Honourable senators, it is my moral duty to express my support for Bill C-21.

It’s even more important for me because yesterday marked the thirty-fourth anniversary of the femicide at École Polytechnique in Montreal, when 14 women were murdered by firearms.

Since yesterday was the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, it is important to remember the context of Bill C-21, which is designed to improve gun control and reduce gun violence, particularly between intimate partners.

More specifically, Bill C-21 includes a freeze on the sale, purchase, transfer and importation of handguns. Canadians will be allowed to continue to possess, use and sell registered weapons currently in circulation under certain conditions.

The bill also provides for a new technical definition that contains the characteristics of prohibited assault-style firearms. Firearms currently on the market would not be affected, however.

The Canadian Firearms Advisory Committee will be re-established in order to facilitate the firearms classification process. This classification will require all guns to have a valid Firearms Reference Table number before entering the Canadian market.

Bill C-21 also contains measures to prohibit ghost guns, which are unregistered firearms that are difficult to trace, since they have no serial number and can be assembled from parts purchased online.

The bill also contains measures to support the fight against intimate partner violence by creating “red flag” and “yellow flag” laws that will allow firearms licences to be revoked in cases of domestic violence or criminal harassment.

Lastly, Bill C-21 would increase the maximum sentence for firearms smuggling and trafficking from 10 years to 14 years.

There are other measures in this bill, but, in my opinion, these are the most important ones.

I would like to thank the government for giving up on its misguided plan to give municipalities the ability to ban handguns in their jurisdiction. This plan, which was denounced by the municipalities, would have caused even more confusion because the enforcement provisions might have varied from one municipality to another.

With more than 1,100 municipalities in Quebec alone, it is easy to imagine the chaos that would have ensued if each one of them had their own permit requirements, regulations and exceptions. The government made the right choice in deciding not to shirk its responsibilities.

I would now like to list some of the arguments I have heard over the past few weeks and try to respond to them.

One argument that we’ve heard a lot in recent months from opponents of Bill C-21 is the idea that most of the weapons used to commit crimes are smuggled across the border, so stronger gun control for gun owners in Canada would be unnecessary.

While gun trafficking is admittedly a problem that needs to be addressed quickly, Bill C-21 contains a few measures that would help. That argument shouldn’t stop us from tightening up gun control here in Canada, because a lot of weapons owned by law‑abiding Canadian citizens sometimes get stolen and used to commit crimes.

For example, the RCMP Commissioner said in December 2021 that three out of four weapons used to commit crimes were from Canada. She stated, and I quote:

In the tracing centre, of the known source, 73% were deemed to be sourced within Canada and 27% were smuggled or possibly smuggled within the country from the U.S.

Those numbers confirm data from various other studies showing that, over time and in different jurisdictions in Canada, a significant percentage of the guns used to commit crimes are Canadian-sourced, so it would be absurd to abandon gun control on the pretext that many of these guns come in from other countries.

Here are some other interesting statistics. According to RCMP data, between 2001 and 2016, an average of 639 firearms a year were stolen from legal gun owners, for a grand total of 8,952 firearms stolen during that period. Ninety per cent of those guns were never found.

For me, the conclusion is clear: The better we control handguns, the less likely they are to end up in the hands of criminals.

Furthermore, in recent weeks, we heard from hunters’ groups, such as the Fédération québécoise des chasseurs et pêcheurs, who said that they were concerned about the fact that the definition of “prohibited firearm” would ban some guns that are regularly used by many hunters, mainly because of the clause that prohibits firearms that were “originally designed with a detachable cartridge magazine with a capacity of six cartridges or more.”

Personally, even as a hunter, I believe that this provision is still too permissive. On the one hand, the new definition of “prohibited weapon” contained in Bill C-21 does not prohibit any existing assault weapons.

According to PolySeSouvient, there are at least 482 models of firearms that the government considered to be sufficiently dangerous to ban last November, but none of those models is affected by the latest iteration of Bill C-21, because the government backed down on its amendments. These models will remain legal, and most of them will not be subject to any restrictions.

Among these 482 models that the government has decided not to ban is the well-known SKS rifle, a Russian semi-automatic weapon designed for warfare in the late 1940s. It has been imported in large numbers since the 1980s. It fires the same bullets as the infamous AK-47.

This gun is very popular due to its low cost. It uses steel-core bullets and is so dangerous that most shooting ranges have banned it because the ricochets can perforate equipment.

Think about how absurd that is. A gun is too dangerous for shooting ranges yet safe enough to circulate without restriction.

Bill C-21 will not prevent new models that can accommodate magazines with a capacity of six rounds or more from entering the market, because manufacturers will be able to continue marketing guns with a smaller-capacity magazine that could later be swapped out for a larger-capacity magazine.

It is important to understand that the Criminal Code prohibits the possession of magazines that hold more than five rounds, under penalty of criminal charges. The limit is set at 10 rounds for handguns. Instead of systematically providing smaller-capacity magazines, however, several new-generation gun manufacturers supply 30-round magazines that are limited to five rounds using a controversial mechanism that can be easily bypassed. That is what Richard Bain did to commit the attack at the Métropolis against the former premier of Quebec, as senators will recall.

I know that the minister has promised to tackle the problem of high-capacity magazines by criminalizing modification of such magazines, but it would have been preferable to act upstream by trying to prohibit the import of weapons designed to accommodate these magazines.

In closing, even though I would have liked us to go much further, I support Bill C-21 because, in my opinion, it will reduce the number of handguns and assault-style weapons in circulation; it will ban certain gun parts; it will help us crack down on ghost guns; it will support the fight against domestic violence; and lastly, it will strengthen the ability of the Canada Border Services Agency to tackle gun trafficking at the border. Thank you. Meegwetch.