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Watch: Gun control questions in the House of Commons

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews faced questions in the House of Commons Tuesday regarding a Global News story about a memo his own staff wrote last year, warning him that failing to modernize gun laws was endangering the public.

In the memo – originally classified as secret, later released in a censored form under access-to-information laws – senior Public Safety argued that the failure of successive Liberal and Conservative governments to update a decades-old list of banned guns “poses a risk to public safety.”

“The Conservative government has put public safety at risk again and again through their inaction,” charged NDP critic Randall Garrison. “Did the minister see this warning, and, if he did, does he think it’s okay to ignore RCMP advice to modernize the list [of prohibited weapons]?”

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“Our measures to keep Canadians safe are working,” Toews responded. “Firearm homicides are at their lowest point in 50 years. That member, and his party, failed to support the measures that are turning around the issue of gun crime.”

Toews didn’t say whether he’d read the memo.

NDP backbencher Rosane Doré Lefebvre followed up with her own question in French, about a firearm the RCMP suggested banning, subsequently used in last year’s Parti Québécois election night shooting:

“Mr. Speaker, the consequences of the minister’s inaction are real. A weapon that the RCMP recommended be prohibited in 2010 was used in the fatal shooting after the provincial election in Quebec. How many other tragedies are going to occur before he takes action?”

Toews countered that the harsher penalties imposed by the Tories are the solution to lessening gun crime.

“We have asked the NDP to co-operate and work with us to impose mandatory prison sentences for those who possess firearms illegally, and they have refused.”

Read: In-depth coverage of Canada’s gun-control loopholes