Bill C-21--Oh, What a Mess!

A Conservative M. P. supplied me with a copy of its proposed "new" firearms control law. It is a grave disappointment, but I was expecting that; I know how Ottawa works. The Ministers tell their top bureaucrats to draft new laws, and what effects he wants the new laws to have. The bureaucrats then draft the new laws for Parliament to pass--laws that will have the effects the bureaucrats want them to have. Their draft Bill C-21 is scheduled to become law this fall.

In this case, the Conservative Ministers wanted new laws that would keep the firearms community in solid support of the Conservative Party--without alienating anti-gun soccer moms. The bureaucrats wanted new laws that would increase the number of their employees, the power of top bureaucrats, and the funding of their bureaucracy. You can judge the results:

To transfer a .22 single-shot Cooey rifle under the new Firearms Act section 23, "A person may transfer a firearm if, at the time of the transfer...the transferor [a dealer or an individual] has no reason to believe that the transferee is not authorized to acquire and possess that kind of firearm."

The seller just has to see the buyer's firearms licence, right? Wrong!

The new Section 23 goes on to say, "In the case of a transfer to an individual [by a dealer or another individual], the transferor informs a chief firearms officer and ­obtains the authorization of the chief firearms officer for the transfer...and...the prescribed conditions are met."


So the seller has to ask the CFO for his permission to actually transfer the rifle to the buyer who has a licence. The purpose of the licence, we were told, was to identify a person as being a person who could acquire and possess a rifle. But after spending $1 billion in tax dollars on their flawed licencing scheme, the bureaucrats who drafted this are now telling us that the licence is meaningless. A licence cannot and does not identify any person as being qualified to buy any firearm.

Section 27 then creates new work for the bureaucracy. It says, "On being informed of a proposed transfer of a firearm under section 23, a chief firearms officer shall verify whether the transferee holds a licence [that requires a licence record check], whether the transferee is still eligible to hold that licence [that requires a criminal record check, and a complete check, including a mental health check, to make sure that the transferee has not fallen into ineligibility under FA s. 5(2)(a)(I), (a)(ii), (a)(iii), (b), or (c) in the interval since he was issued his firearms licence], and whether the licence authorizes the transferee to acquire that kind of a firearm...(so that the CFO can) decide whether to approve the transfer...

That hands a lot of unjustifiable power over to the CFO. The buyer has already done everything required to satisfy all that, just to get his licence. He or she has paid all the required fees for training and the licence itself. Now--just to let him buy a single-shot .22 Cooey--the bureaucracy is going to assume that the licence he already has is meaningless. It is going reinvestigate the buyer to find out if he or she is qualified to have the licence the bureaucracy has already issued!

That makes no sense at all! If the law is going to require that, the licence should be totally scrapped as being a completely meaningless document that is totally ignored.

There is no requirement in this law for the CFO to notify either the transferor or the transferee of his decision. There is no time constraint on the CFO. That is a recipe for long delays, and for inability to determine the cause of a delay in a transfer decision. I have seen far too much of this sort of bad systems design to believe this badly-designed change can possibly work well!

ANALYSIS and RED WARNING:

Transferring an ordinary rifle or shotgun by this very complex method will create very real problems. Obviously, the CFO has to do a lot before he can "authorize" such a transfer. What he "shall" do requires complex analysis of all government records pertaining to the buyer. The presence or absence of a licence is clearly not enough for the CFO to be able to "verify" the things he is required to "verify." Verify is a very powerful word, requiring hard work and solid proof to satisfy the "verify" requirement.

If Bill C-21 becomes law in its present form, the entire licence program will become meaningless and should be discarded once C-21 comes into force. The additional workload will require more staff in the office of each CFO.

Bill C-21 isn't going to save any of our tax dollars. It will make operating the gun control system even more expensive.

The bureaucrats who drafted the changes to FA s. 23 and 27 have produced a nightmare. For example, is the "notification" of the CFO to be verbal or in writing? Is the "authorization" by the CFO to be verbal or in writing? If either is allowed to be verbal, what will happen in a court case involving a transfer that may not have been done to the standard, "the prescribed conditions are met" [FA s. 27(a)(iii)]? The "prescribed conditions" are all set by Order in Council. There are already so many of them, plus so many changes to the older ones made by other Orders in Council, that no one in Canada fully understands what "conditions" are "prescribed." This is just one more step in making firearms ownership more expensive, more complicated, and riskier.

This bill, if adopted, leads inevitably into a system in which all the "notification" and "authorization" is done in writing. That must be done to provide the necessary records. Instead of a simple transfer of registration done at one national (RCMP) central processing site, transfers of ordinary rifles and shotguns will be done at each CFO's office. The processes will differ from CFO to CFO. There will be a record of the location of every rifle and shotgun in Canada--and how does that differ from registration?

There will be confusion when a rifle or shotgun is transferred from the jurisdiction of one CFO's office to the jurisdiction of another CFO's office. The confusion will probably be worse than a registration transfer, which does not require so much CFO activity. The transfer of a "restricted" or "prohibited" firearm requires all this, plus a great deal of activity in the Registrar's office. The cost of transferring such a firearm will be approximately double the cost of transferring a non-restricted ordinary rifle or shotgun. The cost of transferring an ordinary rifle or shotgun will be higher than the current cost. And this is supposed to save money? Pull the other leg!

The top bureaucrats who drafted Bill C-21 were not trying to please their Minister or the public. They were going all out to increase the number of their employees, their budget in tax dollars, and their own personal power over members of the firearms community. That is unacceptable.

If the new laws (Bill C-21, scheduled to be passed this fall) are unacceptable to you, join the National Firearms Association. The NFA fights for every member of the firearms community.