EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Monday, April 24, 1995

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[English]

The Chair: I'd like to call the meeting to order.

We are pleased to have with us this afternoon the National Firearms Association as we continue our hearings on Bill C-68, an Act respecting firearms and other weapons. Representing the National Firearms Association we have David A. Tomlinson, the national president. We also have with him Robert Morton and Linda Thom.

Mr. Tomlinson, I would ask you to make your opening remarks. You have your names in front of you so it is not necessary to introduce yourselves. You could make your opening remarks and then we will follow that with the usual rounds of questioning by the members of the committee.

Mr. David A. Tomlinson (National President, National Firearms Association): Our opening remarks will be made by Linda Thom.

Mr. Robert Morton (National Firearms Association): Mr. Chair, may I introduce Linda Thom as a 1984 Olympic gold medalist in sport pistol shooting and a Member of the Order of Canada.

Mrs. Linda Thom (National Firearms Association): Mr. Chair, hon. members, distinguished guests and ladies and gentlemen, first, may I thank you most sincerely for the opportunity to meet with you today.

Canadians hold dear the principles of peace, order and good government; that these principles might thrive Canadians have respect for and live by the rule of law. Along with citizens of other democratic societies Canadians, too, cherish their guarantees of rights and freedoms. They find comfort that these precious commodities, commodities that our forebears, my own father and grandfather among them, fought two world wars to preserve. They find comfort that these precious rights and freedoms are protected by charter.

Individual rights can and do exist within our society and are compatible with the well-being of all, a balance struck between the collective and the person, giving order on the one hand and freedom on the other. That balance is crucial and it demands trust; trust by the collective, the government, that the person exercise his or her right in a responsible manner, and trust by the person that the rules are fair and are made with just cause from sound principles and will stand the test of rigorous scrutiny.

Hon. members of the justice committee, it is that scrutiny of Bill C-68 which you are beginning today, an examination of new proposals that the government wishes to impose on the people. The government is attempting to load a huge slab of law atop a pyramid of stringent controls on firearms in Canada. The controls already in place are broad and encompassing. They have just been extended and strengthened, and also geared to Canada today, in Bill C-17, passed in the last government years. But many of those laws aren't utilized or enforced. Adding unnecessary controls in the manner proposed raises serious doubts that the principles of peace, order and good government will be improved.

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We contend that the provisions in Bill C-68 won't contribute in a positive way; that they are directed at the wrong target; that they are excessively costly; and that they divert focus and effort by law enforcement officials away from the problem areas in our society - problems involving the criminal use of guns and other weapons. At the same time, the proposed new controls obviously erode individual rights and civil liberties in an unprecedented way.

Bill C-68 has nothing to do with crime control, protection of women, reduction in accidents or prevention of suicide. Bill C-17, however, dealt with these important social issues and it dealt with them in depth. Bill C-68 is simply an attack on the recreational firearms community designed to generate favourable media coverage.

Bill C-68 provides for the confiscation without payment of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of private property. It renders historical artefacts and valuable collections worthless. It wipes out the life-savings, in fact, of many Canadians, either rendering their collections valueless or severely reducing their worth.

Bill C-68 doesn't provide compensation for those who are injured by it. It attempts to ignore that issue entirely. It seems unlikely the courts, however, will go along with that approach.

Bill C-68 confiscates in clear and open violation of the law. Peter W. Hogg says that in the constitutional law of Canada there is a rule of statutory interpretation in anglo-Canadian law that a statute which takes private property is to be read as implicitly requiring that compensation be paid to the private owner. MPs should look at this problem before irrevocable harm is done. If you ignore it, Parliament may well have to pay a very large bill when the courts finally rule on this issue.

Bill C-68 contains the ominous overtones of an authoritarian state mentality. If you think that is an overstatement, we have with us some pictorial evidence which is really quite shocking and which took place very recently right here in Ontario.

The individuals who drafted the legislation apparently regard Canadians as dangerous persons precariously held in check by threats. The bill clearly violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and it ignores rights which Canadians enjoy as a result of traditional liberties in a free society. Most of the bill's attacks are directed at people who have done nothing wrong. I repeat, they have done nothing wrong.

Bill C-68 reverses the burden of proof, a cherished part of criminal law in every true democracy, including Canada. Unlike earlier legislation, Bill C-68 requires the citizen to prove that the official's decision is wrong, instead of requiring the official to prove that he or she is right. In many cases there is no right of appeal at all. The official's power is absolute.

Bill C-68 vests police and firearms officials with extremely broad search and seizure powers, authorizing them to enter and search the private home of any Canadian who has a firearm or ammunition, or a record of either. This also includes situations where no crime is known or suspected.

Think about that for a minute. You have search and seizure powers to go into a home, including in situations where no crime is known or suspected, just because a person owns a firearm or ammunition, or has a record of either.

Bill C-68 authorizes imprisoning anyone who refuses to help the authorities to search his or her home, or refuses to answer any relevant question; and this is before he or she has access to a lawyer. What happened to the right to remain silent?

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Bill C-68 authorizes imposing a sentence of up to five years of imprisonment for expressing an opinion even where the opinion is inadmissible as evidence in a court of law. What happened to the right of free speech?

Bill C-68 strips Parliament of virtually all of its authority in firearms matters, placing all future regulations and legislation in the hands of the Minister of Justice alone. The scope of authority delegated to the minister is huge. Yes, we do realize the wording that gives authority is in fact to the Governor in Council, but you realize as experienced parliamentarians the Governor in Council is virtually a rubber stamp for the minister's wishes. Even parliamentary scrutiny of what the minister is doing will be lost if C-68 passes. While parliamentary scrutiny is required by one clause of the bill, clause 111, it is immediately eliminated by the next clause, clause 112.

The bill is largely a licensing scheme in pith and substance. It is designed as a method to control the activities of honest Canadians engaged in recreational activities and using private property. As such it well may be ultra vires of Parliament because that type of legislative power belongs to the provinces.

When firearms control was first put into the Criminal Code, it was clearly a matter of public safety. The refrain ``in the interests of the safety of the applicant or any other person'' held the key to every situation. The documents were few, permanent and free of charge. That is no longer true. Now the documents are many, expire frequently and cost up to several hundred dollars. Public safety is no longer primary. Instead it really looks like a tax grab.

While the firearms control system has been upheld in the past, today's loss of focus on public safety and the drift into regulatory areas probably will not stand the pith and substance test in the Supreme Court of Canada. Several provinces have indicated already that they intend to take it there.

The financial liabilities that the government has already incurred are quite heavy. By the time that C-68's legal status is resolved the liabilities may well be much heavier. Between having to repay illegally collected licensing fees and compensate for private property taken or destroyed under invalid laws and Orders in Council, the compensation to be paid may well be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is an area worth exploring carefully for any person concerned about the deficit.

Canada can no longer afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on unproven theories. The cost of this system will be over $600 million. That figure, by the way, is derived from figures provided by the Minister of Justice and the RCMP commissioner.

Can Canada afford to spend $600 million on C-68? Yes, we know the minister says that it will only cost $85 million, but he should be asked to explain which parts of our analysis or which of his figures that we used are in error.

Perhaps it helps to put things in perspective. In 1991-92, 69 Canadian women died in gunshot homicides, while 4,038 Canadian women died of breast cancer, 58 times as many as died from firearms. Even more, you probably know, died from heart disease and stroke.

The government has authorized $30 million to be spent on trying to reduce the fatalities from breast cancer. One wonders, if $600 million is available, why it's not allocated to the larger problem, where even a minor success would have far greater effects. For example, a 2% decrease - just a 2% decrease - in breast cancer fatalities would save more women's lives - 80 of them - than a 100% reduction in gun fatalities. Is in fact then C-68 a wise use of resources?

To keep costs down, the minister says that registration will be done by owners using postcards. The results of that are predictable. The error rate will be very high and the already error-ridden system will be swamped with more errors. Under this bill every person who makes an error on the postcard can be sent to prison for up to five years.

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Additionally, the postcard method of entry means that no screening of applicants will be done. Since the alleged purpose of registration is to keep firearms out of the hands of the unsuitable it appears that their real purpose is not what the government says it is.

The government says it has no intention of using the registration system to confiscate firearms. At the same time it proposes the confiscation of nearly 600,000 already registered firearms, almost all without compensation. Under the circumstances, it is easy to be suspicious about intentions.

The provision added in Bill C-68 to the Criminal Code, proposed paragraph 84(1)(d), authorizes the minister to convert every firearm in Canada to prohibited status in terms which ensure that any appeal to the courts would fail. If it's not the government's intent to confiscate all those firearms why is that clause in Bill C-68? Why vest the minister with powers he promises he will never use?

The Department of Justice commissioned the research paper called the Review of Firearms Registration, TR1994-9e. It demonstrates that registration records often go stale and become meaningless. This finding suggests that the proposed registration system is not useful as a long-term crime-fighting tool. Therefore any registration system can only be useful in the short term.

There is enough information available today to prove that the registration system cannot be trusted. By the end of 1995, we expect that evidence from that system - that is, the existing system - will be inadmissible in any court of law as a result, if the case is currently before the courts. It is another example of legislation based on theory, with scientific evidence carefully ignored. Instead of carefully researched facts and figures, you're being asked to judge Bill C-68's registration system on the basis of anecdotes and scare tactics.

In his 1993 annual report the Auditor General condemned the Department of Justice for not doing a decent job of research on gun control. He pointed out the small amount of biased research that had been done was both inadequate and inaccurate. The Auditor General requested more research. It has not been done.

Terence Wade, the author of Review of Firearms Registration, hired by the Department of Justice to do his report, has not been invited to appear here. One can only ask why.

William Bartlett of the parliamentary library wrote excellent papers on firearms control. He has not been invited to appear here. One might ask why.

Professor H. Taylor Buckner of Concordia University has done a great deal of research on firearms control law. He has not been invited to appear here, although he requested an invitation. Again, one might ask why.

Professor Garry Mauser of Simon Fraser University has done research on firearms control law. He has been invited to appear here though he too requested an invitation. One might ask why.

When we asked the clerk of this committee why, he answered he thought we would be bringing Professor Mauser with our delegation. Apparently, there is hope to confuse the issue by forcing neutral researchers to appear with partisan groups or not at all.

The function of this committee, as we understand it, is to improve the legislation. It's difficult to see how that can be done when vital evidence is in fact excluded. Terence Wade's report pointed out that for over sixty years the RCMP has been unable to make our existing registration system either cost effective or accurate. It is riddled with undetected errors. Mr. Wade's report did not enjoy wide circulation.

In fact, when I was serving on the Canadian Advisory Council on Firearms in 1989-91, I remember the RCMP inspector in charge of the system repeatedly telling the Department of Justice officials and anybody else who would listen, for example the CPFOs from the provinces, that the system didn't work and registration of guns was not a good idea because it just simply didn't work. Now, incredibly, in Bill C-68, we see the illogical conclusion that if it doesn't work, make it bigger and spend more money on it.

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In our paper 6, the NFA has described two simple tests which should be run before expanding the registration system. We have been asking for those tests for many years, but the Department of Justice refuses to run them. It refuses to run them because to do so would prove what we say: that at least 25% of the existing registration records, covering over 300,000 firearms, are meaningless. For example, only 100 traces are requested annually by the police or any other authorized agency and less than half those traces yield a positive result. There are 1.2 million guns registered in that registry.

Wade's report also points out that the practices with regard to restricted weapons may vary so widely across Canada and even within a single province that it is impossible to describe a typical registration process. Bill C-68 doesn't solve that problem. It is capable of many interpretations. The government is hoping to piggyback all the objectionable parts of Bill C-68 through on the backs of popular parts.

The popular parts, in fact, are a scheme, one might say, to impose extra imprisonment for possession of a firearm during a crime. But that concept is also badly handled in Bill C-68, and I'd like to make it clear that we're quite in favour of imposing extra imprisonment for the use of firearms in crimes.

Section 85 of the Criminal Code is seldom used. In 1991-92, there were 12,287 convictions for violent crimes. Only 52 of them were dealt with under section 85. In 100% of those cases, the sentence imposed was the minimum.

Obviously, the criminal justice system is refusing to use section 85. Before enacting Bill C-68, we should ask why section 85 is being avoided at all three levels, police, crown prosecutor and judge.

From 1988 to 1991, 28.8% of all robberies were with a firearm. But only 5.4% of robbery victims injured or killed were injured or killed by firearms. That may seem unlikely but it is proven by Canadian justice statistics.

The problem is violent crime, not firearms. If Bill C-68 substituted ``weapon'' for ``firearm,'' it would make more sense. As it is, its success in removing firearms, if any, from robberies may well show up as dead or injured robbery victims, because as stated, only 5.4% of robbery victims who were injured or killed were injured or killed by firearms.

Even if Bill C-68 had used the word ``weapon,'' a second requirement is missing. The crime should be graduated: weapon present; weapon used to threaten; weapon used to injure; and weapon used to kill.

The Bill C-68 proposals in our judgment guarantee increases in deaths and injuries among the victims of violent crime.

Computerized universal registration will probably result in penetration of the system by criminal hackers. Lists of firearm owners may be targeted for burglary or armed home intrusion.

The government claims that registration will allow tracing of firearms. That is unlikely. In an Ontario police study called Project Gun Runner, 86% of all handguns used in crime had never been seen by the registration system, making it useless for tracing them.

Existing law is often difficult to interpret and administer. For example, even the RCMP crime detection laboratories are finding it impossible to say which firearms and cartridges are prohibited and which are not. That is under existing legislation. Bill C-68 makes things far worse; and on top of that, it's abusive. It's lacking in research support and offers little hope of cost-effective benefits to the public. It would be simpler and easier to start over with a clean sheet of paper. We don't want Bill C-68 changed; we want it killed.

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If you look at Bill C-68, realistically it is a political and civil rights piece, albeit a negative civil rights piece, not a bill to improve public safety. It gives the public a false promise, the promise that public safety will improve. That just is not so.

Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you, please take a long and unbiased look at Bill C-68 and see it for what it is. It's a mockery of a bill. See it also for what it will become if it is passed: a blow to civil liberties and to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of every Canadian, not just firearms owners. Where the rights and liberties of one are diminished, so are the rights and liberties of all.

We thank you very much again for the opportunity to bring these points before this committee.

The Chair: Thank you.

We will now go through the usual rounds of questioning, with ten minutes by each of the parties and then five minute rounds alternating between the government and the opposition.

[Translation]

We will start with Ms Venne, for 10 minutes.

Ms Venne (Saint-Hubert): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would first ask Mr. Tomlinson if he appeared before the Justice Committee in 1991.

[English]

Mr. Tomlinson: Yes, I am.

[Translation]

Ms Venne: So it's you.

At the time, you said that any citizen could own an AK-47 if he wanted to. You even compared the possession of this paramilitary assault weapon to the possession of a motor bike or of a small leisure aircraft. Do you still think the same way, and how can you suggest that a weapon like the AK-47 can be useful, if not to put human life in danger?

Secondly, you have stated that people who owned that type of weapon were either students of weapon design, either historians or collectors. Where did you take those figures, because we know that a good number of the AK-47 owners say themselves that they own this type of weapon to practice target shooting with a sub-machine gun.

Those are the two first questions I'd like to ask you.

[English]

Mr. Tomlinson: It is not possible to use an AK-47 in Canada for machine-gun target shooting because the AK-47s that are owned by people in Canada, with a very few exceptions, are not fully automatic. They are semi-automatic rifles.

A voice: They're modified.

Mr. Tomlinson: They are not necessarily modified. The majority of the AK-47s that have been imported into Canada were imported as semi-automatic rifles and they are used in military target shooting, they are held by collectors, and they are held by students of firearms design, as I said in 1991.

In terms of how many AK-47s are used in crime, I think this committee should ask for some statistics on that, and you will find that they are virtually never used for crime in Canada.

[Translation]

Ms Venne: As to the fact that anybody could or should own one if he feels like it and that it can be compared to a motorbike, to a small aircraft or even to a toy, are you still standing by that?

[English]

Mr. Tomlinson: It's like owning almost anything else, which is dangerous if it is misused.

In terms of the AK-47 or any other type of rifle, it is a common perception, because it is used by an army, that it is a particularly deadly firearm. But in fact the AK-47 uses a rather feeble cartridge and is much less dangerous than a common or garden hunting rifle.

The AK-47 fires a bullet that weighs 130 grains at a velocity of 2,500 feet per second. The .30-06 rifle fires a bullet that weighs 130 grains at 3,000 feet per second. It is much deadlier, much more long-range and much more accurate than the AK-47. So the idea that there's something particularly deadly about a military firearm is simply wrong.

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[Translation]

Ms Venne: I'll ask you another question and any member of your group may answer it. In the bulletin of your association titled Point Blank, dated July 1994, you state that your group is national and specializes ``in law and politics, subjects which are too complex for the average person to understand''.

In passing, I'd like to mention that it's not very flattering for your members and that you peddle some false rumours when you say that the next step will be the pure and simple confiscation of their weapons. Is it too complicated to clearly explain to your members the real meaning of the legislative provisions and not the product of your imagination? I would like also to know what you think of the Michigan Militia who told its members about a government that was encroaching more and more in the lives of honest citizens that they should do something. Sometimes, I see a number of similarities but that's a personal comment. For now, I would like to have your comments about the subject you mentioned in your Point Blank.

[English]

Mr. Tomlinson: As I said, confiscation appears to be the next step and I think Mr. Allan Rock has very clearly validated what we said. He has proposed, in Bill C-68, which is before you, the confiscation of 58% of all legally acquired and legally owned handguns in Canada. He has proposed the confiscation of all of the firearms that Kim Campbell took from unrestricted status to restricted status. He now takes them to prohibited firearms status and proposes their confiscation with no compensation to the owners.

As far as the Michigan Militia is concerned, what the Americans do in American society is quite different from what Canadians do in Canadian society. Here in the National Firearms Association, what we do with our members is to recommend that they take out a membership in the political party of their choice and become very active within that political party. We are attempting to get very large numbers of Canadians involved directly in the political process, because as it stands today in the United States 38% of the voters are members of political parties and have some say in what goes on in that political party. In Canada, that figure is under 3% and that very tiny minority has absolute control over every name on every ballot in every election and every policy of every political party. That is much too small a group to have that much power.

[Translation]

Ms Venne: You keep saying that firearms owners are reasonable. I would say that to be responsible, they would have to know about the regulations of their favourite sport. But firearms owners often don't even know that there is such a thing as regulations on the safe storage of firearms. It's in a survey done by Léger et Léger that we found out that, especially in Quebec, and this certainly applies to the whole of Canada, I don't doubt it. They asked firearms owners if they knew the regulations that came into force in 1993 on the safe storage of firearms. Fifty-three percent of the owners think that there is such a law and 31% believe there is no such law, that is there is no law about safe storage and 15% are undecided. If you call that responsible, it makes me wonder a lot.

[English]

Mr. Tomlinson: I have a lot of questions as well, Madam Venne. For example, why is a law of this type made by Order in Council so that the only way anyone can find out about it is to subscribe to The Canada Gazette? It is not possible to learn what is in the new laws and regulations by asking the government for information, because we have found that the government handouts are quite at variance with what is actually in the law.

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As a matter of fact, the government recently put out the Canadian firearms safety training course. Everyone who gets involved in firearms is now required to take that training course and it is riddled with false statements about what the state of the law is today.

The government itself badly needs to clean up its act because it is putting out so much contradictory information that it is impossible for anyone to know what this law is. It is putting out the legislation in such a confusing fashion that I'm currently sitting on four reports from the Edmonton Crime Detection Laboratory in a firearms case in which the police are admitting to being frankly baffled as to whether or not particular items are prohibited weapons or restricted weapons. The situation is one of total confusion at the moment and it's very difficult to know what the legislation is. It is not easy.

[Translation]

Ms Venne: That's all Mr. Chairman.

[English]

The Chair: Before I go to the Reform Party, I just want to mention this so it will be clear. The Office of the Auditor General was invited to appear before this committee about four weeks ago, and did in fact appear, not on this bill but on their total report regarding the office of the Solicitor General and the Minister of Justice. It was subject to questioning by members of the committee on any matter in their report. It's correct they weren't invited on this bill, but they were invited on their report.

Mr. Ramsay, for 10 minutes.

Mr. Ramsay (Crowfoot): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I understand from the questions put to you so far that you have appeared before this committee on Bill C-17. Is that correct?

Mr. Tomlinson: That is correct.

Mr. Ramsay: Would you tell the committee what qualifications you have in connection with firearms?

Mr. Tomlinson: I'm a qualified expert witness for firearms matters. I've been recognized by the courts from Newfoundland to British Columbia. I give advice and brief lawyers for firearms matters in cases all across Canada.

Since 1975 I have attempted to understand and to work with the people in charge of making new legislation. I have become, as some people see it, one of the foremost experts across Canada on what the legislation actually means.

Mr. Ramsay: Thank you.

From that point of view, would you give the committee your opinion as to what obstacles lie in the way to a universal firearm registration system that will be able to identify a single firearm positively out of the 6 million to 20 million long guns reported to be in Canada?

Mr. Tomlinson: Quite frankly, I think that problem is insoluble. The problem is the registration system as currently designed - and I see no way to improve it - says we take seven descriptive characteristics of the firearm - the make, the model, the number of shots, the barrel length, the calibre, etc. - and we record those. Now we have the firearm identified as one of a group sharing seven characteristics. Then we add the serial number as the eighth characteristic and that absolutely identifies the firearm as unique within that group.

Unfortunately that is not true. Even for a handgun as common as the German Luger, which was brought back by the thousands by Canadians in World War I and World War II, the German numbering system was to begin with 1 at the beginning of the year and go to 9,999, then with 1A to 9,999A, and then with 1B and so on.

The first problem was that they put the letter on one line and the number on another line. Most of the Canadian registrations had only the digits and not the letter, which limited the usefulness of the system for identification.

Even worse, at the end of making a year's worth of production, at the end of December, the Germans cut off the numbering system and started again the following year with 1.

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So for every year of production from 1908 until 1945, the Germans duplicated the serial numbers. They did the same thing with the Walther P.38.

The Iver Johnson Company in the United States manufactured approximately 9 million fairly cheap revolvers, which can be told apart from model to model only by genuine experts - and there are very few of those, particularly in guns like the Iver Johnson. They stamped those guns with serial numbers using a machine that had only 5 digits, so every 100,000 they started duplicating serial numbers for 9 million guns.

Many of the firearms that are manufactured have no serial numbers. Even where the firearm does have a serial number, because of a lack of expertise at the local registrar level, it's quite frequent to find that the gun has been registered and the serial number that has been put down on the form is the model number, the patent number, the patent date, the year of manufacture, or some other piece of irrelevant information.

Additionally, the government now has a situation whereby the difference between a prohibited firearm and a restricted firearm is simply what the status of that gun was on some date nearly 20 years ago. The government's control system, its registration efforts, are so poor they cannot positively say that a gun was in one status or the other in 1978. Therefore, they cannot tell you what its status is today. I have a court case in hand on that particular matter today.

I have court cases running all over Canada where I have been called in as an expert simply because the lawyers cannot tell what the law means. They cannot tell whether a particular firearm is in this classification or that classification. The situation is pretty much of a mess, I'm afraid.

Mr. Ramsay: If I could ask you a second question before my time is up, what then do you make of the proposed firearms registration procedure, which has been advanced by the justice minister, where a gun owner will merely have to pick up a card at a local store and fill in the make, model and serial number and mail it in? What do you make of that kind of a process to register rifles and shotguns?

Mr. Tomlinson: The system is already riddled with errors, including, we expect, about 25% to 30% of the records being absolutely meaningless. You're going to add an enormous number of more meaningless records, because the information that you get by that process is not going to be expert identification by any means. As a result, what are you going to do with it?

There's an old rule of computer work. It's called garbage in, garbage out. What it means is if the data you put into the computer is of poor quality, inaccurate, dead wrong or has other problems then you can buy a bigger and faster computer and put that data into it, but you still can't get the right answers out of it. That's the situation with the registration system today.

Mr. Ramsay: I visited one of the RCMP forensic laboratories and they gave a startling figure to me that they have a standard collection, which is one of a kind. As firearms come into their possession, if they don't have one like it in their collection, they add it to it. This one firearms collection had just under 1,000 long guns. I was advised by one of the scientists there that 1.7% of those long guns were not identifiable. Have you run across this, and if you have, what does it mean, that a firearm is not identifiable?

Mr. Tomlinson: I'll give you an example. A gentleman was charged with possession of an unregistered restricted weapon. The RCMP crime detection laboratory identified it as a .44-.40 revolver, probably Belgian. I was called in as an expert witness to examine it and I took one look at it and burst out laughing. It was an 11.75 mm Montenegrin Gasser made in Austria, but it's such an old and such a rare revolver that I do not fault the RCMP crime detection laboratories for being unable to identify it. It's quite common not to be able to identify firearms, particularly when the firearms are changed.

Sitting in my collection, for instance, I have a Remington 870 shotgun. Now, if you ask any firearms expert, he will tell you a Remington 870 shotgun is a pump-action shotgun. Mine is a semi-automatic, because a gunsmith in Sweden added parts from a different model that were semi-automatic, and converted the pump-action shotgun to semi-automatic. It was quite an exercise and very expensive and very difficult, but he did it.

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Mr. Ramsay: From what you're saying, is it possible, then, to identify the 1.7% of those firearms in that standard collection that scientists told me were unidentifiable?

Mr. Tomlinson: I would think not. I've seen many firearms that I couldn't identify, and I've been studying firearms since I was 12 years old.

Mr. Ramsay: Well, why can't you identify a firearm?

Mr. Tomlinson: Simply because there were no remaining records for it, in many cases. A company started manufacturing it, let's say, in 1923. By 1925 the company had gone out of business and of the firearms they made maybe a few hundred have survived. But there are no records of the company. The firearm is in an area that is not particularly interesting to collectors and therefore nobody has bothered to research it and there is simply no information available.

Mr. Ramsay: Are these firearms devoid of identifying features? Is that what you're saying?

Mr. Tomlinson: For example, Sears, Roebuck in the United States has sold firearms for many years, and many of those firearms have been stamped with names like J.C. Higgins and A.J. Aubrey. Neither of those two firms exist. The only identification on the firearm is for that firm and it doesn't exist. It is what is called a house name. The company that is selling them stamps its house name on the gun. Trying to identify guns that were sold under house names can be a real nightmare.

Mr. Ramsay: I have no further questions, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Mr. Bodnar, 10 minutes.

Mr. Bodnar (Saskatoon - Dundurn): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Tomlinson, you mentioned that our present system is in total confusion at this time. Is it time for a new gun registry system, then?

Mr. Tomlinson: I don't think you can design a gun registration system that will give evidence that is admissible in a court of law. If you can't do that you're in a situation rather like finding out that fingerprints are not unique; the value of the system is severely degraded.

Mr. Bodnar: Or a possibility of stamping guns with new serial numbers, the same as is done on Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Mr. Tomlinson: I'm sorry, but it can't be done with firearms.

Mr. Bodnar: Not all, but some?

Mr. Tomlinson: The definition of firearm is a whole gun or the framer/receiver of a gun. The framer/receiver of many modern guns are made of plastic. That means that you can't stamp them and any number that you put on them is likely to be worn off.

On March 30, 1994 the Department of Justice issued a paper that said they were going to have a firearms identification number that would be totally unique and stuck to every firearm. That idea didn't even last until the introduction of Bill C-68. It was scrapped and they had to throw it out totally because there was no way to do it.

Mr. Bodnar: Ms Thom, do you believe a woman needs a gun to protect herself?

Ms Thom: I have never espoused owning a gun for self-protection. I'm thinking mainly of city situations here, because I live in the city of Ottawa. People have asked me that from time to time because I think in their minds they're thinking of a loaded gun in the night-table, and that is not a good idea. It's never a good idea to have a gun loaded and not at a range where you're physically going to shoot at a target, or hunting, or something of that nature. I don't espouse that, but I can understand, because since that time I've talked to people who live in rural and remote areas and they sometimes do have a gun for self-protection, either against animals - which is very interesting. I thought that was a myth when I first heard it. I thought, oh yes, sure, sure.

A voice: It is a myth.

Ms Thom: No, it's not. In fact, that was the finding of I think Professor Mauser - I'm not sure. Anyway, somebody did a study of that in western Canada and in fact brought it to the attention of the justice department and said more study should be done in this area because one study doesn't prove it at all, one way or the other. But more study should be done to see in fact if it is true and how extensive it is.

Mr. Bodnar: Well, I don't know what parts of western Canada would be considered by you as requiring this. Coming from western Canada, I do not know where it would be required, unless one went into the north, into the wilderness areas, with particular animals such as bears. There are very few people live very far apart in those particular areas where it may or may not be needed. But other parts of western Canada, in all likelihood, do not require them.

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Mr. Tomlinson: I would like to bring your attention to something that is happening in California, because -

Mr. Bodnar: Now just a moment.

Mr. Chairman, I'd like to be asking the questions rather than having interjections with other information.

The Chair: Unfortunately we have fifteen other members of the committee and we have only limited time, so I leave it to the members to ask the questions to whom they wish.

Ms Thom: Mr. Bodnar, I didn't personally do the study.

Mr. Bodnar: I see.

Ms Thom: When I first heard of it I too was sceptical until I delved further into it.

Mr. Bodnar: And who did it?

Mr. Thom: It was Professor Mauser of Simon Fraser University.

Mr. Bodnar: In the report you gave us today, you indicate that under subclauses 102(1) and (3):

...every person who makes an error on the postcard by giving his opinion on an obscure point of identification can be sent to prison for up to five years if his opinion turns out to be wrong.

This is at the bottom of page 3 and top of page 4, and you're referring to subclauses 102(1) and (3). Subclause 102(1) says that the person has to give this information knowingly...not that it's just an error, but it has to be knowingly...make a statement orally or in writing that is false or misleading...or knowingly fails to disclose any information that is relevant. That is quite different from what you're stating in your brief.

Ms Thom: That if they make a mistake on it.... But how are you -

Mr. Bodnar: It's not a mistake; it's knowingly misrepresenting or giving false information.

Ms Thom: How are you going to tell the difference between somebody who makes an honest mistake and somebody who knowingly gives false information?

Mr. Bodnar: Wouldn't you agree that's why we have judges who draw inferences from facts that come out before the courts and that is where the decision should be made?

Ms Thom: Then you're going to have the courts swamped with an awful lot of cases.

Mr. Bodnar: Ms Thom, they do it all the time. They draw inferences on facts in murder cases and convict people on murder cases or acquit them on the basis of inferences drawn from facts, and this is no different.

Ms Thom: This is so open to have so many errors committed when the postcards are filled out, it's just amazing. I would think it would be hard to tell. Somebody could be falsely accused of making a wilful error when in fact they made an honest error.

Mr. Bodnar: Usually, as the judges say, if the inference can be drawn one way or the other they do it in favour of the accused, not in favour of the prosecution.

Ms Thom: I'm glad to hear that.

The Chair: Not only that, you were a crown, I think. Would a crown bother laying charges of this kind under this proposed section alleging knowingly if in most cases it obviously wasn't knowingly?

Mr. Bodnar: If they couldn't prove it, they wouldn't lay the charge.

The Chair: That's right.

Mr. Bodnar: You've indicated as well on page 8 of your brief that from 1988 to 1991, 28.8% of all violent crimes were robberies with a firearm but only 5.4% involved any type of injury or death.

Ms Thom: No.

Mr. Bodnar: That's what it says: 28% of all violent crimes were robberies with a firearm.

Ms Thom: Yes. Right.

Mr. Bodnar: So 28% involved firearms?

Mr. Tomlinson: No, ``violent crimes'' should read ``firearms''. We took in the correction this morning. We didn't distribute it.

Ms Thom: There was a correction this morning that wasn't distributed to you.

Mr. Bodnar: Well, I got this this morning. This was given to me this morning.

The Chair: We can correct the text. Please point out where it was wrong.

Ms Thom: What page are you...?

Mr. Bodnar: Page 8, the third paragraph from the bottom.

Ms Thom: From 1988 to 1991, 28.8% of all robberies -

Mr. Bodnar: Of all robberies?

Ms Thom: Yes. We noticed that error and we corrected it on the copies we distributed. We brought them in this morning.

Mr. Bodnar: So 28.8% of all robberies were with a firearm?

Ms Thom: That's correct. Of those -

Mr. Bodnar: Five point four involved injury or death.

Ms Thom: Right.

Mr. Bodnar: But 28.8% of all robberies involved a firearm. That's a very high percentage of robberies involving firearms. That's over a quarter.

Ms Thom: It is over a quarter, but on the other hand, of those robberies.... I'm not advocating robbery with a firearm.

Mr. Bodnar: No, no, I understand that.

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Mr. Bodnar: No, I understand that.

Ms Thom: But of those, only 5.4% where they were injured or killed. When a victim was -

Mr. Bodnar: Yes, yes.

Ms Thom: Out of 100%, where somebody was injured or killed, 5.4% -

Mr. Bodnar: Involved injury or death.

Ms Thom: Yes, by firearms.

Mr. Bodnar: Probably 100% of those victims were almost scared to death of having a gun pointed at them or used in that robbery.

Ms Thom: Yes, there's threat. That's why we were stating that regardless of the weapon used -

It is not that I am advocating this at all, but, for example, somebody might go into a jewellery store with an unloaded gun, rob the store and leave. Next door in a grocery store somebody might come in with a machete, beat up the owner, knock somebody out, chop somebody and slash them severely with a machete. There's a difference in those crimes. Under Bill C-68, the person who used the firearm gets an automatic -

Mr. Bodnar: Four years extra.

Ms Thom: - four years extra, whereas the machete wielder is dealt with differently.

Mr. Bodnar: It's discretionary for the judge.

Ms Thom: That's right; it's discretionary, whereas in the case of firearms it isn't discretionary.

What we're saying is that it would be more effective, because of these statistics, if you substituted the word ``weapon'' for ``firearm'' so the machete wielder gets dealt with in a similar way, since obviously there are far more people -

Mr. Bodnar: Well, then, you're supporting this part of the legislation.

Ms Thom: We always did. We supported the increased penalties.

Mr. Bodnar: So we shouldn't kill the legislation, but we should improve upon it.

Ms Thom: You could easily take out the portion where you've increased penalties and kill the rest of the bill, or kill the bill entirely, because it's more riddled with holes than Swiss cheese. It really would be better to start out drafting the legislation with simply the penalties that you have in mind.

The Chair: I would like to remind members and the witnesses not to interrupt each other, because we're trying to take a record of the meeting and if the witness is answering and the witness is interrupted, we don't get a clear statement of what has been said, and vice versa. If the member is asking the question and is interrupted by a witness, the same thing would happen. We want to make sure we have a clear record.

Mrs. Venne for five minutes.

[Translation]

Mrs. Venne: Mr. Tomlinson, I think you said a moment ago that 58% of hand guns would be confiscated under Bill C-68, isn't that right?

[English]

Mr. Tomlinson: - [Inaudible - Editor] -

[Translation]

Mrs. Venne: I regret to tell you that this is false, what you're telling us here, because 58% of small calibers weapons will be declared prohibited weapons, but their owners will keep them anyway, as you know very well. Owners of weapons belonging to the same category will even be able to trade them. I wanted to make that correction for the reading material of the committee.

Secondly, I have here a quotation from 1991; I would like to know if you still think the same way or if you have changed your mind. You were saying at the time, and you were with Mr. Michael Martinoff, that if Canada is a safer country than the United States, it is because, and I translate as I go along:

[English]

of poor Blacks and Hispanics here, not because our gun laws are stricter.

Mr. Tomlinson: On your first comment on the handguns being confiscated, what I said was accurate, and I'm afraid what you said was not accurate. It is 58% of all registered handguns that are proposed for confiscation by Bill C-68.

The idea that these firearms still have value because they will be confiscated from my heirs rather than from me I think is invidious. It is not correct to say that the government is taking nothing. They are stealing the inheritance of my child.

Second, with regard to what was said in 1991, we have never and will never agree that the idea of race has anything to do with crime.

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As a matter of fact, our research indicates quite clearly - Here I refer you to the paper ofDr. Cinterwall, who studied the city of Atlanta. He found that in Atlanta there were six times as many homicides among blacks as there were among whites. But when he divided Atlanta into districts and examined it district by district, he found that in the poor black districts - and there were many of them - the homicide rate was very high. In the poor white district the homicide rate was the same as it was in the poor black district. In the middle-class black and middle-class white districts, the homicide was very much lower, but it was identical in black and white areas. In the higher socio-economic groups, the very wealthy people, the white areas had a homicide rate that was very low, and he couldn't compare them with the black groups because there were no wealthy blacks, or not enough to make good statistics.

It has very little to do with race or colour. It has a great deal to do with socio-economic status.

[Translation]

Ms Venne: Anyhow, I have in front of me your quotation. If you tell me it is not what you said, you might have to correct some of the papers that were published at the time.

I would like to ask you a last question. In 1992, 732 homicides were reported in Canada. Two hundred and fourty six, that is 34%, have been committed with a firearm. During the last 10 years, the majority of homicides have been committed with shotguns or rifles. Three times out of four, the female spouse - because most of the time the victims of murder are women - is killed with a rifle or a shotgun.

In Quebec, between 1990 and 1992, 1,293 deaths have been reported as caused by a firearm, which means an average of 425 deaths annually. Still in Quebec, three deaths out of four, by firearms, are suicides, for a total of about 300 suicides annually.

How can you maintain that homicides and suicides are so negligible that it is not necessary to adopt a law to control firearms?

[English]

Mr. Tomlinson: Basically it is because you need to look at the rates of death for other things. As I said, the rate for breast cancer was 4,000 a year, as compared with 69 for women killed by gunshot wounds. I understand that the prognostication for this year is there will be 5,500 deaths by breast cancer.

As far as suicides are concerned, there is nothing you can do about suicides by way of gun legislation. Bill C-17 in 1978 attempted to deal with the problem of suicide by establishing the firearms acquisition certificate, which would prevent the person who wanted to commit suicide from buying a gun until he had gone through a lengthy paper-gathering process. In fact, for the next three years after that had been brought in the suicide rate went up. The suicide rate by firearm was virtually unchanged and the suicide rate by other means went up.

If you have someone who is determined enough to kill himself by putting a gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger, there is a very high degree of certainty that he is determined enough to use some other method that is equally deadly and more easily available, such as hanging himself, jumping off a bridge or jumping off a tall building. There are many ways to commit suicide, and firearms control is not a good way to try to reduce the suicide rate. It doesn't work.

[Translation]

Ms Venne: It's not what coroner David said in Quebec.

[English]

Mr. Thompson (Wild Rose): A point of order, Mr. Chairman. I just want to check to make sure, as a matter of record, that I heard you say the Auditor General was here before the committee on firearms.

The Chair: No, I didn't.

Mr. Thompson: I just wanted to make sure that wasn't -

The Chair: No. I said the Auditor General was invited to appear before the committee with respect to his report, which dealt with several aspects of the Department of Justice and the Solicitor General. Members were available to ask the Auditor General's staff questions as they wished, but not on the firearms bill.

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Mr. Thompson: Thank you.

The Chair: They could have asked questions on that day.

Ms Barnes, for five minutes.

Mrs. Barnes (London West): I find that people who have no understanding of women's issues always trivialize issues that they don't understand. That's what I find in your statements with respect to violence against women.

I'm going to start by telling you that I'm prepared to spend a lot of time understanding this legislation. I'm working with groups to try to improve the legislation. I think that's a valid purpose.

I want to let you know that I find you extremely offensive. I turn to your brief, look at the last page and see ``Shoot down Liberal gun control legislation - A dart board, fake gun bullets - Support the Reform Party of Canada''. That does a disservice to the people you're trying to represent.

I will start now.

In your brief you quote from Professor Peter Hogg. Clearly you acknowledge, and I'm sure everyone would agree, that Mr. Hogg is a leading expert in this country on constitutional law. Certainly he is acknowledged as such by the Supreme Court of Canada, given the frequency with which he is referred to in their decisions. You also state at page 2 of the brief, paragraph 9, that gun control legislation may be ultra vires of the federal Parliament, which is to say that the federal Parliament has no authority under the Constitution to legislate with respect to gun control.

I understand that the point that you or your organization is trying to make is that gun control legislation is a subject within exclusive jurisdiction of provincial governments under section 92(13) of the Constitution Act...the property and civil rights sections. I understand that line of your argument.

I have also read Professor Hogg and I note that he does not seem to agree with you at all. In fact, what he says is completely the opposite. I brought along, just in case you think I'm imagining these things, the third edition of his book on this point. At page 485 he states,

A law may be validly enacted in relationship to criminal law although the law itself does not have the characteristics of a criminal law. This would be true, for example, of a law which simply repealed a criminal law. Its most important application, however, is in support of laws aimed at the prevention of crime. For example, binding over a person to keep the peace, controlling the possession of guns or detaining....

I would like to ask you if you are familiar with the cases of Attorney General of Canada v. Pattison, which was on gun control, in the Alberta Court of Appeal, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber in the Supreme Court of Canada. Perhaps you are more familiar with the case of Martinoff v. Dawson in the B.C. Supreme Court. You may recall that in that case your own organization's vice-president - or maybe former vice-president, I don't know, in light of the conviction of firearms offences - challenged the government's right to make gun control legislation. That case ruled that gun control provisions are intra vires, not ultra vires, of Parliament.

I find it hard to believe you could be unaware of these legal decisions, Mr. Tomlinson.

I would like to know if part of the National Firearms Association finances these court cases and at what level you have ever been successful that has not been overturned at appeal.

Mr. Tomlinson: We do either partially or totally fund some firearms cases; not the cases that you are citing. We are aware of these cases. We are also aware of a number of cases that go in the opposite direction. This is a very tangled area of the law and a very tangled area of jurisdiction.

When the firearms control legislation was first put into the Criminal Code, it was very clear that it was public safety legislation. As public safety legislation, it is clearly intra vires of Parliament.

However, I sat here this morning and listened to the Minister of Justice telling some of the questioners that this legislation was for the administration and regulation of property, that it has nothing to do with criminal law, that he is planning possibly to take criminalization out of it. If it goes outside the criminal powers of the federal Parliament, then what you are saying is that it is regulatory law, and it is regulatory law of property. He stated that explicitly this morning.

My question to you, Madam, is if it is regulatory law -

Mrs. Barnes: Could you just answer my questions, please?

I want to get back to your brief. I find so many statements.... On the second page alone, there are at least four occasions where I see total misrepresentation. It angers me, quite frankly, because I think you have a job to do. I think you have a job to come before this committee and give us good information and not misinformation that instils fear in people - because I know people are concerned about this legislation, and it's our job to fix it where there can be improvements.

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My question will go to your point where you talked about entering private homes, which is in the second paragraph on page 2. If you read clause 101, it very succinctly tells anybody who does read it that you cannot go into a private home without (a) consent or (b) a warrant. Would you agree with that?

Mr. Tomlinson: I agree with you that you have to get the warrant, but in order to get that warrant -

Mrs. Barnes: Okay, that's fine. If you agree with that, sir -

The Chair: Allow the answer, please.

A witness: [Inaudible]

Mrs. Barnes: Well, it should be when you say this misstatement.

Mr. Tomlinson: In order for the man to get that warrant...although it calls in a police officer, notice, from section 98, he may very well not be a police officer. In order to get the warrant, all that is necessary is for him to go to a judge and say that he has a reasonable belief that there is a firearm, ammunition, or a record of a firearm or ammunition in that home and there need not be the slightest hint of any criminal activity whatever.

Mrs. Barnes: To quote your brief, it says:

C-68 vests police and firearms bureaucrats with extremely broad search and seizure powers, authorizing them to enter and search the private home of any Canadian who has a firearm or ammunition, or even a record of a firearm or ammunition, including situations where no crime is known or suspected.

You quote the clauses. That's not what you just relate; not at all.

Mr. Tomlinson: That is what I just related, Madam.

Ms Barnes: No, he didn't.

The Chair: Again, there's a difference of view on the meaning of the legislation.

I go to Ms Meredith, who has five minutes.

Ms Meredith (Surrey - White Rock - South Langley): I would like to deal with a couple of issues that do concern me, mainly about part III of this proposed legislation, and I would like to know how you feel. I take it that you've been in court representing firearms cases.

In this proposed legislation, as I understand it, there is an onus of proof that it is a firearm and under definitions, or under proposed section 84, it states those which are not firearms and it goes through a whole list of things that are not considered to be firearms. One under subparagraph (d)(ii) is ``a shot, bullet or other projectile that is designed or adapted to attain a velocity exceeding 152.4 m per second''.

Does that mean that that's the definition of what a firearm is, that it can send out a projectile at that speed?

Mr. Tomlinson: No, that is not correct. If you will read that in its entirety, you will find that what you have is a definition of ``firearm'' that falls under proposed section 84. Then you have an abridgement and a changing of the definition of ``firearm'' that falls under clause 2. The change makes a narrower definition of the word ``firearm'', but that narrower definition only applies to certain specified sections of the Criminal Code and to all of the Firearms Act. As a result, you have two definitions for the word ``firearm'', a narrow definition and a wide one.

So, for example, you could not be convicted of possession of a paint-ball gun without a licence, because, for the purpose of that section, it is not a firearm. On the other hand, you could be convicted of several other firearms offences for having a paint-ball gun, because, under those sections, it is defined as being a firearm.

Ms Meredith: Are you talking about a clause here that is using ``replica'' or...?

Mr. Tomlinson: No, I'm talking about the word ``firearm''. The word ``firearm'' has two entirely different meanings in this legislation.

Ms Meredith: Okay, then that just adds to my concern, because I noticed in here that there is a different offence for the use of a replica as opposed to the use of a firearm. From talking to crown counsel, my understanding is that so many firearm charges get dropped or don't proceed through the courts because they cannot prove that it was in fact a firearm that was used and therefore it's easier for them just to plea-bargain it down or not take it into court.

What I'm hearing on the street is that people want this government to come up with a piece of legislation that is going to penalize criminals when they use anything that looks like a firearm in the commission of an offence so that people who are going to rob a bank will choose to leave a firearm out of it and you get fewer firearms out there.

.1645

My understanding is that these are two separate offences. Is it going to be possible to carry any kind of charge, either a charge of using a replica or a charge of using a firearm, through the court system with these changes to part III?

Mr. Tomlinson: It's going to be extremely tangled. You have the idea of the replica. You have firearms divided into seven classes by this legislation: unrestricted, restricted and five separate and distinct classes of prohibited firearms, all of which may be bought, sold and traded within individual grandfathered groups that overlap.

You have the replica firearm, which is undefined. I have no idea what the government means by a replica firearm. For example, replica firearms, in common terminology within the recreational firearms community, include black powder cap and ball guns, which are manufactured to look like guns that were used during the American Civil War period and earlier.

Ms Meredith: I don't care what it looks like. I care that it's there at the scene of the crime. I don't care whether it's a water gun that shoots water and not a bullet. Again, the trauma to the bank teller is just as severe whether it's a water pistol or a real gun.

My concern is whether this legislation can carry that kind of offence through the court system successfully, or will it be plea-bargained down or not even carried into the courts because of lack of proof. Have you looked at that aspect of this legislation?

Mr. Tomlinson: We have looked at it and we consider that it would be very difficult. Additionally, we consider that the criminal justice system will reject it, for the same reason as they have rejected section 85. Section 85 has been used in 52 out of 12,287 convictions.

One of the major reasons for that is.... Say you are a police officer, judge or crown prosecutor and you have two cases in front of you. In one case, a man walked into a jewellery store with an unloaded pistol that didn't actually work, held the place up, tipped his hat and went quietly out. In the other case, the man used a baseball bat, knocked several people down, fractured the skull of the proprietor of the grocery store and made off with the contents of the till. To our mind, it is absolutely inexplicable that the law would say that the first man gets an extra penalty and the second man attracts no extra penalty at all although he actually used his weapon.

To our minds, the problem is violence, not firearms.

Look at what they're doing with Bill C-68. It drives the criminal away from the .25 and .32 calibre handguns, which are the feeblest of guns. It drives them away from short-barrelled guns in favour of long-barrelled guns, which are more powerful. It drives them away from replica guns and towards genuine deadly weapons by giving an extra penalty for using something that is completely harmless.

Ms Meredith: I want to correct something that was said. It is not an additional sentence; it is one sentence for committing a serious crime with a firearm. It's a four-year minimum. I don't feel and a lot of people in the community don't feel that's a serious enough sentence. I feel that there should be an addition to it. Do you not agree with that?

Mr. Tomlinson: I agree with you wholeheartedly that the sentences are woefully low, particularly when you consider how early the prisoners are being let out. It isn't at the end of four years.

But also you have to look at the factor that what the public is really upset about is the increasing violence. It is not which particular tool the criminal is using. Therefore, this legislation would be much better if, instead of saying that an extra penalty will be incurred for having a firearm, we say you will receive an extra penalty for using a weapon, and there will be another extra penalty if you actually injure someone with that weapon, and we'll give you a much more severe penalty if you actually kill somebody with that weapon. But to tie it to a particular tool....

When you tie it to something like a replica firearm, which is absolutely harmless, we don't understand the logic.

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If you are a judge, a crown prosecutor or a policeman, and you have these two cases - one where no damage was done and one where intense damage was done - and you have the opportunity of laying the more severe charge of committing the crime with a firearm, will you actually do that? Or will you go with the other charge, which is equally possible, and say this is simply a robbery case?

This is what has been happening with section 85. The criminal justice system refuses to use it because it is illogical.

Mr. Gallaway (Sarnia - Lambton): Ms Thom, you appeared last week on a national news or public affairs program with the Chief of Police of Halifax, I believe.

Ms Thom: Yes.

Mr. Gallaway: I saw it. It was very good.

You made reference at that time to the fact that in your opinion the national registration system would cost somewhere between $250 million and $300 million, as I recall. I don't have the transcript here.

Ms Thom: At the time I said $300 million to $500 million, using the statistics I had at the time.

Mr. Gallaway: Okay, fine.

You are a former Olympic champion, a gold medallist. I assume that gives you a lot of credibility in the community. People are aware of you.

Ms Thom: Yes, they are aware.

Mr. Gallaway: In your opening statement, representing the National Firearms Association, you also talked about this as a bill riddled with false statements.

Ms Thom: Yes.

Mr. Gallaway: Last summer ads such as this appeared in a number of western papers. It appeared in the Saskatoon and Regina newspapers. It is sponsored by a number of groups, of which the National Firearms Association was the sponsor. I assume it paid for the ad. Its name is listed on the ads. Your name is listed here as endorsing this, in any event.

Don't you find it rather strange that you would appear on a show on national TV and talk about a $500-million price-tag for the registry system, yet this advertisement, endorsed by a group for which you speak, talks about a cost of $1.7 billion to $2 billion? Do you not find that false or misleading also?

Ms Thom: I haven't had the opportunity to read that and I haven't had the opportunity to verify those figures.

Mr. Gallaway: Which figures, then, are we going to verify?

Ms Thom: I would go with the figure I have in fact given you today, the $600 million.

Mr. Gallaway: All right, it's the $600 million today.

You are speaking for the National Firearms Association. It participated in an ad that stated it would cost $1.7 billion to $2 billion. Is that not false or misleading?

Ms Thom: As I said, I haven't had the opportunity to see how they based their figures. So I'm sorry, but -

Mr. Gallaway: Well, how do you base your figures on $600 million, then?

Ms Thom: We're basing it on the number of firearms the justice department estimates are out there and the price-tag per firearm to register them.

Mr. Gallaway: Second, in your opening statement you talked about Bill C-68. You'll have to excuse me, because I'm going to paraphrase you. Please correct me if I'm not correct. You said that Bill C-68 is the act of an authoritarian state government. I've made notes and -

Ms Thom: Mentality.

Mr. Gallaway: The mentality, okay.

You also talked about the anecdotes and scare tactics. Do you not think that is a scare tactic?

Ms Thom: I'm sorry, I don't have a copy of it. Mr. Gallaway, if you'd let me have a copy of it, I'd be happy to read it and make a comment on it for you.

Mr. Gallaway: Yes, certainly.

I have to ask why. You are asking why in your presentation.

Ms Thom: Yes.

Mr. Gallaway: I have to ask why that ad would be run.

Ms Thom: Presumably it -

Mr. Gallaway: This was run last summer. Do you have new information, Ms Thom?

Ms Thom: Let me pass that over to Mr. Tomlinson, because he's got notes on it.

Mr. Gallaway: I assume that as a spokesperson for the group you can answer, but I'll defer to Mr. Tomlinson.

Mr. Tomlinson: The figure you're looking at there is the full cost of implementing the system. The $600-million figure is merely the cost of operating system and getting the seven million firearms registered to the new standard. It does not include the capital costs, whereas that figure does include the capital costs of new computers, new software, testing, debugging and all the other expenses inherent in this, plus the fact that the $600-million figure is predicated on the minister's own figures for the total number of firearms to be registered, which we are quite aware is very much lower than the actual number out there.

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Mr. Gallaway: Mr. Tomlinson, you stated you were here this morning. The minister appeared this morning and provided the committee...I'm certain you've seen his estimates now and how he arrived at them. Are you telling us the department is out by a factor of perhaps 800%?

Mr. Tomlinson: I would recommend that you look at our paper number 3, which uses entirely figures supplied by the office of the Department of Justice and the Commissioner of the RCMP, and then you inquire of the minister as to why his figures are so different from ours.

Mr. Gallaway: Well, the minister actually provided these numbers to us.

Mr. Tomlinson: I have not seen those numbers; however, I have seen the numbers that he provided in earlier sessions, and when we assemble those numbers we come up with a rock-bottom minimum cost of $600 million. It costs $82.69, on average, to issue one registration certificate. That figure comes from Mr. Wade's report, which was prepared for the Department of Justice.

Mr. Rock said, and he said it again this morning, there are 7 million firearms in Canada;1.2 million are registered, 5.8 million are not.

The Wade report recommended going over to the Quebec system of registration, which increases the cost of issuing one certificate to $104.02. The Wade report is saying that the cost is away up there. At 5.8 million guns times $100 a piece, which is lower than the Quebec figure and doesn't take into account the extra cost of issuing plastic cards instead of simple paper certificates, it is $580 million.

The Chair: Madam Venne.

[Translation]

Ms Venne: I am through.

[English]

Mr. Thompson: I would like to ask Ms Thom a question. I'm interested in the comment that was said from across the table and I would like to know some information. I certainly would not want anybody to think for a minute that anybody is trivializing the idea of violence against women, and if it comes across that way I think it should be corrected.

I'd like to get your opinion, Ms Thom, on how many women, first of all, are involved in your organization and whether you feel your organization has trivialized the violence against women. Give me some comments. How do you feel about that whole thing?

Ms Thom: I feel very strongly, naturally. I'm part of the sisterhood. I feel very strongly about violence against women; but I also feel it's very important to put it into context. There's an awful lot of violence against men, and in fact, it winds up being more.

The illustration I used of comparing the number of women who died from breast cancer and the number who died by firearms was to give some perspective and some balance to the whole affair. I have found in the past, dealing with this subject, that if you don't have some measuring stick by which to judge a lot of these statistics, then one can wind up feeling that the problem is far larger and far more severe than it actually is, but I would never, ever trivialize even one death by suicide or by terrorizing her in the home. Certainly not. That was not my intention at all.

Mr. Thompson: How many women are in your organization? Do you have a number?

Ms Thom: I don't have a number in my organization. Well, there are two or three organizations here.

The Chair: And that's the National Firearms Association?

Mr. Thompson: The National Firearms Association.

Mr. Tomlinson: We do not separate our membership by male and female.

Mr. Thompson: Good, I'm glad to hear that.

Has your group personally done an analysis of firearm registrations that have already been conducted, particularly the ones that have been established in Canada since 1934, or are you using the reports that have come out from other researchers, such as Mauser out of the Fraser Institute?

Mr. Tomlinson: We are using research that we have done ourselves. The firearms registration errors one and two are our papers 17 and 18 in the package that was given to you.

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We also get material from other sources, such as the Australian and the New Zealand data, in papers 19 and 20. We have a great deal more material than that. We merely included those as representative examples of how useless registration can be.

Mr. Thompson: In your membership, the one thing that has been said constantly is that the Minister of Justice has the support of all the police all across the country and the police commissions.

In my riding, I think there are 17 RCMP detachments and a couple of city police. I've ridden around with a number of city police on ride-alongs. I've talked to sergeants, I've talked to foot soldiers, so to speak. I have not found any that are supporting this legislation. Have you any evidence that the police are behind this legislation or not behind it, and on what do you base that?

The Chair: They're going to appear, by the way, tomorrow afternoon.

Mr. Thompson: I'd be glad to find one tomorrow.

Mr. Tomlinson: I think you have to look at the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police from the aspect of being a police chief. In the event that you come out against registration, then you are also coming out against having the registration office operating within your own department. Therefore you are going to lose staff, you are going to lose budget and you are going to lose some control over firearms in your city.

If you are a member of the running staff of the police...it has been our experience that most of the street cops do not regard firearms registration as being of much use, and that is particularly true of police officers with long service, because they've gone many years and they've never found a case where the registration system has done them any good.

As proof of that, the Wade report says that they do 100 traces a year, most of which are unsuccessful. We don't know whether ``most'' means 90% unsuccessful or 51% unsuccessful, so in our analysis in paper 3 we took it at 51% unsuccessful. If the reason for the registration system is to be able to do traces on firearms, that works out at a cost of $141,000 per successful trace of a firearm. We don't think that's very cost-effective.

Additionally, you have the problem that we don't know from the Wade report what they consider to be a successful trace. We suspect that a successful trace is one that comes up and says this gun was stolen from John Brown eight years ago. We think they would count that as a successful trace, but that's something this committee could possibly ask people who have inside information on it.

Another problem we have is that we do not know how many of those 100 traces are internally generated and are merely the system trying to find out how the system screwed up this time.

The Chair: Once again, I want to bring to the attention of the committee that we'll have both the Canadian Police Association and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police before us. I'm sure they will be able to answer themselves whether or not they support the bill. In other words, they'll speak for themselves just as you are speaking for yourselves.

Mr. Gagnon (Bonaventure - Îles-de-la-Madeleine): I want to make one thing clear to the officials from the NFA - I was going to say NRA. Often you mix the two, since they are so much alike.

Mr. Chairman, I'm from a rural part of Quebec where everybody has a gun, basically. In my own family we have five or six rifles. My grandfather, my father and I are big game hunters.

But I must say that I'm in full favour of Bill C-68, because we've learned today, and we've been hearing about this for some time, that many women are victims of violence and that one women every six days is murdered either by her husband or by whomever with a legally registered weapon in the overwhelming cases that are currently under review.

The Chair: A gun, which is a weapon.

Mr. Gagnon: And a rifle; whatever you want to call it. I'm not going to debate with you on what kind of rifle is best used to hunt down deer or rabbit. I think you and I could have a very interesting discussion.

The Chair: A knife is a weapon.

Mr. Gagnon: Being a Gaspesien and a Magdalen Islander at the same time, I think it would be quite interesting to exchange notes.

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I'm also concerned that you refer to the federal government as the authoritarian federal government. I have a feeling that your association has a deep-seated philosophical difference with this government, with Parliament, and with the notion of peace, order and good government. I think you take a lot of your examples of what's going on in the United States and a lot of these things don't apply.

We look at the murders in Canada versus the United States, and there is no comparison. This is a safe society. I think this is one of the hallmarks of our country and it is something we don't want to let go of easily.

However, I don't want to digress too much. I have very limited time. But I would like to hear you out on what the American government thinks of this piece of legislation. I'm told the U.S. government and its law enforcement agency are in favour of this bill. They think it's a good example.

Also, I would like to hear from you, sir, given the current disarray in American society, on the availability and the proliferation of arms and weapons of all kinds. Don't you think if the American society had anything similar to Bill C-68 or anything we've had in the past, American society would not be going through the trials, tribulations and the virtual anarchy, I should add, given the recent events in that country? I would like to hear you on that.

Mr. Tomlinson: Actually, you're quite wrong about that, and the reason I say you're quite wrong about it is that you're looking at the United States as an enormous monolithic society with all the same problems everywhere; which is not true.

Dr. Cinterwall did a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology in which he compared the states in the United States that touch Canada with the Canadian provinces and territories that are touched by those states as being the closest to one another in basic sociological areas. It was a very interesting comparison, because the highest rates for homicide and aggravated assault were on the Canadian side of the border, in the Yukon territory. The lowest rates for homicide and aggravated assault were on the American side of the border in North Dakota, which has rates for homicide and aggravated assault that are approximately half those of any Canadian province.

As a matter of fact, if you look at the United States, it is an area where firearms legislation is largely local, usually on a state or city basis. In those areas that have restricted versus unrestricted firearms ownership, the violent crime rates are much, much lower.

Mr. Gagnon: That's not on track. On a per capita basis it would save 100,000. Are you trying to tell me that there is less crime and there are fewer murders in the United States of America compared to Canada?

Mr. Tomlinson: In North Dakota, definitely.

Mr. Gagnon: Now, that's the state of North Dakota, which has a state population of about1 million or 1.5 million - I'm not too sure.

Mr. Tomlinson: We're talking figures...

Mr. Gagnon: But I'm talking about the overall picture here. I mean statistics that are widely referred to throughout the world, if you compare the United States with Canada, with Europe, with Asia, etc.

Can you actually claim today that the United States is a safer society, that Detroit is safer than Toronto, that Washington is safer than Montreal, that there's no problem with arms of any kind in the United States, when people have access to weapons of kinds we don't have here in Canada? Can you substantiate what you say?

Mr. Tomlinson: What I can tell you is that this is a local problem. You have extremely high crime rates in areas of the United States where you have very bad socio-economic situations, such as in the ghettos of the large cities.

But in terms of looking at this picture, you have to look at it in more detail. For example, Washington, D.C., has firearms control laws that make Canada's look petty by comparison, yet it has the highest homicide rate in the United States. It has a violent crime rate of 2,500 per 100,000. If you ask the people of Washington, D.C., why their firearms control laws don't work and don't protect them, they say, well, just across the bridge in Alexandria, West Virginia, you can buy guns with virtually no controls.

The problem with that explanation is that the violent crime rates and homicide rates in Alexandria, West Virginia, are approximately one-tenth of what they are in Washington.

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This is not a simple problem. Exercises comparing Canada with the United States on an overall basis are so simplistic and so ridiculous that they shouldn't even be considered.

Mr. Ramsay: Ms Thom, I was surprised when you indicated you didn't feel firearms were necessary for self-protection in terms of animals. Mr. Thompson, Ms Torsney and I were in Kamloops and we were at a firearms information meeting. A lady stood in the meeting and told us of a young boy who was mauled to death by a bear that had come into the yard while the parents were frantically trying to get their firearms out of their locked-up cabinet.

I think if you go into the northern part of Canada, particularly in the territories, where whole families go out on trapping and hunting expeditions, particularly at this time of the year, when the bears are coming out, you'll find it is quite necessary to have a firearm for self-protection. I just thought I would put that on the record.

I would like to ask Mr. Tomlinson this. I received some information about the cost of processing an FAC. I mentioned that when the justice minister was here. The figures I have haven't been validated to my satisfaction, but they come from a source I consider to be quite reliable. They indicated the cost to process a single FAC in 1994 for the city of Toronto was $185 and some cents. Another source indicated that from the best of their estimation with the facts they had, it was approximately $150.

Now, when I look at what a chief firearms officer is going to have to do just to issue a licence before any gun is registered under subclause 5(2), where they have to do the background check in the area of criminality, take a look to see if they've ever been treated for mental illness, take a look at the history of behaviour, which I think includes probably a neighbourhood check to see if the individual has a history of violence or threatened or attempted violence, I see that an awful lot of work has to go on before a licence can be issued, let alone a gun registered.

So I would ask you, from your knowledge, do you have any estimation of what it costs today to process a firearms acquisition certificate?

Mr. Tomlinson: The figures you're quoting of $150 to $185 I would say are reasonable figures, from things I have seen. However, what it will cost in the future is completely unpredictable, because in addition to the things you say the chief firearms officer has to do, you also have the problem that he has to do anything else that is prescribed by Order in Council by any future minister.

Now, the meaning of that is that you have a nest of bureaucrats in the minister's office and these officials have interests of their own. They always want to improve and tweak up the system. Every time they do that, of course, there's an increase in cost, there's an increase in staff, there's an increase in budget, and therefore there's an increase in power of the chief official within that office.

Mr. Ramsay: Can I ask you this, then? Knowing the process to obtain an FAC or to process an FAC, and looking at clause 5, as you probably have, do you see any intensity in the demand upon the chief firearms officer in comparison with the FAC as compared with the duties and obligations under subclause 5(2) of this bill? Do you see any increase, or is it pretty well the same?

Mr. Tomlinson: I would say it depends on how it is interpreted. As with all this legislation, the terminology tends to be hopelessly vague. You get into it, and one man will look at it and say, well, I have to go and do this, I have to go and do that, I have to go and do the other. The next man, in the same job, says I won't bother doing any of that; I will assume everything is correct.

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This was something the Wade report pointed out quite clearly. The variation in how things were handled was so severe that the Wade report was completely unable to say what was the right way to do it. There were just too many different ways being run. As he said, it varies from province to province and even within the province.

The Chair: Before I go to Ms Torsney, Mr. Tomlinson, in your exchange with Mr. Gagnon you referred to a report that was done in some journal in which they compared the border American states with Canadian provinces. I'm wondering if, at the end of the meeting, you would give the clerk the exact reference on that report. We would like to get a copy and consult it. Is that all right?

Mr. Tomlinson: Yes. I think I have a copy of it in my briefcase, sir.

The Chair: If you don't, as long as we have the reference to it, we could get it ourselves.

Ms Torsney (Burlington): Actually I have a copy of it myself. It's quite an interesting document, because of course it speaks to the need for national standards and not provincial, as you might be advocating, or state standards. Certainly in New York state they have ten times as many firearm homicides as we do in Canada. In Washington state, they have two times as many. In Michigan state, they have seven and a half times as many firearm deaths. Certainly there are some problems in some of those American states that they need to deal with.

I have a couple of wrap-up questions for you, a couple of unlinked ones. First of all, I wanted to know if Mr. Martinoff is still a member of your executive.

Mr. Tomlinson: Not of the executive. He's still a member of the association.

Ms Torsney: How many members are actually in the association, individual members, not members who are members of another association who are members of your association?

Mr. Tomlinson: At the moment I couldn't give you a good figure on that. We're experiencing explosive growth and we haven't had time to sit down and find out where we are.

Ms Torsney: What was your latest mailing list, Mr. Tomlinson?

Mr. Tomlinson: Our latest mailing list was about 7,000.

Ms Torsney: So you have 7,000 members. You also had some numbers that were interesting earlier about the participation rate in politics, Canada versus the U.S. amongst gun owners, or was that just members of the NRA?

Mr. Tomlinson: I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

Ms Torsney: You talked about the political participation rates of Canadians versus Americans who are gun owners, how the American members of the NRA.... I believe that's what you were discussing.

Mr. Tomlinson: No. That was overall of the population. In the United States, 38% of voters are members of a political party. In Canada, less than 3% of voters are members of a political party. So we recommend to our members that they become active inside political parties, because we think the figure is far too low.

Ms Torsney: Let's hope we certainly don't lead to the kind of distortions in American politics that they have there.

One of the documents I have a copy of as well is something called Gunproofing Your Child, and I think you may have written this article.

Mr. Tomlinson: Yes, I did.

Ms Torsney: Mr. Tomlinson, at what age do you think we should start showing our kids how to shoot guns?

Mr. Tomlinson: At the age where the child is endangered by firearms. Today that is the age where your child is in someone else's home and outside your control.

Ms Torsney: That would be because many people put their children in child care facilities at about six months old or even younger. So you think then we can start teaching children how to use guns?

Mr. Tomlinson: No. I'm saying when your child is going visiting his friends, because when your child is in a friend's home, you have no control over what is going on with firearms in that home. If the friend's child brings out a gun, your child should know what to do.

Ms Torsney: If I have children, I need to actually have guns and shoot into soap bars and everything else to get that message home to them. I can't just talk to them about it? I actually have to pull out the guns and start shooting with them?

Mr. Tomlinson: No. What you have to do is combat television. Television, by the time your child is six, has taught your child to load and fire a revolver, an automatic pistol, a rifle and a shotgun. If you're satisfied with the training television gave your child, then that's where you're at.

Ms Torsney: Ms Thom, do you agree with that as well?

Ms Thom: About the statistics?

Ms Torsney: No, about gunproofing children in this way.

Ms Thom: I was taught to shoot at the age of eight. My father stressed safety, safety and safety. He supervised us until such time as he felt we could shoot safely on our own. We were shooting an airgun at the time, and many, many young people learn to shoot by shooting airguns now.

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Ms Torsney: So you would advocate....

Sorry, Mr. Chairman, but I had a very specific question and I just wanted that answer.

The Chair: I know, but I want to make sure that I get the answers on the record.

Ms Torsney: My question was do you advocate that all of us who let our children watch television and who let our children visit other children in their homes, whose fathers may have different standards from ours, should be showing our children how to shoot and getting bars of soap...and advocating what this article does, that is, actively showing these youngsters how to shoot? That's a yes or a no.

Ms Thom: I'm sorry, I can't just answer with a yes or a no, because circumstances alter cases.

Ms Torsney: Ms Thom, Mr. Tomlinson has published an article for all people who have guns or who have children who watch television, saying that these children should be learning about gun safety. I'm asking, do you agree with that article?

Ms Thom: All people who have guns should very definitely gun-proof their children, because just as we teach all children in the schools about traffic safety, we make sure.... This is important and it's been proven true that if we teach them at a young age -

Ms Torsney: Ms Thom, I'm sorry to interrupt again, but this article specifically says that even if you keep guns out of your home, you should be getting some guns and showing your kids how to fire guns by actively shooting into bars of soap, and it actually uses the example of a person who doesn't have any guns in his or her home. Mr. Tomlinson thinks that all of us who have children who visit other children and have children who watch television should be going out and shooting with these children, apparently from the age of six months old and older.

Ms Thom: I'm sorry, I think that's an exaggeration about six months old or older, I really do.

Ms Torsney: He mentioned ``at the earliest age''.

The Chair: Excuse me. We've gone beyond the time. Have you read the article?

Ms Thom: No, I'm sorry, I haven't read the article. To answer the question more closely...I think the principle here is that we're trying to teach our children how to use firearms safely, whereas television and movies teach our children very well and at a very early age how not to do it. I think it would be a good idea if parents could open themselves up to go down to a club with a child of a reasonable age - and this depends very much on a child's stature, because in one case you might get a child who's seven or eight and in another case you might get a child who's much older - and take the opportunity for them to shoot at a club and actually learn the safe handling of a gun. This would be a very good idea because there is so much abuse given to us by society that is totally out of our control.

Ms Torsney: Can I just make one comment. We need to figure out who is the spokesperson for the National Firearms Association, because clearly they don't agree with each other and I'm not sure how we're supposed to figure out what their position is.

The Chair: Well, the only thing before us today is their brief. I don't want to be facetious in saying this, but there may be members of the National Firearms Association who have their own personal views on things, as we do in political parties sometimes. What we have to deal with is their brief. I think you're right that they probably have different views on different items, too, but that's not unusual.

Ms Torsney: It's certainly hard to figure out what they're advocating.

The Chair: I think Mr. Tomlinson has some different views. I've already noticed them withMs Thom, and I haven't heard from Mr. Morton. But all we're dealing with is their brief today and what they've recommended to us in their brief.

Ms Thom: Thank you very much, Mr. Allmand. I appreciate your intercession because it's nice to know that you can be a member of any organization and hold differing views or slightly differing views. But I honestly think it's the principle that is being talked about here, that's being considered or thrown forward for people to consider, and not the absolute -

Ms Torsney: Ms Thom, I think you need to read the article.

The Chair: She may disagree with the article, who knows?

Mrs. Venne.

[Translation]

Mrs. Venne: I would just like to comment very briefly on a sentence contained in the summary that is before me; it states that the problem lies with acts of criminal violence and not with firearms. Well, this is a truism to end all truisms. I think it is a very deep thought, I would even add that people are killed by the ammunition and not by the person holding the firearm.

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That's all I had to say.

[English]

Ms Thom: I'll be happy to field that simply by giving you an illustration. I know a lot of people are sick and tired of hearing that it's not the gun that kills; it's the person who kills. But if you took a Chevrolet and mowed down a bunch of people at a bus stop, for example, killed them all and then said it's logical that you should ban all Chevrolets, I think it would make a lot of people laugh. I don't think it's the car that killed the people in that instance; I think it was the person behind the wheel.

[Translation]

Mrs. Venne: The purpose of a weapon is to kill, whereas the purpose of a car is to travel. You should not be making any groundless comparisons.

[English]

Mr. Tomlinson: I would like to answer that comment. You say, Madam, that a gun is to kill. We have 1.2 million firearms in this country, and very, few of them, far lower than 1%, have ever been used to kill a human being.

The Chair: What's their purpose?

Mr. Tomlinson: The purpose of the firearm, in many cases, as the purpose of Mrs. Thom's guns is, is to punch holes in pieces of paper and nothing else. Her firearms are completely useless for any other purpose.

The Chair: I was going to ask a few other questions, but just to clarify that point, are you saying the guns used in international competition, while they are meant to shoot at targets, couldn't be used to kill somebody? If you shot one and instead of hitting the target it hit me, wouldn't I die?

Mr. Tomlinson: It's possible you would, but the gun is so large it is not concealable. It is so awkward, it is not really useful as a practical weapon. It is purely an instrument for punching holes in pieces of paper.

The Chair: It's hard to believe, but anyway....

I wanted to ask you further questions about your organization so you could have this on the record, and I intend to do it with all of the organizations that appear before us. You were asked what your membership was, and you say you can't tell us now because it's fluctuating very much. What was it at the end of last year?

Mr. Tomlinson: As to that, I don't know. We've been in this period of explosive growth since Kim Campbell. We are also in the process of changing over from one computer program to another because our old computer program could no longer handle the volume of membership we had.

I can tell you in the last nine days that I have records for, our bank deposit was $70,000 from incoming memberships and insurance.

The Chair: That's my next question. Do your members pay membership fees and how much do they pay?

Mr. Tomlinson: Our fees are $30 for an individual member, $40 for family membership, $50 for a business, $500 for a life membership, and they add $4.50 per person covered for $2 million liability insurance covering all of your firearms recreational activities in Canada or the United States.

Incidentally, we've been selling that insurance to any member of any gun club anywhere in Canada for five years and we've had a grand total of exactly one claim against it for a car that was damaged when a marquee tent blew over at a shoot.

The Chair: It's too bad you don't have the breakdown of your membership. Do you have any idea of what the rough breakdown would be between business members and individual members?

Mr. Tomlinson: I would say 99.5% individual or family members.

The Chair: Do you know how many business members or corporate members you have?

Mr. Tomlinson: Very few. Most of those are small businesses. Some people take out a business membership in order to make the membership fee tax deductible.

The Chair: Do you get any of your financing from other than membership fees? Do you get it from donations or gifts?

Mr. Tomlinson: Yes, we get it from donations.

The Chair: From corporations or businesses?

Mr. Tomlinson: No. Occasionally we get something from a business. Over the years we've been in operation, I would say we have less than $2,000 from all businesses combined over the last five years.

The Chair: Do you get any donations or gifts from firearms manufacturers or from magazines that deal with hunting, shooting, gun collecting, of which there are quite a few? I have seen them in the -

Mr. Tomlinson: No.

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The Chair: Do you get any of your financing from outside Canada?

Mr. Tomlinson: No. Oh, I'm sorry, we do have a few members in England and the United States, probably a grand total of about 30.

[Translation]

Mrs. Venne: Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask a supplementary question.

[English]

The Chair: The question is, are you associated with the National Rifle Association in the United States.

Mr. Tomlinson: No, we're not.

Mr. Lee (Scarborough - Rouge River): Mr. Tomlinson, you're very knowledgeable about firearms, and I want to address the issue - I may not be using the technically correct language - of replica or imitation firearms and the possibility that some existing firearms owners may chose to disable their firearms. That may sound like heresy to some gun owners, but given the comprehensiveness of the existing legislation, I thought some might opt for that course, to disable their firearms, or some of them.

First, do you think there would be any significant number of existing owners who would take that course? Second, do you think the definitions currently existing and in the legislation are sufficient to deal with the cascade from the existing firearm to the disabled firearm to the replica to the imitation? I'm slightly confused as I read these and I wonder if you have a comment on that.

Mr. Tomlinson: You're not the only one who's confused. No one knows what is meant by the term ``replica firearm''. No one knows what is meant by the term ``imitation firearm''. That is because the legislation has no information on it.

With regard to the disabling of firearms, these firearms are technically known as DEWATs, deactivated war trophies. Primarily guns of that type are machine-guns that have been disabled. They are a source of great problem and controversy because a firearm is the whole firearm or the frame or receiver of a firearm within the definition of the word ``firearm'' in the law. Therefore, a deactivated firearm has a frame or receiver of a firearm as part of it.

Deactivated firearms can be deactivated in many, many different ways. Some ways are appropriate to one firearm and not to another. There is no definition of a deactivated firearm or of what is and is not acceptable in a deactivated firearm.

One of the curious parts of the legislation is that no one is designated to say what is correct and what is not correct or what transfers a firearm from one classification and what does not. The only person who can give an opinion that means anything is a judge in a court of criminal law, because no one is appointed to make that decision.

Therefore, we are in a situation now where we have court cases running all over Canada trying to decide the status of firearms. It's a highly confused area.

Mr. Lee: Do you think if we were to clarify it a bit better than it is now - I'm not a firearm owner so I don't know this. I'm looking for your judgment or the judgment of any of the other witnesses here - do you think any significant number of current firearm owners would take advantage of deactivating firearms provisions?

Mr. Tomlinson: Let me give you an illustration. The Department of Justice put out a video-tape explaining how to deactivate firearms. That is simply someone's opinion and it has no status in law.

The methods they describe for deactivating a firearm were flatly impossible. They were mechanically impossible and the person who described them on the video-tape obviously had never actually tried to do it, because it could not be done.

Additionally, they demonstrated the deactivation of an Uzi sub-machine-gun, and the method they chose was so faulty that I could have counterfeited it with very little trouble and be left with an Uzi sub-machine-gun that was in exact conformance externally with everything they had requested to be done and could be put back into operation in two minutes flat.

This is a very tangled area. If you want to get into that, for heaven's sake, get better technical advice than is available in the minister's office. It's a highly technical and difficult area.

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As for taking a firearm and deactivating it, it sounds nice, but I'm aware of cases where a warehouse burned down in the United States and it had a large quantity of Thompson sub-machine-guns in it, and they were burned to a point where they were just blackened relics. The fire had burned very hot, the metal had been de-heat treated, the guns were covered with rust from the water, and a great number of those guns were put back into service.

So it's very difficult to deactivate a firearm in such a way that it can't be put back into service. When it comes right down to it, you're going to have to look at it and say do we trust people with anything at all, because sporting firearms can be converted to fully automatic with relatively little trouble as well.

The Chair: I'd like to get a copy of that video. When was this video made? You say it was put out by the Department of Justice and distributed. Could you identify it a bit for us so we can find it?

Mr. Tomlinson: There was a series of videos, and they're full of major errors.

The Chair: What year, Mr. Tomlinson?

Mr. Tomlinson: Last year.

The Chair: By the federal Department of Justice?

Mr. Tomlinson: That's correct. They were distributed to the police and they gave the police a tremendous mine of information which in many cases was very, very wrong. For instance -

The Chair: All right. I've heard your testimony. I just wanted them identified so we could get a copy of the one on deactivation. Thank you.

Mr. Ramsay: I'd like to ask any of the witnesses here today.... The justice minister, of course, has used the horrifying statistic of one woman being shot to death every six days, and that is truly a horrific statistic. I wonder if any of the witnesses are aware of the fact that this statistic has been on a decline since 1975? It hit its lowest ebb during that period - I think it was around 1984 - when Canada was experiencing a very strong economic upward surge. I wonder if you are aware of those statistics? It brings to mind some of the testimony of Mr. Tomlinson that as you go into a depressed area the crime rate seems to increase.

Do you have any comments along those lines?

Ms Thom: I'd like to comment on the first part of your comments, and that is the statistics from 1975. These statistics show a decline of deaths by firearms on a per capita basis in Canada, and it does fluctuate far more with the business or economic cycle than it seems to with the effect of any legislation that's been brought in.

The first in my particular experience was the 1978-79 round of legislation. It was claimed at the time that that legislation had caused a decline in the rate of death by firearms, but in fact it's traceable back to 1975. That was before the legislation came in. It's very interesting how it does in fact follow, as does the suicide level, other trends rather than legislation.

Mr. Ramsay: Do you see anything in Bill C-68 that addresses the problem of domestic violence?

Ms Thom: No. I see an awful lot more in Bill C-17 that addresses domestic violence. In fact, it's quite extensive and quite in-depth in Bill C-17, and a lot of that was intended to do just exactly that. It was to take into consideration domestic violence as well as suicides and accidents.

Mr. Ramsay: If any of the other witnesses would like to make a comment on that...I have no other question unless it comes from a comment that the witnesses might make.

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The Chair: We are beyond the time set for the meeting. Ms Torsney has one final question - and not five minutes, I don't think.

Ms Torsney: I found that interesting, because of course your organization fought against Bill C-17. So I'm not sure why you would have been in favour of those provisions.

You've mentioned several times in some of your discussions, and certainly yet again, that there are problems related to poverty, related to television violence, and I wonder if you distribute information. Do you fund any of the various organizations that are trying to work, the National Anti-Poverty Organization or Patricia Herdman's group against violence on television? Do you distribute some of that stuff or provide them with some funding?

Mr. Tomlinson: What we do is work in the firearms area, because that is our mandate. We attempt to educate people in firearms safety and in personal safety. We do the best we can within our own limited area. We cannot afford to go out and deal with all the other problems in the world, because there are, as you say, other organizations that are already doing that.

Ms Torsney: You don't feel the need to work in concert. You are just a single special-interest group, then?

Mr. Tomlinson: We work in our own area as they work in their own area. We occasionally meet with other organizations and talk things over and do things to help one another, but primarily we are working in our own field, just as they are working in their own fields.

Ms Torsney: Actually, most of them address more than one single issue. But that's okay. Thank you.

Ms Thom: I would like to comment on that comment you directed to me. I was vice-chairman of the Canadian Advisory Council on Firearms and our advisory council had representatives on both sides of the issue. We did an awful lot of work in making recommendations to the minister, many of which she took on board, some of which she didn't.

As you are probably aware, I am a member of several different organizations in the country, and was even at that time, and many of the organizations I was a member of didn't agree with large parts of the legislation. That still didn't stop me from serving on that committee and helping to develop the recommendations that were given to the minister.

Ms Torsney: Again, Ms Thom, you are speaking on behalf of the National Firearms Association today and they in fact opposed Bill C-17.

Ms Thom: Yes. So did the SFC, of which I am a director.

The Chair: I want to thank you for appearing today and giving us your perspectives on the bill.

The meeting is now adjourned until 7:30 this evening, when we will hear from the Northwest Territories government.