The Liberals' latest gun control legislation has passed the House of Commons. Now what comes next for the over 2 million law-abiding, business-minded Canadian gun owners? My special guest, Tony Bernardo, from the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, joins me to talk about it.
00:00:48.960It repeals Stephen Harper's easing of restrictions on authorizations to transport for restricted firearms.
00:00:56.680It randomly reclassifies popular and very expensive Canadian rifles from non-restricted to completely prohibited.
00:01:06.060Apropos of nothing, the law is absurd and draconian and unnecessary and it focuses government and police resources at one of the most law-abiding and peaceful segments of the whole Canadian population.
00:01:22.160Canada's so-called Minister of Gangs and Borders, Bill Blair.
00:01:25.360Remember him? He's the former Toronto police chief who set in motion the conditions that have led to the eruption of gun violence in Toronto over the past three years?
00:01:34.560Well, he has his sights set now on a full handgun ban across the country.
00:01:39.760Bill Blair is currently heading consultations that are supposed to be wrapped up by the end of 2018.
00:01:46.340These liberal gun-grabbing policies are proceeding at a breakneck pace.
00:01:52.660So joining me on my show tonight is one of Canada's greatest advocates for Canadian firearms owners.
00:01:59.160He fights for your rights when you are too busy to.
00:02:02.960And he keeps tabs on the people who've got their eyes on your guns.
00:02:07.480My special guest tonight is a good friend of the show, Tony Bernardo from the Canadian Shooting Sports Association.
00:02:14.340Hey Tony, thanks so much for joining me.
00:02:34.540I wanted to have you on because you are such a strong advocate for Canadian gun owners.
00:02:39.300And we just saw the Liberals' latest gun control legislation, Bill C-71, amble its way through the House of Commons.
00:02:48.520And I think this is terrible, terrible news for Canadian gun owners.
00:03:02.160And I think the worst thing in the whole bill is the basic premise of it, that they appear to be doing something by piling regulation on top of people who are not breaking the law in the first place.
00:03:18.660Just using 2 million Canadians, 2.1 million Canadians that own firearms, as political footballs, just so they can try to prove something to their base.
00:03:30.200That's just so disingenuous, it makes me ill.
00:03:34.060You know, and there's, I mean, it's not even a good bill if you were a gun grabber.
00:03:39.240Like, the bill is all around bad because it's taking guns, in particular the CZ858 and the Swiss Arms Green Carbine, it's taking guns that were not required to be registered and moving them directly over into prohibited with no studies or anything being done on these guns.
00:03:58.820We don't like how easy and cheaply they are to customise to be a little more fun.
00:04:03.000But if you're a gun grabber, this is a very ineffective way to get those two particular guns out of the hands of people because they weren't registered.
00:04:13.440So you don't know who has them, you don't know where they are.
00:04:15.880Right, and of course the real end result of this will be to drive those firearms underground because people legally own them, they legally acquired them.
00:04:27.080And they just look at this as, hey, look, I'm not breaking the law, I'm not doing anything bad with this, and, you know, like, what business is it of the RCMPs?
00:04:37.820And that's really what it comes down to.
00:04:40.100All they're doing is taking ordinary Canadians and just setting them up to be victims again.
00:04:47.820Well, and, you know, our friends over at the Gun Blog, they did a very comprehensive, but as you and I were talking earlier, pretty conservative study about what the confiscation or rendering semi-automatics and handguns illegal in Canada would do to the wealth of Canadian gun owners.
00:05:09.820Their numbers say it would basically liquidate about $2 billion in assets, but like you, I think it's far greater.
00:05:21.680Now, you know, the thing is, is that if they take the guns to effectively solve whatever problem they think they have, they're going to have to pay compensation for those firearms.
00:05:34.720And not just the firearms, the magazines, the ammunition, the reloading equipment, all the things that go along with making those firearms perk.
00:05:44.440This is precedent that's been established in Britain and in Australia when they did their gun seizures.
00:05:51.520Also, in Canadian common law, anytime the government's taken the firearms, they pay compensation for them.
00:05:57.180So, if they're going to take them, they're going to pay out about $4 billion of Canadian tax money to people who are not committing crimes anyway.
00:06:08.480If they don't take them, how can they profess to say they solve their problem, since they state their problem is that criminals are getting them by stealing them from Canadian gun owners?
00:06:21.700Well, they're not going to take the guns out of the hands of the Canadian gun owners, so how the hell does that solve their problem?
00:06:27.240Yeah, isn't that true? Now, on Bill C-71, of course, I was looking through some of the notes, and Justin Trudeau did not vote.
00:06:37.060He was not in the House of Commons, but he's not a particularly hardworking individual, and that doesn't really surprise me anyway, that he wasn't at work that day.
00:06:45.340But there was somebody missing from that vote that I think should have been there.
00:06:57.680Yes, Mr. Bernier wasn't there, and he's trying to set himself apart, and I'm giving Mr. Bernier, you know, as much benefit of the doubt that I can.
00:07:07.740He courted gun owners when he was running for the leader of the Conservative Party.
00:07:11.940He promised us that he would make Canada much more freer for us, and would fight for us, and he wasn't in the House of Commons to vote against Bill C-71.
00:07:22.260And I think, even if it's a losing proposition, he should have been there to stand on principle.
00:07:27.340Well, totally. I mean, look, when the thing went forward in the House of Commons, everybody knew what the foregone conclusion was.
00:07:33.860The Liberals have a huge majority that they can use.
00:07:36.500But Andrew Scheer was in the House, and he was there supporting the firearms owners of Canada.
00:07:42.760You know, I have no doubt that Mr. Bernier's heart would be in this, but that's not enough.
00:07:51.380You know, and quite frankly, the divisive politics that he's playing will only guarantee that we get another four years of Justin Trudeau.
00:08:00.460You know, I think that gun owners in Canada have, over the last 25 or 30 years, become politically smart enough to recognize that splitting the right is a suicide record here.
00:08:17.460Let's keep our eggs in one basket and make sure that we get the Liberals out of power.
00:08:23.100You know, from your lips to God's ears.
00:08:27.080Now, there's something else that will be coming back in Bill C-71, and that is the requirement to make that phone call to the CFO if I want to take my handgun to the range.
00:08:39.680This is, you know, if I didn't know better, I would think that this is Justin Trudeau's job creation strategy.
00:09:00.940So, like, the target shooting authorization to transport, which is by far the biggest of the bunch, allows you to take your restricted firearms and certain prohibited firearms to any shooting range in your province of residence 24-7.
00:09:20.000So, if you live in Ontario and you live in Cornwall and you want to shoot a match in Kenora, it's going to take you two days to drive there, two days to drive back.
00:09:32.780You're going to stay for a couple of days in hotels while you're there.
00:09:36.080And, of course, you know, you've got to stop and sleep and eat as you go to and from Kenora.
00:09:43.360And you have that permit to do that now.
00:09:47.160And they're not going to take away that one.
00:09:49.040The one they're going to take away from you is that if your gun is broken and you have to go across the road to the gunsmith, you're going to need a special permit to that.
00:09:59.360Even though when you get to the gunsmith, he has to sign your firearm into his business inventory in order to work on the firearm.
00:10:08.860So, there's a paper record there already.
00:10:14.200For me, some of it seems like a prohibition through inconvenience where people are interested in getting their restricted license who may just have their regular pal are saying, you know what, maybe not.
00:10:30.600And I think there's – I'm seeing at least some of that where people just say, you know what, I might just get out of my handguns altogether because it seems like, you know, it's just too much of a hassle.
00:10:41.720Yeah, and you know, one of the ones they took away was the one to take you from your place of residence to a border crossing to enter the United States with your firearms.
00:10:53.080I don't know if you've ever done this, but I've done this lots of times, going to the U.S. with firearms for whatever reasons.
00:11:01.700And I can tell you that if you tried to do this without your paperwork, your U.S. paperwork, you're in for the worst two days of your life.
00:11:44.320The whole bill is a basket of stupid stuff.
00:11:47.540They profess that this is going to somehow cut down on gang crime, and crime and gangs are not even mentioned in the bill.
00:11:58.140It is strictly paperwork and, of course, the gun bans on the CZ-858 and the Swiss arms rifles, both of which are very high quality, relatively expensive firearms, especially the Swiss arms gun.
00:12:32.940I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a study that I read that was done on the people of Saskatchewan.
00:12:39.760They were polled, and about 50% of the people in Saskatchewan said gun laws are pretty good just the way they are.
00:12:48.800And another, I think it was 9% or so, nine wise people said, no, they're too strict.
00:12:56.140And about 40% of people in Saskatchewan say that they would like to see gun laws tightened up.
00:13:06.380Now, I actually don't think that those 40% of people actually want gun laws tightened up because I don't think they actually know what the gun laws are.
00:13:16.020I think that there's a real problem with a lack of information in the general population.
00:13:23.240And if you paid attention to the mainstream media, you'd think you could just wander wherever you wanted with a handgun.
00:13:28.700Just walking around with a pistol on my hip at the grocery store, which is a personal dream of mine.
00:13:34.460But, you know, I think there's a real problem with communicating what the laws really are.
00:13:41.180Yeah, well, that's the whole problem here is communicating what Canada's gun laws are, all 140 pages of them, is a Herculean task that nobody's got the patience to sit through that.
00:13:58.480It's amazing that not only do gun owners have to know those laws, they have to comply with them to the letter or they put you in jail.
00:14:12.160The only people within the police force that are even moderately versed on the gun laws are the area firearms officers that are assigned to each unit of policing.
00:14:25.400And when the average street copper has a question about that, they go to them.
00:14:29.980However, the crowns don't know what the law is.
00:14:33.700The judges don't know what the law is.
00:14:36.460What we have here, Sheila, is a law that's so complicated that Canadians can't understand it.
00:15:24.520But why I resent this is because the Canadian legal system, and in particular the liberals, especially with this McClintic stuff right now,
00:15:35.280it seems like they treat criminals with this idea that they are always, always capable of rehabilitation and life change.
00:15:44.100And sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, they're criminals, you know, they're known for lying to you.
00:15:49.580But they don't treat gun owners like we can make life changes, that we can address our mental health issues,
00:15:56.500that we can address our life problems, that we can get our lives back on track if we were plagued with divorce or some other problem in our life.
00:16:07.380That's the problem I have with that provision in C-71.
00:16:12.080One, it treats gun owners like they're this part of the Canadian population that is beyond some sort of personal growth or redemption.
00:18:09.580Now, I wanted to talk to you about how going forward, we're seeing these consultations that are happening so fast.
00:18:18.400They need to be wrapped up by the end of the year to discuss a full handgun ban with the possibility of a full semi-automatic ban across the country.
00:18:31.860And Bill Blair, the minister of nothing, is going around holding sham consultations.
00:19:32.300So if they're not listening to us, who are they listening to?
00:19:34.640That's a really good question because they say they're only listening to their experts.
00:19:41.700And, of course, from the election of the Trudeau government, they maintained that their experts were the police.
00:19:48.880But here we have the commissioner of the RCMP, former commissioner of the OPP, president of the Toronto Police Association, the Peel Police Association, et cetera, et cetera, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.
00:20:02.880And every one of them has said the gun ban is a dumb idea and it won't solve the problem.
00:20:15.360Well, you know, when you look at the Canadian Firearms Advisory Committee, you've got a whole lot of experts on gun control.
00:20:23.240You don't have very many experts on guns.
00:20:25.800You know, as a matter of fact, there's no one represented on that committee from any of the large firearms organizations.
00:20:33.820There are a list of people that I could provide to them who are technical experts on firearms, people who have been doing this for a long, long time.
00:20:43.380And they're not interested in having those people on there.
00:20:46.160What they have is they have a bunch of gun control activists on the committee, and that's all they are.
00:21:28.680But he actually said the young men, he used the word young men instead of gangbangers and gangsters,
00:21:36.620that he had spoken to in the course of his criminology endeavors.
00:21:42.660He said that they told him that they got their guns from legal gun owners, and he doesn't see why they would have any reason to lie to him.
00:21:52.480And, you know, you wouldn't want to, you have no reason not to rat on your gangster friends or anything.
00:21:59.980And, you know, when these are the experts that they're considering, it's really no wonder they can't get the gang problem sorted out in Toronto.
00:22:28.400They're the most stressful people, you know.
00:22:31.560I mean, and then Bill Blair, as late as a week ago, he's still spouting that completely debunked statistic about the majority of guns in Toronto coming through the hands of legal gun owners.
00:22:47.040Even the stuff we got out of Toronto that Dennis Young got a couple of weeks ago, you know, wonderful stats.
00:22:54.200It's showing 9.2% of the firearms came that were ever in the registry system, ever in the registry system.
00:23:03.540These are the guns that enter into Canada legally, 9.2%.
00:23:07.680Interesting, though, because his stats also showed 18.6% of the guns originated in Canada.
00:23:17.500Now, if they originated in Canada, but they've never been in the registry system, that means they came from the police or the military.
00:23:26.180So, 9.4% come from the police and military, and 9.2% come from civilian gun owners.
00:23:34.820And do you want me to tell you something else that's also true?
00:23:37.900A civilian, Canadian civilian firearms owner is half as likely to commit a violent crime as a non-firearms owner and one-third as likely to commit a violent crime as a Canadian police officer.
00:24:44.460If we're so dangerous, how come when they prohibit firearms, like the Section 12 firearms that are in the Firearms Act, they didn't take them?
00:24:53.360They just grandfathered everybody and let you keep them.
00:25:58.340We're putting out a document in the next day or so that everybody should be getting on how to contact your senators and what to say and stuff like that.
00:26:08.140But there's also the NoC71.ca, which is a CSSA website.
00:26:14.720And you can go on there and get all your talking points for your letters.
00:26:19.080And then we've got NoGunBan.ca, which is something that anybody can go on to and get form letters down there to the senators and to the MPs in regards to the gun ban.
00:26:32.400Now, remember, the gun ban is a different issue than C-71.
00:28:43.660The fight against Bill C-71 isn't over yet.
00:28:50.420Like Tony explained, it's headed for a Senate committee where changes could be made to make this horrendous law a little better if your senators are willing to do it.
00:29:00.420But also, like Tony said, the senators need to hear from you.
00:29:05.000They need to know what you think about your government scapegoating Canadian gun owners for the lawlessness happening in urban centers like Toronto.
00:29:15.020Instead of hassling farmers and target shooters over their semi-automatic .22s, it's time to focus on gang intelligence and border security.
00:29:23.140Any time and resources spent hassling the law-abiding are wasted resources and the criminals laugh.
00:29:29.380Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.