Honourable senators, I am going to speak to Bill C-21. However, before I start, I want you to know that I have six police officers, one judge and two lawyers in my extended family, so I agree with the rule of law. Except for stealing chocolate milk from the creamery when I was a child, I have kept my nose pretty clean — but I have some problems with this bill. I think it’s a bill that targets rural Canadians.

And it is done by urban Canadians who don’t understand what rural Canadians do, or who they are.

My rifles were used for hunting an age ago. Though I no longer hunt, they are my keepsakes from years gone by. However, they are in the crosshairs of a new and earnest regulation. It is a regulation that hopes to mitigate crime, but it refuses, in many cases, to direct its focus on those who would commit them.

I want to believe that Bill C-21 means well, but it is a bill that is arrogant in assumption, and concocted by many people who have never owned a weapon, have never used one, have never scouted for moose or deer, have never set up a moose stand in the rain or have never waited on a rut mark until dark. These are extremely important abilities and valuable knowledge for any rural Canadian — White, First Nation, French or English.

To depart from my speech for a minute, if you are a rural Canadian and live in the Maritimes, or anywhere in rural Canada, you probably know about running a river, which means that you take a canoe down the river in early spring for fiddleheads. Then, you head down with your rod and fish trout. You wait for the salmon to come in June, and then the grilse follow the salmon. Next, you fish for the big trout later in the summer. By then, you are scouting for moose and setting up your moose stand. Then, in November, when it becomes cool, you are hunting deer. This tradition has gone on for as long as I have been alive, and for centuries before that. This is a tradition that urban Canadians don’t understand regarding regulations for guns.

I refuse to say that their intentions are malicious, but perhaps they’re ill-conceived. Many who will be exploited by this law — those who will be scrutinized — have done nothing to deserve such scrutiny. I would agree that it’s fine if it were to stop the great majority of crime and murder, but I am not convinced that it will. More regulation will seem to do so — and that is what this law not only proposes, but also desires. It fits the pattern of Canadian oversight that is often both rigid and ineffective. More regulation is the new and treasured opioid of the masses.

Why are people writing to me about these laws? Why are they so angry about this bill? It is because they are being lectured, once again, by a government that assumes and presupposes a superior moral nature against certain members of its own citizenry, and acts with uppity condescension toward so many who have done no wrong, suspecting them — without evidence — of things they would not do, while being unable to stop those who will continue to do wrong despite the regulations they continuously and tiresomely propose.

This bill targets only those it feels comfortable in targeting.

It has been a long time since we’ve enjoyed the gratitude of a government for our truckers and common men, as well as gratitude for ordinary Canadians being extraordinarily generous and decent human beings. It has been a very long time. In fact, we are told that we are not allowed to see ourselves as such until we agree to the propositions in many bills before us — to correct who we are to fulfill a mandate set up by governmental people who are often far more gullible than ourselves about whom Canadians actually are.

This bill is actually cowardly in whom it points the finger at and blames, and it still will not solve the problem of violence. I wish it did, but this bill will not stop the gangs. The law, in its own blind way, actually proposes to recruit them.

This new law solicits others and promotes the idea of a red flag snitching program. We are asking for a community of little snitchers. The net will be cast so wide that among the guilty too many innocents will be caught in the web.

Sooner or later, no one will be immune. All of us will be suspect if we raise the ire of the wrong person. This is where the new bill fuses concern and propaganda in order to make gun owners culpable without trial, done in secret by unknown accusers. You had to have belonged to the inner circle of a high school glee club at one time to think this was a good idea.

The right person’s guns may be confiscated. But, over time, many innocents will be marked. Yet, nothing like this will stop the trade of illegal handguns, the smuggling in and out of certain reserves and the import of weapons through clandestine means by biker gangs and others. This is where the majority of illegal guns used in crimes are acquired.

Will grandfathering a rifle that I bought when I was a boy of 18 years old, because I can carry eight in the clip, stop someone from illicitly purchasing a semi-automatic handgun on some desperate night in Scarborough, Ontario?

This bill makes thousands guilty by association to a new broad illegality. Our government becomes offended when people decry it, but people have every right to see a glaring absurdity in its regulatory framework that no oversight will correct.

I’m not saying that there should be no laws regarding this; I am not, for one moment, saying that. However, I am saying that these clauses are, for the most part, ineffective. I wish they weren’t, but they are. They point out how the government feels about Canadians who they can assume are guilty without trial. There is a bullying trait here — make no mistake.

The two most violent acts in our country in the last three years were done by a venal psychopath obsessed with police cars, who did not have much to do with hunting, as well as another sick, violent man with a bloody knife on a Saskatchewan reserve.

Our government has used the horrendous murders in Nova Scotia and in Uvalde, Texas, as an asset to support their position. In both cases, the unfortunate missteps of the law ordered to protect us played their part as well.

Honourable senators, Canada is very different from the U.S.

An RCMP officer bravely gave her life when she was ambushed because no one gave her the information she needed. She managed to draw her weapon; she managed to fire back. She did the only thing that was left for her to do.

I also believe that a person has the right to a firearm for protection as much as anyone else. If one lives an hour from the nearest RCMP detachment, a gun in the hand is better than a police officer on the phone if someone is intent on harming you or your family. The very human right to self-protection has become vulnerable by laws given to us by people who have security guards and panic buttons.

I am not dismissing the violence in Canada; I grew up with it. I know there has been much damage by violent men. But so much about this law is sophomoric housekeeping, impotent against rage and hate.

I believe that Plato was right when he said that good people do not need laws — the bad will never ever recognize them.

I will end with this: There was a moment in Uvalde, which I saw — I didn’t want to see it, but I happened to turn the television on. I saw a little girl seated at her desk — a child’s desk — with her pencil in its pencil groove, and with her hands folded neatly and blood on her dress. She was trying to explain to the man about to shoot her that this was wrong, that she wanted to see her mom and that this was a bad thing to do. Her soul was generous and alive, but his damnable soul was dead. I will never forget her — ever — seated at her elementary child’s desk, with the blood of one of her classmates on her dress. The police were in the hall with their guns, totally impotent and frozen.

I believe there is not a man or a woman I know — with whom I have hunted and fished — who would not have given their life to protect that little girl. I am sure that the same goes for every man and woman in this chamber — those who support this bill, those who do not. It is true that they would have shot him dead because they would have had to do so. They would have had no other choice in the matter. Like that RCMP officer drawing her gun in Nova Scotia, there was no other way.

That is the difference between good and evil when it comes to guns, and, unfortunately, when it comes to the misdirection of Bill C-21. For these reasons, I will be voting against it.

Thank you very much.