Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the minister's statement. I wonder why he even bothered to make the statement, because he did not say anything new. There was nothing of substance that merits taking time in the House to make this statement. He is saying the same old nonsense we have heard for a long time. He continues to defend a program that Parliament now refuses to fund.
We were hoping that the minister would finally accept responsibility for the fiasco and announce his resignation for the biggest cost overrun the Auditor General has seen in any government program. We were also hoping that the minister was going to announce this morning that he was scrapping the gun registry because it already has wasted almost $1 billion. For that billion dollars, he will only have registered one-third of the guns in Canada. Is he going to waste another billion or two or three before he admits the program is a dismal failure? How much is it going to be? We cannot get that response.
If he is not going to resign or scrap the gun registry, at least he could have announced this morning a general amnesty to allow all firearms owners the time they need to fully comply with the law. Because his own bureaucracy cannot get the paperwork done, he has put in place a six month moratorium or amnesty for owners to get their papers, all because his bureaucrats need more time to process the firearms licences and registration certificates. Does he really want to drive millions of gun owners and guns underground?
The Liberals issued a general amnesty in 1978, and the Conservatives also did it in 1992. What possible excuse can the minister have for sticking to a completely arbitrary political deadline of December 31 of this year?
The minister's own user group on firearms tells the minister that the way his program is designed is driving firearms into the black market, the exact opposite of what the public and Parliament were promised. Is the minister listening to his own user group? Has he even met with the group yet?
Poorly drafted legislation and an up to 90% error rate in the system are making it impossible for police to know who owns guns or where they are stored. That is the very thing the minister promised the police that the gun registry would do.
The three justice ministers who have been in charge of this file have so infuriated provincial and territorial governments that eight of them have opted out of the administration of the gun registry, and the western provinces refuse to enforce the Firearms Act. This is criminal law that the provinces do not want to have any part of, which ought to indicate to Canadians that there is a serious problem here.
This week the Nunavut Court of Justice suspended firearms registration requirements for the Nunavut Inuit because of lack of service, poor communication and low compliance. I remind the minister that he is responsible for ensuring that all Canadians are treated equally before and under the law. If they no longer have to comply with it, what about the rest of us?