a costly and unnecessary piece of paper.

QUESTION #7: Will the amendment on ATTs create public safety concerns?

ANSWER #7: No. There are no changes to the places or purposes for which an individual may transport a firearm.

QUESTION #8: POLs and PALs are already established and paid for. Why is it advantageous to merge them?

ANSWER #8: The elimination of duplication and red-tape has been a significant governmental initiative for several years. This amendment eliminates two parallel systems that do exactly the same thing, while saving millions for taxpayers.

QUESTION #9: Why issue Licenses for ten years? Is there a public safety concern?

ANSWER #9: No, The tremendous success of the RCMP's Continuous Eligibility Program eliminates the necessity of five-year renewals. Utilizing the latest high tech data management solutions eliminates the obsolete and costly paperwork system developed in 1995. The Continuous Eligibility System cross-references the individual license holder's name with every police computer in Canada. This virtually amounts to an individual's license being renewed daily.

QUESTION #10: Why is it necessary to have the Auditor General conduct five-year audits?

ANSWER #10: Justice Minister Allan Rock promised Parliament and the public that the firearms program would only cost $2.2 million over the first five years and that by then the program would be self-sustaining. The Ministers of the day also made wild claims about how registration of firearms would improve public safety, reduce violent crime and even curtail domestic violence. Every Canadian now knows the cost projections were a complete fabrication and the benefits wildly overstated. Once bitten, twice shy. Massive expenditures were previously hidden from Parliament and the Canadian people. Considering that the previous government declared their own cost-benefit analysis a Cabinet secret, we think it's time to start getting to the truth about this program on a regular basis.

QUESTION #11: Why to you keep saying the firearms program has cost $2 billion dollars while the Auditor General said it only cost a billion dollars in her 2006 audit?

ANSWER 11: In 2006, the Auditor General reported the net-costs had reached nearly a billion dollars. She also admitted at that time that her audit did not include: enforcement costs, compliance costs, economic costs, and all the costs of all federal departments affected and all costs incurred by all provincial, regional, municipal governments (including police services). Before the Firearms Act was enacted in 1995 the cost of the entire firearms program cost the federal government between $12 and $15 million a year. This included the handgun registry and Firearms Acquisition Certificates. Cost benefit analyses conducted by the Auditor General should also provide evidence to Parliament to determine whether the Canadian people are any safer now that we were then.