Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government remained under bitter criticism for its sweeping plan to disable the federal long-gun registry as annual commemorative ceremonies approached for the 14 female students killed by a rampaging gunman at a Montreal engineering school 22 years ago this Tuesday, Dec. 6.After two weeks of criticism from vocal members of gun-control organizations, including students and graduates of L’Ecole Polytechnique, site of the massacre, Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner (Portage-Lisgar, Man.) incited more fury, and astonishment, when she said last week the end of mandatory records for gun sales could be supplanted with income-tax records of gun dealers.
As fine print in the government’s legislation to end the registry and destroy its entire computerized record system became clear during final hearings at the Commons Public Safety and National Security Committee, opponents welcomed Ms. Hoeppner’s acknowledgement of an end to reliable firearms transfer and ownership records, but expressed amazement she could propose income tax records as a replacement.
Ms. Hoeppner, the Parliamentary Secretary to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews (Provencher, Man.) assigned to steer Bill C-19 swiftly through the committee, made the comment while debating NDP MP Jack Harris (St. John’s East, Nfld.) and Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia (Lac-Saint-Louis, Que.) on CBC’s Power and Politics with Evan Solomon.
“There is nothing in Bill C-19 that will change the requirements for individuals to have a licence to own any kind of firearm, nor the fact that it remains a criminal offence, punishable by jail, imprisonment, to transfer a firearm to anyone without a licence,” said Ms. Hoeppner, despite arguments from gun-control advocates that Bill C-19 amendments to the 1995 Firearms Act may make it nearly impossible to investigate and prosecute illegal gun sales and ownership.
“Store owners continue to keep records, they keep records for a multitude of purposes, including income tax purposes, including inventory purposes,” Ms. Hoeppner said.
The claim drew exclamations of disbelief from Ms. Hoeppner’s opposition critics.
“Imagine in a crisis, dealing with a gun, imagine dealing with CRA [Canada Customs and Revenue Agency],” Mr. Scarpaleggia told The Hill Times.
NDP MP Francoise Boivin (Gatineau, Que.) was equally alarmed by the comments from Ms. Hoeppner, who did not respond to a telephone request for an interview about her income-tax reference and other aspects of the controversy, including a statement from a survivor of the shooting at L’Ecole Polytechnique, Heidi Rathjen, that Conservative MPs should stay away from commemorative ceremonies on Dec. 6 out of respect for the families of the female students who were killed.
“First it was, ‘We didn’t understand the difference between registration and gun ownership and so on,’ now they’re moving to the income tax slip,” Ms. Boivin told The Hill Times.
“It still doesn’t address the fact that you might be law abiding, you own a gun, you bought it, everything was great, you’re tired of that specific gun that’s not in the gun registry anymore, and you sell it to me, because you’re tired of this and you need cash, and I have cash and I want to buy your gun,” she said.
Bill C-19 will eliminate Firearms Act provisions that require gun sellers to validate the licences of gun buyers through checks with the Registrar of Firearms. The Firearms Act, through the registry provisions, requires all buyers of rifles and shotguns to report and record their acquisitions. Handguns have been restricted and subject to a registry since 1934.
Under Bill C-19, gun sellers have the option of validating a licence or not.
As part of the Harper government’s determination to prevent any record that could provide any form of a new registry system, the legislation compels the Registrar of Firearms to destroy any record of the request for validation.
Like another section of the bill that requires the Commissioner of Firearms, a deputy commissioner of the RCMP, to destroy all current database records of the registry, the section compelling destruction of requests for licence validation contains provisions to override government record protection clauses in the Privacy Act and the Library and Archives of Canada Act.
Critics point out the bill does not specifically require gun sellers to even ask, let alone demand, proof of valid acquisition licences from gun buyers.
Ms. Rathjen told The Hill Times none of those aspects were mentioned in Mr. Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) election-campaign promise earlier this year to scrap the registry.
“My reading is that their position is extreme,” she said. “Publicly, they’re contradicting what they’re doing underhandedly with this bill. Publicly, they profess to support licensing and during the committee even said it should be tougher, but at the same time they’re taking all the teeth out of the provisions related to licensing.”
“They’re going further than what they talked about during the election, by destroying the data and eliminating sales records and, again in a very underhanded way because they’re not admitting to this at all, they are rendering the licensing provisions inoperable,” Ms. Rathjen said.
More than a decade before the current controversy and claims from diehard registry opponents that licensing alone is a sufficient control on sales and ownership of firearms, the Supreme Court of Canada said it is not.
In a 2000 ruling that the Firearms Act and its registry were a constitutional exercise of federal criminal law powers, the Supreme Court said licensing alone would not meet the higher public safety standards of a registry.
“The combination of the two parts of the scheme is intended to ensure that when a firearm is transferred from one person to another, the recipient is licensed,” the court said is it confirmed an Alberta Court of Appeal ruling that the Firearms Act was a valid federal law to protect public safety. “Absent a registration system, this would be impossible to ascertain,” the judgment said.
“Guns cannot be divided neatly into two categories - those that are dangerous and those that are not dangerous,” the court argued. “All guns are capable of being used in crime. All guns are capable of killing and maiming. It follows that all guns pose a threat to public safety.”
Origin
Source: Hill Times
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