Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Justice said that he wanted to be transparent and he was. He certainly has done a great deal for transparency this morning by so transparently engaging in an act of damage control with respect to the cost overruns associated with the gun registry.
I will begin by just going over the minister's statement. The minister says that the Government of Canada believes that the firearms program contributes to public safety by keeping guns and ammunition out of the wrong hands, by deterring their misuse and by controlling specific types of firearms. These are worthy goals and the NDP supports those goals of the firearms control program.
However that does not mean that we have to be lax when it comes to our job as parliamentarians in holding the government to account for how it administers particular programs. I must also say that the statement is very unclear as to what the government associates the cost overruns with.
The statement goes on to say, “throughout the first five years of the program”. Which program? Is the minister referring to the first 5 years of the 25 years that he referred to in the first paragraph of his statement from 1978 to 1983, or is he specifically referring to the first 5 years of the gun registry program which we are now in the middle of? It is not clear what he is referring to here.
The cost overruns, as I understand them, are associated with the registration aspect of the overall gun control program, and yet the minister hides that fact in his statement by never actually mentioning the registration program in his statement. The overruns are associated with the registry, not with the firearms control program that began in 1978, at least that is how I understand the situation. I regret that the minister decided to avoid the issue of the specific cost overruns associated with the registry itself.
The minister went on to say that departmental costs have always been reported through approved Treasury Board framework guidelines and that the department has reported many times to Parliament. Nevertheless, the Auditor General has said, and he agrees, that we must do better. The Auditor General did not just say that we should do better. The Auditor General said that the government did not do it at all, that it kept Parliament in the dark.
Therefore to suggest that somehow there is just a little degree of improvement that is required on the part of the government with respect to how it has reported to Parliament on the gun registry program is ridiculous and certainly not an example of due diligence in terms of reading the Auditor General's report.
If we were to read the Auditor General's report we would see that she is very hard on the government and does not just say that it needs to do better, like it was being tapped on the wrist. The government was given a great big wallop and told to fundamentally revamp how it reports the cost of this program to Parliament.
The minister should be faulted for a statement which so transparently seeks to minimize the way in which the government has mismanaged this program.
When the minister talked about seeking efficiency in terms of costs for this program, I want to warn him that we in the NDP will not stand for the privatization of the gun registry. If this is what he has in mind when he talks about cost efficiencies, then he will not have the support of the NDP.