Honourable senators, I rise to speak to Bill C-71, An Act to amend certain Acts and Regulations in relation to firearms.

For the past 25 years, as a physician and an intensive care specialist, I have spent my professional life working to achieve healthy outcomes for Canadians, trying to understand and prevent illness and, frankly colleagues, trying to save lives. So I am disturbed that when presented with an opportunity to make a difference — a real difference — in legislation that saves lives, we may have lost all focus.

The data is strong and the evidence is clear: Firearms can and do cause serious negative consequences in the lives of individuals in our society. When the report came back from the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, it did not appear to me that the bill as amended properly addresses this reality.

I’ve spent a great deal of time since then trying to understand what the committee heard from witnesses, specifically around the issue of background checks, and why an integral, life-saving component of the legislation was removed. Because it is easy to see how the changes proposed in Bill C-71 could have a direct impact on the health care sector, I feel it is important to add to the record the thoughts and the lived experiences of those who worked tirelessly in this area.

The medical community sent a really strong message to the committee. In their daily professional lives, trauma surgeons, intensive care physicians, nurses, long-term care physicians, rehabilitative physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health support workers are all presented with serious firearm injuries. They face those threatening suicide, those opposed to intimate partner violence, victims of parental abuse or assault and those afflicted by accidental injury. Yet, senators, it is as if their voices were not heard. Today I feel I must represent their voices.

Linda Salis, from the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, represented hundreds of thousands of nurses and told the committee that, in 2016, for the third consecutive year, there was an increase in both the number and the rate of firearm-related homicides in Canada. There were 223 firearm-related homicides reported, 44 more than the previous year. Firearms have, in fact, become the most common method of homicide.

Dr. Natasha Saunders from the Canadian Pediatric Society, representing thousands of pediatricians, told the committee that in Ontario, during the five-year study of unintentional and assault-related injuries, 1,777 children and youth were injured or killed by a firearm, which works out to about an average of 355 children per year, or one per day.

Dr. Alan Drummond from the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, again representing thousands of doctors, told the committee that Canada has one of the highest suicide rates by firearms in the developed world, about 500 per year. He informed the committee of the strong and robust scientific evidence that a gun in the home is associated with a high risk of suicide and that for every 10 per cent decline in gun ownership, firearm suicide rates dropped by 4.2 per cent. Overall, suicide rates dropped by 2.5 per cent.

He concluded that any legislation aimed at reducing access to firearms, particularly for those at risk, can reasonably be expected to reduce the number of suicides.

Finally, Dr. Ahmed from the Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns, told the committee that just days before her testimony she had to tell a woman that her 25-year-old daughter was dead, shot by her common-law partner. She went on to speak to the committee about the Canadian femicide report, a report that analyzed data on 148 women murdered in Canada last year. It is a study that highlights three key things: women are most often killed by an intimate partner; Indigenous women are drastically overrepresented in deaths; and women are most commonly murdered with firearms.

Colleagues, before I go on, I should point out that some of these physicians speak at the risk of personal attacks and/or danger. Dr. Ahmed has been subjected to a targeted campaign by the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights. In an attempt to scare her into silence, the group called on its members to submit false complaints against her to her regulator, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. After her testimony at committee, a spokesperson for the college shared with us and confirmed that 70 fake complaints were received.

Senators, the research cited by Dr. Ahmed and by those other witnesses at committee was gut-wrenching, eye-opening, and based on the best available medical and scientific evidence — scientific evidence which has demonstrated over and over again that more stringent gun laws, more scrutiny of licence holders, greater restrictions on firearm accessibility and availability save lives and prevent injuries. They lower homicide rates, reduce suicide rates and prevent firearm-related injuries.

So I was disappointed to see that the committee reported and didn’t reflect this testimony. That is why I stand before you today, to recount these important facts for you, the senators in this chamber.

When the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters appeared at committee, they stated that the single most important question we must ask ourselves is: Will there be a return on investment required to implement the proposed changes in Bill C-71?

A return on investment? I am not sure that that is the most important question to ask, but it does provide us with an opportunity to explore the costly impact that firearm-related violent crimes have on our health care system.

In 2012, the Department of Justice reported in the Economic Impact of Firearm-related Crime in Canada 2008 that for victims of firearm injury the average cost of hospitalization was about $46,000 per female and about $20,000 per male. These numbers do not take into consideration productivity losses like wages, school days missed, lost future income or personal costs for legal and counselling services. More importantly, they do not take into account the intangible costs of firearm injuries — costs such as physical and emotional pain experienced by victims, the suffering of families, loved ones and communities and, most importantly, the loss of life.

When asked whether the return on investment is worth implementing the proposed changes, for all those reasons, senators, my answer is an unequivocal yes.

This legislation is supported by organizations representing health care workers, police officers, and women’s associations. It is supported by scientific research, medical evidence, victims of gun violence and, most importantly, the Canadian public. That is why I voted against the committee’s report on Bill C-71, and that is why I will be voting in support of this bill at third reading.

On a point of order.

We can have only one senator standing at a time.

Senator McPhedran, Senator Martin is rising on a point of order.

Senator, you made reference to “gun owners” and “gun senators.” I’m not sure about the appropriateness in terms of how you’re using that phrase. I wanted clarification. I feel that the way the phrase is being used sounds a bit inflammatory. That’s the point of order.

It is not exactly, Senator Martin, a point of order. However, now that you have raised it, maybe Senator McPhedran can take a second and explain it.

No.

Senator McPhedran, I think Senator Martin is saying that the phrase “gun senators” is a bit of an awkward description. Perhaps a rephrasing to “senators who oppose the gun legislation” might be more appropriate. I think that would solve the problem. Would it not, Senator Martin?

Senator McPhedran, I apologize for interrupting you. It is now six o’clock and pursuant to rule 3-3(1), I am required to leave the chair unless it is agreed that we not see the clock.

Is it agreed, honourable senators?

Senator McPhedran.

I’m sorry to interrupt you again, Senator, but your time has expired, including the extra time you’ve been allotted for the interruption. Are you asking for five more minutes?

Is leave granted, honourable senators?

No.

I’m sorry, I hear a no, Senator McPhedran.

On debate, Senator Sinclair.

Honourable senators, I also rise to speak to this bill, particularly, though, from the perspective of the impact that it might have and what it might do with regard to Indigenous people and Indigenous rights.

I want to mention, first of all, that it’s interesting when one studies the history of gun control in Canada that the first legislation regarding gun control in this country was passed in 1886. At the time, it banned the possession of firearms in Western Canada by anybody who didn’t have a permit from the Lieutenant-Governor of the province.

There was, of course, a hue and cry from the settler population that they needed their guns to survive. They were concerned about Indian uprisings. The government decided permits would only be given to the settler population and permits were denied thereafter to Indigenous people. The first gun control laws that we see in Canada were those applied against Indigenous people.

Firearms played significant roles in the lives of Indigenous people since their introduction going back to the 15th and 16th centuries in their lives as traders with Europeans. They changed the way Indigenous people hunted for sustenance and obtained animals for use in traditional ceremonies and in trade. They seriously impacted the safety and crime rate within Indigenous communities.

Indigenous people are disproportionately represented within the statistics relating to suicide, violence, crime and homicide, much of it gun related. Colonization and discriminatory laws designed to disrupt and prevent Indigenous peoples from transmitting cultural values and identity from one generation to the next, along with those who created communities with social, economic, emotional and psychological damage, have been the impact that the history of laws in Canada have had.

We see that, in fact, represented in the high rates of incarceration and of child apprehension and the mental and medical health problems that Indigenous people face, as well as in the suicide rates. Indigenous peoples in Canada experience disproportionately higher rates of suicide and suicidal ideation in comparison with their non-Indigenous counterparts. This issue was brought to light in a landmark special report published by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1995, which documented that rates of suicide among Indigenous peoples had dramatically increased just over the decade prior to the issuance of the report.

At the time of the writing of that report, the commission estimated that the national rate of suicide among Indigenous people was three times higher than general public or non-Indigenous Canadians, and the rate of suicide among Indigenous youth was five to six times higher than non-Indigenous youth.

Sadly, research indicates that those figures have remained unchanged and, in fact, in some parts of country have increased significantly over the past three decades.

Firearms suicide rates are highest among Indigenous people; however, the percentage of suicides themselves involving a firearm among Indigenous peoples, as opposed to other methods of suicide, is lower. People choose other methods of ending their lives than simply shooting themselves, it would appear. Only two interventions have been empirically demonstrated to be effective in decreasing suicide mortality: health treatment that includes traditional elders and traditional healing methods, and the restriction of the lethal means of suicide.

Firearms are responsible for somewhere between 21 and 31 per cent of intimate partner homicides and rifles and shotguns, the common firearms in Western Canada and, in particular, in Indigenous communities, are used in 62 per cent of all spousal homicides in First Nations territories.

One cannot contest that keeping a gun in the home is a risk for spousal homicide. The risk of death to a victim of intimate partner violence is significantly higher when there is access to a firearm, particularly when one is drinking or partaking in the use of drugs.

A firearm in the home increases a woman’s risk of death fivefold in Indigenous communities and is such an important risk factor that a partner’s access to firearms is a question in the well-validated danger assessment for risk of death from partner violence.

Firearms are not only used for homicide and intimate partner violence. Gun owners enrolled in a Massachusetts batterers intervention program described intimidating their partners by threatening to shoot them, to shoot a pet or to shoot someone their partner loved, or while cleaning, holding or loading a gun during an argument, or even firing the gun during the course of an argument.

In the 1980s, gun control became the focus of the efforts of Indigenous communities. In one community in northern Manitoba, the Pukatawagan First Nation, now called the Mathias Colomb Band, was known as the Dodge City of the north. It had the highest per capita homicide rate involving rifles in North America. It had 30 deaths in the course of two years, half of them classified as murders.

Other communities facing critical levels of violence and homicide with firearms are Shamattawa and Gods Lake Narrows. While I was Chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in Manitoba, we studied the critical situation of those two communities and what they were facing, and the other communities as well and how they dealt with firearm-related violence and crime. Many broke the law. The level of despair in the community was palpable among young people in particular. Many broke the law hoping simply to grab a jail term just to escape from the dangers, the isolation, the boredom and the sense of hopelessness they felt in the communities where they lived.

The community of Pukatawagan, under the leadership of the chief at the time, wanted to implement community-based solutions to deal with this critical issue. Drawing upon traditional practices in involving the women elders of their community, it established a justice committee through band council resolutions. They implemented laws requiring that firearms had to be stored in the band office when they were not in use. The cost of implementing such a measure was negligible. Gun-related violence and homicide dropped significantly in Pukatawagan as a result of that.

Seeing this turnaround, leaders from other northern communities turned to Pukatawagan for help. Some of them launched similar initiatives. The RCMP hired an independent researcher to find out why the practice had not taken off across the province. Their report, entitled Safe Storage in Aboriginal Communities: Exploratory Review of Central Firearm Storage Programs in Manitoba, highlighted that such community-based initiatives contributed to a more successful central firearm storage program because it had a formal administrative process.

If a person needed their firearm for hunting, all they had to do was show their ID and sign it out. Ninety-one per cent of firearm owners used the band storage registry and believed that the system benefited the community in terms of reduction of firearms offences, reduction of accidents and increased safety of children. Complaints about the programs were very rare. The programs were carefully overseen by elders councils who enforced their will in that area upon all of the gun owners in the community.

The success of these programs is based on four main elements, which are the essence of community will to use the program, the level of public awareness of it, the level of public confidence in it, and the relative convenience of the program. This is evidence that Indigenous people must be part of community-based solutions to address firearm violence.

I want to acknowledge and commend Senator Pratte for his mobilizing efforts to ensure that this bill identified and addressed the unique needs, issues, concerns and rights of Indigenous peoples. Despite government oversight to include Indigenous people in the consultation process during the development of this legislation, as noted by those who came to testify during the committee stage, the consultation process they did not feel was complete or adequate. Nonetheless, Senator Pratte worked with Indigenous stakeholder groups, held Indigenous-specific briefings with senators and reached out to the Indigenous senators in an effort to understand and resolve any unforeseen impacts this bill may have on Indigenous peoples.

All Canadians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, must meet prescribed criteria for the safe handling and use of firearms and demonstrate knowledge of the laws relating to firearms.

While the Firearms Act and its regulations apply to everyone, some sections of the act and licensing regulations, such as the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada Adaptations Regulations, have been adapted for Indigenous peoples to ensure that the application of the firearms laws respect the traditional lifestyles and Aboriginal treaty rights as recognized and affirmed by section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982.

There are eight historical treaties in Western Canada. They provide for certain amounts of ammunition, for example, to be provided on an ongoing and annual basis to the members of those treaty territories. In the modern day context, treaty ammunition is often distributed in the form of currency and treaty benefits, and treaty beneficiaries require a valid firearms licence to purchase ammunition from a retailer.

I am satisfied, however, that the non-derogation clause relied upon in this bill is sufficient in that it will not affect or impact Aboriginal and treaty rights. It is consistent with the non‑derogation clause in Bill C-68, sponsored by Senator Christmas, and we both agree that Aboriginal treaty rights will not be impacted. This legislation, in its overall impact upon Indigenous communities, will allow Indigenous communities to continue to exercise their jurisdiction safely and with a view to compliance with the overall national objectives of this law.

Therefore, I have no hesitation in supporting this bill and I encourage my colleagues to do so as well.

Honourable senators, I do not own a gun. I support legal gun owners in my province and in Canada, and I’m proud to say that I do not support this legislation.

We also live in the sixth safest country in the world. We have a very low percentage of murders in this country. Most murders are committed not by firearms but by stabbing and other means. Suicides are not populated only by guns but by hanging and poison and other methods. Women don’t shoot themselves with guns when they commit suicide; they use poison and they hang themselves, unfortunately. These are questions of mental illness and have nothing to do with guns.

I am sure all senators are aware this legislation was thoroughly studied in the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, which after hearing from a broad cross-section of witnesses, proposed certain amendments at committee to address some of the concerns raised by those witnesses.

Some of these amendments were adopted and others were not. However, what was common in the discussion on all of the amendments was that the debate was thorough. Considerable witness testimony contributed to that debate, and the discussion among senators was vigorous.

It is virtually unprecedented in these circumstances that this testimony and the report of the Senate committee should be summarily rejected and that the amendments made by the committee should be summarily dismissed. It just happens to be that the proposal from Senator Pratte to reject all the amendments made at committee happens to coincide with the position of the government, that its legislation must be entirely accepted, whether flaws identified by witnesses in the Senate committee are addressed or not.

Given that this is the government’s position, it is incumbent upon the opposition to ensure that amendments proposed at committee are given a full hearing in the Senate Chamber.

One such amendment concerns the question of whether the screening of a firearms licence application should be focused on the five-year period immediately preceding an individual’s new licence application or renewal, or whether the screening in general terms should always apply to an individual’s entire life history.

Current legislation requires that the background of an individual applying for a new firearms licence or renewing the existing firearm be focused on the five years previous to a firearms licence application being made. The government has proposed that this screening should be expanded to cover an entire life history.

I have not heard a particularly strong rationale for that from the government. What concerns me is that the resources simply do not exist to consistently apply that sort of lifetime review. This means that inevitably, lifetime reviews will be random. There is a risk that it will not be case-specific but instead carry a high risk of being haphazardly applied.

That is what is being proposed in Bill C-71. In that context, it is useful to consider how the current firearms screening system actually functions. What we find is that the lifetime review of licence applications is already permitted under the current system. Under the current background check system, subsection 5(1) of the Firearms Act already states that:

A person is not eligible to hold a licence if it is desirable, in the interests of the safety of that or any other person, that the person not possess a firearm . . . .

To verify that, background checks already consider a person’s entire criminal history beyond five years, plus mental health, addiction and domestic violence records.

The reality is that investigations can also go into a person’s history if there is a reason to do so. In this context, we have to consider what we are gaining by more routinely requiring lifetime background checks in legislation. Witness testimony on this bill has referenced the impact that this provision could have on Canada’s more vulnerable communities.

I was not a party at the Senate committee, but when the House of Commons reviewed Bill C-71, Heather Bear, Vice-Chief, Saskatchewan Region, Assembly of First Nations, asked:

Obviously we need to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous criminals and people with serious mental illnesses, but why punish a person who made a mistake decades ago?

The majority of members on our National Security and Defence Committee agreed with that perspective, as well as what they heard from other witnesses, and the committee amended the bill to have background checks focus on the five years immediately preceding a firearms licensing application or renewal.

In addition to using resources more effectively, that amendment would have ensured that mistakes a person made decades ago should not be held against that same person decades later.

Senators should be aware that this amendment to focus licence reviews on the five years previous still left all the other provisions related to enhanced background checks intact. Therefore, an individual would continue to be screened for the following: First, whether the person has been convicted of an offence in the commission of which violence against another person was used, threatened or attempted; a firearm-, weapon- or ammunition-related offence against the Firearms Act or Part III of the Criminal Code; criminal harassment, drug trafficking or possession for the purpose of trafficking.

In addition to these criminal checks, individuals are also screened as to whether a person has been treated for a mental illness, whether in a hospital, mental institute, psychiatric clinic or otherwise, and whether the person was confined to such a hospital, institute or clinic that was associated with violence or threatened or attempted violence on the part of the person against any person; and (b) whether that person has a history of behaviour that includes violence or threatened or attempted violence on the part of the person against any other person.

This type of focused screening is justifiable and reasonable. When required, the screening can cover a person’s life history. Such screening is also manageable within the resources that are allocated to the Canadian Firearms Program.

What I fear will happen if we move to lifetime screening is that such reviews will, at best, be random. The resources will not be available to support that approach The system risks being made more inefficient, with longer and unnecessary wait times being created through cascading delays.

This will not enhance public support for reasonable gun controls, which I believe most of us support. I propose that focused five-year background checks be retained in the legislation.