This week’s report is about Bill C-21: “An Act to amend certain Acts and to make certain consequential amendments (firearms)”.

For those with little interest in Canada’s firearm laws this report may not be of concern.

For others it has become a bill of significant interest.

For some background, in May of last year Prime Minister Trudeau announced that “1,500 types of 'assault-style' firearms” were being banned and that a “buy back” plan was going to be introduced so owners of these newly restricted rifles would be able to “sell” them to the government at a yet to be determined rate.

At the time, this announcement from the Prime Minister led to some confusion as military assault rifles in Canada have long been illegal.

Further the term “assault style” has no legal definition within the Canada Firearms Act.

What is an “assault style weapon”?

The term “assault style” is a recently deployed piece of political rhetoric used to characterize eleven different types of semi-automatic rifles.

These can be ordered in up to 1,500 different variations from various manufacturers.

Why did the Prime Minister decide to ban these particular semi-automatic rifles?

In his words: 

"These weapons were designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time," Trudeau said. "There is no use and no place for such weapons in Canada."

Bill C-21 is the legislation that further addresses these “assault style” rifles and proposes other firearms related measures as well.

What is most surprising about this bill is, contrary to commonly expressed opinion, it does not actually remove “assault style” weapons from within Canada.

Legal owners of these weapons can continue to own them however with new restrictions that include a ban on permitted use (none), no import, no further acquisition, no sale and no bequeathal.

Critics have questioned why, if the PM believes that there is “no place for such weapons in Canada.", is Bill C-21 proposing to allow these weapons to remain in Canada?

Another measure proposed in Bill C-21 is a measure that will allow municipalities to prohibit legal hand guns from being stored or transported anywhere within a municipality if a by-law to that effect is passed.

Critics of this by-law, including one local Mayor, have pointed out this is a form of downloading federal responsibilities onto municipalities.

From my own perspective, considering guns are illegally smuggled across the Canada/United States border, it is unclear why PM Trudeau believes that criminals with illegal firearms would view a municipal border any differently.

As far as illegal gun smuggling, Bill C-21 is largely silent as most of the measures are proposed against legal gun owners with one exception.

Bill C-21 proposed to extend the maximum term of imprisonment from 10 years to 14 years for those convicted of illegally smuggling guns into Canada.

My concern with this measure is that gun smuggling charges often occur well after the fact.

The need to be proactive and stop illegal guns from entering Canada should be a priority, not once again targeting legal gun owners. 

While there are other measures in this bill, most building on already existing laws and regulations, this is a summary of the areas I have heard the majority of concern around.

My question this week:

Do you believe Bill C-21 will help stop illegal gun crime in Canada? 

I can be reached at Dan.Albas@parl.gc.ca or call toll free 1-800-665-8711. 

It was seven years ago that I had an opportunity to hand deliver a petition from over 15,000 concerned citizens of the Okanagan (15,258 to be exact) to former Conservative Justice Minister Steven Blaney opposing the parole release of Mr. David Ennis.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar, David Ennis (formerly David Shearing), is the mass murderer who brutally took the lives of the West Kelowna residing Johnson and Bentley family of 6, who were on a camping trip in August of 1982. 

While this horrific and tragic act took place close to 40 years ago, Mr. Ennis may be again coming before the parole board in July of this year.

This painful event once again haunts the family and friends of the victims. 

One of these family friends is West Kelowna resident Tammy Arishenkoff, who was a classmate of the Johnson girls.

Over the past decades, whenever Mr. Ennis has been before the parole board, Tammy has dutifully collected a petition from the thousands of citizens opposed to the release of David Ennis.

I would like to sincerely thank Tammy Arishenkoff for her efforts in this regard and also to recognize the many citizens who have participated in this petition process.

We must always remember the victims in acts of deplorable and senseless violence.

With the potential parole board hearing for Mr. Ennis in July of this year, Tammy Arishenkoff is once again leading the petition charge to gather together citizens opposed to the parole release of David Ennis.

The petition is located here:
https://www.change.org/p/parole-board-of-canada-keep-david-ennis-aka-david-shearing-convicted-mass-murderer-behind-bars-deny-parole?redirect=false

My question this week:

Will you sign this petition?

I can be reached at Dan.Albas@parl.gc.ca or toll free 1-800-665-8711. 

​One interesting aspect about a minority government is the ability for the opposition parties to out vote the government in parliamentary committees. 

In Ottawa, we are seeing many documents being released that relate to how the Trudeau Liberal government has been responding to the pandemic.

These documents were released because the opposition party members on the Parliamentary Health Committee were able to pass a motion that these documents would be made public, against the wishes of the Liberal members of the committee, who wanted to keep them secret.

This week we learned more. 

One of these released documents, an email, was quite alarming.

A section of this email read:

“The rationale here is to present a new metric to distract somewhat from unattractive delivery numbers being reported. Hajdu goes into QP with these numbers, updated weekly, so we’re in safe territory:”

This email related to challenges the federal Government was encountering at the time with the procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE). 

What's alarming is that knowing that media reports were not flattering, the response of the Liberal Government was to deliberately manipulate the data to create a distraction.

This Liberal plan involved sending manipulated numbers with the Health Minister into Question Period.

Global News has also obtained documents that they reported as:

“Senior political staffers from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office and the office of another federal Liberal cabinet minister privately discussed how to withhold information from Canadians about the government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis last June, newly released emails show.”

From my perspective this is part of a reoccurring pattern.

Despite this Prime Minister promising to be “open by default”, we instead see a culture of secrecy within his government.

As the Opposition, it is our responsibility to hold the government accountable.

This is a fundamental part of democracy.

Canadians deserve to know how their money is being spent and what actions the federal government is undertaking on their behalf. 

Even more alarming is a Liberal Government majority would have withheld this information and Canadians would be in the dark on what was really going on, aside from the Prime Ministers official announcements.

My question this week:

How important is it to you that government truly is “Open by default” with its citizens?

I can be reached at Dan.Albas@parl.gc.ca or call toll free 1-800-665-8711. 

Here in Canada we have witnessed firsthand the challenges of COVID vaccine administration due to lack of procurement supply from the Trudeau Liberal government.

To put this in perspective, Washington State between January 25-29th went from having administered over 500,000 doses of COVID vaccine to 616,589 doses.

That is an increase of 116,589 doses in a matter of days.

Here in B.C., over the same time frame, we went from having administered 119,850 doses up 129,241 doses. 

This is an increase of just 9,391 doses by comparison.

This is by no means a criticism of the Provincial Health Officer or any of the regional health authorities.

Simply put, provinces cannot vaccinate citizens without sufficient vaccine supply.

For these reasons Canada has now fallen to 15th place in terms of total doses of vaccine administered per country.  

Canada drops even further behind if factoring in the total number of vaccination doses administered per 100 people in the population.

With that being said, for developing and third world countries, this situation is far more dire. 

For this reason, the World Health Organization (WHO) partnered with GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance) to pool funds from wealthy countries to provide COVID vaccine for poor and developing countries. 

This partnership is called the COVAX program.

In May of 2020, the Prime Minister announced a $600 million contribution to this global effort.

Of this $600 million, $475 million will be spent in direct contributions and the $125 million remainder to the International Finance Facility for Immunization (IFFI).

This week we learned that the Trudeau Liberal Government has made the decision to access vaccines from the COVAX program that is intended to help poor and developing countries.

Canada is the only G-7 country to do this.

This decision has raised serious concern.

The Globe and Mail has reported that the organization “Doctors Without Borders” has warned there is a danger that Canada’s use of COVAX could contribute to global health inequities. 

The vaccine in question is 1.9 million doses of the, yet to be approved in Canada, AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine.

My question this week:

Do you agree with the Trudeau Liberal Government to access vaccine from the COVAX program?

​I can be reached at Dan.Albas@parl.gc.ca or call toll free 1-800-665-8711.