June 20, 1995
THINGS I WOULD HAVE SAID IF THE LIBERALS HADN'T INVOKED CLOSURE (2)
"Firearm owners should worry, Rock is going to confiscate hunting and sporting rifles."
Ottawa - Garry Breitkreuz, MP for Yorkton-Melville, today launched the second salvo in his new battle plan to fight the Liberals costly, intrusive, ineffective gun control bill. "The anti-gun Liberals all say that people who think that Allan Rock is going use Bill C-68 to confiscate their hunting rifles are paranoid and are spreading a conspiracy theory. I ask everyone to read the facts and then decide for themselves," said Breitkreuz. "The Minister has given himself and the Liberal Cabinet the unprecidented power to confiscate any firearm they think is "not reasonable to be used for hunting and sporting purposes". The Minister even reversed an amendment made by the Justice Committee to give himself this unlimited power." Here is part of his speech Breitkreuz never had a chance to give:
When Bill C-68 becomes law the Minister of Justice with approval of the Governor in Council could ban all guns in Canada except for the police and the military. Even if he did use the laying provisions in C-68, the Standing Committee would have no power to change the Orders in Council or force a review by the House of Commons unless they complete their review and report to the House within thirty days, which as we all know is very unrealistic and unfair.
In fact, Bill C-68 will give the Minister of Justice through Orders in Council more power to pass regulations and bypass Parliament than the War Measures Act, now known as the Emergencies Act.
Under the current Criminal Code of Canada, Section 84(1)(e), the Minister, by using Orders in Council, can prohibit a weapon of any kind as long as it is not a "firearm of a kind commonly used for hunting or sporting purposes" - a quantifiable, impartial, objective test.
Bill C-68, Criminal Code amendment section 117.15(2) changes this objective determination to a subjective one. When Bill C-68 becomes law, the Minister through Orders in Council will be able to prohibit any firearm, "if, in the opinion of the Governor in Council (really just Allan Rock with the approval of Cabinet), the thing to be prescribed is reasonable for use in Canada for hunting a sporting purposes" - a unquantifiable, subjective test, open to bias and abuse.
So if the Minister thinks that it is not reasonable for a particular type of firearm to be used for hunting and sporting purposes, it can be banned. This is how the Minister will ban approximately 5,500 hunting rifles of the type that Mark Lepine used to murder the 14 engineering students in Montreal in 1989. But the gun Lepine used is just a normal semi-automatic rifle which is "commonly used for hunting and sporting purposes", so the Minister cannot ban it without changing the law - just as he did in Bill C-68. It begs the question, what if Mark Lapine had used a bolt action .22 calibre rifle which he could have, because he had all the time in the world to carry out his sick, deadly deeds?
The banning of the thousands of Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic sporting rifles in Canada as a so-called "bad-gun" proves beyond all doubt that the Minister believes guns are, somehow, as much to blame for violent crime as the people who use them. As long as Rock has this irrational view of the world the rights of law abiding citizens will be in jeopardy. God help us all.
The fact is, Mark Lepine was a product of a long period of parental physical and mental abuse and was given a Firearms Acquisition Certificate by a firearms registrar who failed to conduct the proper background checks required by Canadian law.
Firearms prohibitionists like the Justice Minister and his friends in the Coalition for Gun Control and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police neglect to mention that the coroner's report on the Lepine incident identified the poor response time of the police (30 minutes after Lepine began his rampage) was directly responsible for the high death toll, and under the circumstances Lepine could have committed this atrocity with any type of firearm or even a knife.
"So as everyone can plainly see, Allan Rock and his Liberal puppets give us assurances that he is not going to confiscate guns and then announces in his proposals and his legislation that he plans to do just that. This is an issue that has never been properly covered by the media in central Canada. I ask you all to just report the facts - they speak for themselves," concluded Breitkreuz.
For more information please call:
Ottawa: (613) 992-4394