Tony Bernardo and Sheila Gunn-Reed of the CSSA condemn Bill C-71, Canada’s Liberal gun control law, now in Senate review, for gutting Harper-era transport rules, arbitrarily banning rifles like the CZ-858, and forcing $2B–$4B in asset liquidations. They call it ineffective—90% of Toronto crime guns unregistered—and warn of Blair’s upcoming "sham" consultations to expand bans, despite police opposition. With Trudeau absent and Bernier’s broken promises, gun owners must unite politically or risk prolonged Liberal dominance, per Bernardo’s urgent call to action via noc71.ca and donations to hyphencila.org. [Automatically generated summary]
The Liberals' latest gun control legislation has passed the House of Commons last week.
Now, what comes next for the over 2 million law-abiding, business-minding Canadian gun owners?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
The Liberals' gun control legislation, Bill C-71, has passed the House of Commons, and it's already on its second reading in the Senate.
And this bill, it's ugly.
It repeals Stephen Harper's easing of restrictions on authorizations to transport for restricted firearms.
It randomly reclassifies popular and very expensive Canadian rifles from non-restricted to completely prohibited, apropos 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.
And it is not over yet.
Canada's so-called Minister of Gangs and Borders, Bill Blair, remember 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.
Well, he has his sights set now on a full handgun ban across the country.
Bill Blair is currently heading consultations that are supposed to be wrapped up by the end of 2018.
These liberal gun-grabbing policies are proceeding at a breakneck pace.
So joining me on my show tonight is one of Canada's greatest advocates for Canadian firearms owners.
He fights for your rights when you are too busy to, and he keeps tabs on the people who've got their eyes on your guns.
My special guest tonight is a good friend of the show, Tony Bernardo from the Canadian Shooting Sports Association.
Hey, Tony, thanks so much for joining me.
I wanted to have you on because you are such a strong advocate for Canadian gun owners.
And we just saw the Liberals' latest gun control legislation, Bill C-71, amble its way through the House of Commons.
And I think this is terrible, terrible news for Canadian gun owners.
This is a dark day for us.
Can you fill us in on some of the worst things in that bill?
Because there is a whole pile of it.
Yeah, there is.
And 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.
Just 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.
That's just so disingenuous.
It makes me ill.
You know, and there's, I mean, it's not even a good bill if you were a gun grabber.
Like, the bill is all around bad because it's taking guns, in particular, the CZ-858 in 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, just sort of willy-nilly.
We don't like the color.
We don't like how easy and cheaply they are to customize to be a little more fun.
But 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.
So you don't know who has them.
You don't know where they are.
Right.
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.
And 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?
And that's really what it comes down to.
All they're doing is taking ordinary Canadians and just setting them up to be victims again.
People are so sick of this, Sheila.
Well, 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.
Their numbers say it would basically liquidate about $2 billion in assets.
But like you, I think it's far greater.
Yeah, we estimated about $4 billion.
Now, 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.
And not just the firearms, the magazines, the ammunition, the reloading equipment, all the things that go along with making those firearms perk.
This is precedent that's been established in Britain and in Australia when they did their gun seizures.
Also, in Canadian common law, anytime the government's taken the firearms, they pay compensation for them.
So 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.
If 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?
Well, 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?
Yeah, 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.
He 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.
But there was somebody missing from that vote that I think should have been there.
And that would be...
Well, I think you and I both know...
Mr. Bernier.
Yes, Mr. Bernier wasn't there, and he's trying to set himself apart.
And I'm giving Mr. Bernier as much benefit of the doubt that I can.
He courted gun owners when he was running for the leader of the Conservative Party.
He 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.
And I think even if it's a losing proposition, he should have been there to stand on principle.
Well, totally.
I mean, look, when the thing went forward in the House of Commons, everybody knew what the foregone conclusion was.
The Liberals have a huge majority that they can use.
But Andrew Scheer was in the House, and he was there supporting the firearms owners of Canada.
You know, I have no doubt that Mr. Bernier's heart would be in this, but that's not enough.
You know, and quite frankly, the divisive politics that he's playing will only guarantee that we get another four years of Justin Trudeau.
You 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.
Let's not do that, folks.
Let's keep our eggs in one basket and make sure that we get the liberals out of power.
Keeping Guns in One Basket00:02:53
You know, from your lips to God's ears.
Now, 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, this is, you know, if I didn't know better, I would think that this is Justin Trudeau's job creation strategy.
Yeah, you think so.
You think so, but it's a pretty dumb job creation strategy.
And of course, the confusing thing is this doesn't apply to all authorizations to transport.
It's only certain ones.
So 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.
So 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.
You're going to stay for a couple of days in hotels while you're there.
And of course, you know, you've got to stop and sleep and eat as you go to and from Kenora.
So it's going to take you a week.
And you have that permit to do that now.
And they're not going to take away that one.
The 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.
Even though when you get to the gunsmith, he has to sign your firearm into his business inventory in order to work on the firearm.
So there's a paper record there already.
It's just busy work.
For 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.
It's just not worth the hassle.
And I think I'm seeing at least some of that where people just say, you know what, I might just get out of my handcunds altogether because it seems like, you know, it's just too much of a hassle.
Yeah, 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.
I 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.
And I can tell you that if you try to do this without your paperwork, your U.S. paperwork, you're in for the worst two days of your life.
Yeah.
Because that's how long it's going to take them to sort out that you're not John Dillinger.
Gun Laws Still Matter00:13:35
Oh, my goodness.
And so now it's like that's not sufficient.
It's not sufficient to go to the border with a stack of U.S. paperwork this thick.
You now have to have one more permit from the Canadian government.
What is that?
It's like the stupidest stuff you've ever seen.
And C-71 is a basket of stupid stuff.
The whole bill is a basket of stupid stuff.
They profess that this is going to somehow cut down on gang crime.
And crime and gangs are not even mentioned in the bill.
It 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.
That's a very expensive gun.
And the people who are buying these guns, these are target shooters.
Yeah.
They're target shooters.
Yeah, they're collectors.
Yeah, they're people with a serious interest in the mechanics of firearms because they are beautifully manufactured guns.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they are.
I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a study that I read that was done on the people of Saskatchewan.
They were polled, and about 50% of the people in Saskatchewan said gun laws are pretty good just the way they are.
And another, I think it was 9% or so, nine wise people, said no, they're too strict.
And about 40% of people in Saskatchewan say that they would like to see gun laws tightened up.
Now, 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.
I think that there's a real problem with a lack of information in the general population.
And if you paid attention to the mainstream media, you think you could just wander over wherever you wanted with a handgun, just walking around with a pistol on my hip at the grocery store, which is a personal dream of mine.
But, you know, like I think there's a real problem with communicating what the laws really are.
Yeah, 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.
It'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.
But the police don't know them.
The 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.
And when the average street copper has a question about that, they go to them.
However, the crowns don't know what the law is.
The judges don't know what the law is.
What we have here, Sheila, is a law that's so complicated that Canadians can't understand it.
This is wrong because in a democracy, you should be able to understand the laws you're expected to abide by.
You know, that's a fantastic point.
There's something else in Bill C-71 that I found.
I don't like to say the word offensive because offensive sounds like I can't control my own feelings.
But it makes me really angry because it speaks to that treatment of law-abiding gun owners as scapegoats for larger crime organizations.
They want to examine, before you can get your gun license, your entire life history, including your mental health history, when right now it only goes back five years.
And I think five years is adequate.
But why I resent this is because Canadian, the Canadian legal system, and in particular the liberals, especially with this McLintick stuff right now, it seems like they treat criminals with this idea that they are always, always capable of rehabilitation and life change.
And sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
They're criminals.
You know, they're known for lying to you.
But they don't treat gun owners like we can make life changes, that we can address our mental health issues, that 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.
That's the problem I have with that provision in C71.
It treats gun owners like they're this part of the Canadian population that is beyond some sort of personal growth or redemption.
Right.
And then, let's add this.
Okay.
You've got the RCMP and the Liberal Party who have designed this intrusive draconian gun control system that is supposed to check every single person every single day.
That's the continuous eligibility program.
And the reason we're doing this is so that we make sure that criminals don't sprout up from within the community.
But when one does, why doesn't anybody say, hey, stupid, your gun control program doesn't work?
Yeah.
They never say that.
It's always, oh, it's the gun owner's fault.
Right.
Well, wait a minute.
The RCMP gave you the license.
The RCMP checks you every single day.
Every time you do a transfer of a restricted or prohibited gun, you're checked again, even though that might be your second time that day.
And guess what?
Criminals still happen once in a while.
Now, in our community, that's very rare.
And it's rare enough to be remarkable.
And that speaks more to our character than it does to the foolish system of gun control that we've got in this country.
What we really need to do is simplify this thing down so that everybody, including police and judges and lawyers, can actually understand this thing.
It needs to be dumbed down.
I completely agree.
I'm all for repealing government regulations and making them easier for people to follow, just like the tax code.
Too many goofy tax credits to take care of.
You had to go there.
Give me a flat rate and I'll pay it.
Now, I wanted to talk to you about how going forward, we're seeing these consultations that are happening so fast.
They 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.
And Bill Blair, the minister of nothing, is going around holding sham consultations.
I'll call them a sham.
I've said that they are a solution.
They're a solution in search of a problem, and by God, he's going to find it.
But they're not going the way the liberals thought these consultations would go.
They're meeting opposition, which is fantastic.
Well, yeah, but you know, back in the day when they passed the Firearms Act, the Bill C-68, they did exactly the same thing.
Alan Rock went around all over the country doing these sham consultations.
And I was there.
You know, I was part of those demonstrations of protests by the community.
And I'm telling you, he got cooked.
The reception that Alan Rock got made Bill Blair's look like a kid's party or something like that, you know?
But they didn't care because they never intended to listen to you anyway.
The consultation is a show.
It's bull.
It's complete bull.
So if they're not listening to us, who are they listening to?
That's a really good question because they say they're only listening to their experts.
And of course, from the election of the Trudeau government, they maintained that their experts were the police.
But 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.
And every one of them has said the gun ban is a dumb idea and it won't solve the problem.
And they haven't.
I was going to say they haven't included you in the consultations either.
And I would consider you an expert.
Well, you know, when you look at the Canadian Firearms Advisory Committee, you've got a whole lot of experts on gun control.
You don't have very many experts on guns.
You know, as a matter of fact, there's no one represented on that committee from any of the large firearms organizations.
There 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.
And they're not interested in having those people on there.
What they have is they have a bunch of gun control activists on the committee, and that's all they are.
I was reading an article.
I think it was on the gun blog, but it could have been on the Canadian Shooting Sports Association website.
And they were talking about how badly one of these town hall meetings went.
And they had this criminologist, I think he was from the University of Toronto.
His name is Scott Wortley.
And he was, again, repeating this false allegation about how a lot of these crime guns are coming from the hands of legal gun owners.
And someone confronted him on that statistic, which we now know is garbage.
Sure it is.
But he actually said the young men, he used the word young men instead of gangbangers and gangsters that he had spoken to in the course of his criminology endeavors.
He 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.
And, you know, like, no, you wouldn't want to, you have no reason not to rat on your gangster friends or anything.
And, 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, really.
How ridiculous does this have to get when somebody who's supposed to be an expert says something that remarkably stupid?
Yeah.
Well, and I mean.
They have no reason to lie.
Yeah, sure.
Okay, yeah.
Well, criminals don't lie, Tony.
They're the most trustful people, you know.
I mean, and then Bill Blair, as late as a week ago, he's still report, still spouting that completely debunked statistic about the majority of guns in Toronto coming through the hands of legal gun owners.
Even the stuff we got out of Toronto that Dennis Young got a couple of weeks ago, you know, wonderful stats.
It's showing 9.2% of the firearms came that were ever in the registry system, ever in the registry system.
These are the guns that enter into Canada legally.
9.2%.
Interesting, though, because his stats also showed 18.6% of the guns originated in Canada.
Now, if they originated in Canada, but they've never been in the registry system, that means they came from the police or the military.
So 9.4% come from the police and military, and 9.2% come from civilian gun owners.
And do you want me to tell you something else that's also true?
Sure.
A 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.
What do you think of that?
That is shocking, but unsurprising.
Unsurprising.
Unsurprising.
I think Canadian gun owners have almost a religious commitment to following the law and knowing the law.
Because like you say, you never know when the law is going to change.
You never know when you're going to end up on the wrong side of a registration.
You're constantly scrutinized by the police every single day, including Christmas Day.
You don't even get a day off from scrutiny.
So that doesn't surprise me.
It doesn't surprise me.
And it doesn't surprise me also because of the amount of money we have invested in our ownership of firearms.
Now, here's another one.
If 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.
Senators Need Your Voice00:04:43
They just grandfathered everybody and let you keep them.
They just stopped new ones coming in the country.
So if we're so dangerous, how come we still get to have them?
And if we're so dangerous, how come these ministers that go to these town hall meetings, they don't come in there with bodyguards.
They're not in any danger, and they know they're not in any danger.
They know our community is the most peaceful community in the entire country.
They know this.
Now, Tony, you're not done fighting back on Bill C-71.
And I think this is a great spot to leave our interview.
You have a letter-writing campaign.
So I thought I'd give you a chance to tell our viewership about that so that, you know, you're fighting every day when the rest of us don't have time to fight for our own rights.
But you also need some help from the rest of us to make sure that our voices are heard.
Sure, we absolutely do.
And, you know, this is a big thing right now.
You know, C-71 is bad stuff.
We'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.
But there's also the noc71.ca, which is a CSSA website.
And you can go on there and get all your talking points for your letters.
And 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.
Now, remember, the gun ban is a different issue than C-71.
C-71's real legislation.
It's already cleared through the House of Commons and is now cleared second reading in the Senate.
So it's going into its committee phase now.
No timetable set for that yet, but we'll keep people informed.
In the meantime, contact your senators and tell them that C-71 is lousy legislation.
One more fun anecdote for you, Sheila.
I know you'll like this.
I was doing a live television show with Wendy Sukier from the Coalition for Gun Control.
And I said to the interviewer, this bill has actually made Wendy and I agree on something.
And he says, what's that?
And I said, well, we think it's really lousy legislation.
And so does Wendy, right, Wendy?
I said, yeah.
And she says it hasn't made anybody happy.
Everyone hates it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's great.
It's so bad that it united you with the other side.
You know what's bad when.
Yeah.
No, Tony, folks need to get they need to get motivated here.
They need to send those letters in.
Join the association, CSSA, hyphencila.org.
You can get it, join right online.
You can phone us up on our 1-800 number and we'll take care of you by phone.
But you need to join the association.
You need to donate money.
I know everybody's after you for that.
But hey, if you want to hang on to your guns, you've got to help us here, you know.
Well, that was exactly what I was going to ask you about next, is how people can actually support you as you support us in our rights.
So I'm glad that you beat me to it there.
Tony, I want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your day.
Like I said, you're out there fighting for my rights because I don't have the time to do it.
So thanks for letting us know what you're doing for us.
And we'll talk again, I'm sure.
Thank you very much, Sheila.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Tony.
The fight against Bill C71 isn't over yet.
Like 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.
But also, like Tony said, the senators need to hear from you.
They need to know what you think about your government scapegoating Canadian gun owners for the lawlessness happening in urban centers like Toronto.
Instead of hassling farmers and target shooters over their semi-automatic 22s, it's time to focus on gang intelligence and border security.
Any time and resources spent hassling the law-abiding are wasted resources, and the criminals laugh.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.