Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to the report of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence on Bill C-71.

I’m a member of the committee that studied the bill and I’ll be voting against the report, but not because the committee broke any rules. On the contrary, the committee’s process was open and fair and respected the rules to the letter.

I will be voting against the report because, as I understand the rules and principles governing my constitutional duty as a senator, it would be inappropriate to accept a report that tears apart a government bill, which follows through on electoral promises and was supported by credible evidence presented in committee.

The Liberal Party electoral platform devoted an entire page to the issue of firearms, and several legislative commitments were made. The first three commitments read as follows, and I quote:

We will repeal changes made by Bill C-42 that allow restricted and prohibited weapons to be freely transported without a permit, and we will put decision-making about weapons restrictions back in the hands of police, not politicians.

The platform also indicates that:

We will require enhanced background checks for anyone seeking to purchase a handgun or other restricted firearm.

These weren’t vague promises; they were very specific. They were the very core of Bill C-71, its raison d’être. Then all three were carefully removed during the review process.

Honourable senators, although my remarks will mainly focus on the background checks, they could also apply to the other provisions of the bill that were deleted.

The committee heard several witnesses. Some strongly supported background checks covering a person’s entire life, while others were vehemently opposed. In my opinion, the witnesses in favour of the bill were more credible because of their expertise and the quality of the research on which they based their evidence. However, there will always be someone to testify in support of any point of view, and I don’t plan to dispute the credibility of the witnesses who spoke out against this bill. I also don’t plan to pit experts against each other on the Senate floor. Here’s my point. Highly credible witnesses clearly demonstrated that the government’s policy to legislate background checks is legitimate.

Let’s now look at the main criticisms against adopting lifetime background checks. The first one is that these checks could punish people for mistakes they made when they were younger or for long periods of struggling with depression or another mental illness. Similarly, some say that these checks would unfairly penalize Indigenous Canadians, either because they are overrepresented in the justice system and could have criminal records, or because they may have been misdiagnosed as having a mental illness earlier in their life.

With respect to the first point, Public Safety Canada officials clearly explained that the factors included in a background check, such as a criminal record check or violence associated with mental illness, are, indeed, taken into account, but this doesn’t mean that the individual would be prohibited from ever obtaining a firearms licence. The director general of policing policy said, and I quote:

The discretion remains with the Chief Firearms Officer to consider the circumstances under which an incident happened in someone’s life, the severity of the circumstances, the time that has elapsed, and whether on balance, given those considerations, the person represents a threat to public safety if they were to own a firearms licence.

The same principle applies to Indigenous applicants. All circumstances are taken into account. Criminal pasts and mental illness diagnoses are not irredeemable. Furthermore, as the minister explained to the committee, Bill C-71 maintains the existing Aboriginal Peoples of Canada Adaptations Regulations (Firearms), which state that if an Indigenous person applies for a licence or an authorization to transport and the chief firearms officer expresses concern, the applicant may provide a recommendation from an elder in support of the application.

A second and more broadly based criticism was that lifetime background checks will do nothing to curb gun violence in Canada, because, after all, criminals and street gangs don’t apply for gun licences. They obtain their guns illegally.

This is part of a more general narrative that we heard repeatedly at committee and in this chamber, that the world is divided neatly into two camps, criminals on the one hand and law-abiding gun owners on the other, and that Bill C-71 does nothing to attack the real problem of gun violence in Canada.

Honourable senators, I addressed this false dichotomy in my second reading speech and I shall not repeat what I said then at this point. What I do want to underline today is simply this: The committee heard very credible, indeed compelling, evidence that clearly established otherwise.

First, and I won’t repeat the statistics, but the evidence clearly establishes that the problem of death and injury by firearms is not exclusively a problem tied to street gangs or handguns in our urban centres.

The committee also heard from several witnesses that the lifetime background checks in Bill C-71 are likely to reduce domestic violence. This is because incidents of domestic violence can occur over a long period of time. As Lise Martin of Women’s Shelters Canada stated:

Prior violence and crime is a strong predictor of future violence.

And as Professor Jooyoung Lee stated:

. . . we know from a pretty robust literature in criminology and health research that violent behaviour and mental health issues don’t cluster into neat five-year intervals. These can be lifelong issues, and CFOs ought to have access to this information when determining whether a person should own a firearm.

Let us be clear. The problem is not that people who own guns are more likely to use violence against their intimate partners or children. As Dr. Amanda Dale stated:

The problem is the presence of a gun in an escalating domestic violence situation. . . . It is a deadly tool. It kills you quickly. If you have it ready to hand when a situation is escalating, it’s more likely to result in homicide . . . .

The same is true with respect to the use of firearms in suicide. Here the evidence was equally compelling.

First, the committee heard expert testimony that a previous suicide attempt, even further back than the past five years, is a positive predictor for a suicide attempt in the future. As Professor Brian Mishara testified, lifetime background checks “can prevent the risk of suicide deaths.”

Second, although using a firearm is not the most common way in which people try to take their own lives, it is, sadly, the most effective. In the words of Jérôme Gaudreault of l’Association québécoise de prévention du suicide, a “firearm is an extremely lethal means that rarely affords a suicidal individual a second chance.”

There’s another criticism of the background checks I’d like to talk about, something our colleague, Senator Boisvenu, raised a number of times in committee. Referring to major backlogs in several provinces and territories, he asked witnesses to acknowledge that lifetime background checks would only exacerbate the delays in some parts of the country.

Some witnesses countered that the problem has more to do with resources. For example, Minister Goodale testified that the issue would be dealt with through the estimates process, which would, and I quote:

 . . . provid[e] funding to the RCMP to make sure they have the funds necessary to do the job they are being asked to do.

Other witnesses rejected the premise itself. As Dr. Natasha Saunders stated, and I quote:

Just because there is a delay or a backlog doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen. It doesn’t mean those people shouldn’t be checked.

Honourable senators, so far I’ve argued that the report removes provisions in the bill that fulfill electoral promises despite credible evidence in favour of those provisions being provided to the committee.

Now I would like to tell you why I’ll be voting against the report.

In his speech, Senator Pratte stated that there was nothing extraordinary about the Senate rejecting a committee report. Indeed, the Rules of the Senate are very clear that a committee report represents recommendations to the Senate as a whole and that the chamber is free to accept or reject the report. Indeed, we have rejected committee reports on numerous occasions in the past.

For example, during the previous Parliament, the Senate rejected the report of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, which had significantly amended Bill C-36, An Act respecting the safety of consumer products. In her speech, Senator Martin argued that the report would significantly weaken the legislation because the committee had put the interests of an industry ahead of the interests of the health and safety of Canadians, and that, and I quote, “defeats the main purpose of the bill.”

A few months earlier, the Senate rejected the report of the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs that had amended provisions of Bill C-25 to limit credit for time spent in pre-sentencing custody. In debate, Senator John Wallace said this:

The reason I find myself and others not able to support the amendments is that they will effectively undercut and negate the purpose and objectives that underlie Bill C-25 . . . .

I could go on, but there is no point in multiplying examples. You may think I exaggerate when I say that the report cuts the heart out of the bill, or to use a fishing image, guts the bill.

But you cannot deny that the report so weakens the bill as to defeat its main purpose and objective. That is the standard the Senate applied to reject committee reports in the past, and that is the same standard I applied when I reached my conclusion to vote against this report.