Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise this evening to talk about the failed Liberal long gun registry.
Canadians do support gun control. We all understand that and we all believe in it. In fact Canada has had a handgun registry since the 1930s. It is high time that we did a thorough review and analysis of that registry which goes back to the 1930s. Historically, Canada during the second world war had a long gun registry which ran for a few years and after the war was over it just kind of disappeared.
Regarding former Bill C-68 and the long gun registry, Canadians are sick and tired of having their taxes wasted on a failed registry. It is time for the Liberals to face the music and understand that yes, they as a party can make mistakes, and I am sure Canadians would forgive them, but the Liberals continue to waste our dollars. In the recent estimates under the Solicitor General there are $10 million in new allocations to the failed long gun registry.
The newspapers over the last couple of days illustrate how bad it really is. A headline in the paper reads “Ottawa report blasts gun registry: Unreliable data threaten key screening goal of the program”. That is the reason we had the long gun registry in the first place, to help the policemen on the street. The report says that one of the chief goals of the program, continual screening to make sure gun owners remain eligible for licences, is threatened by unreliable information contained in a massive database that is supposed to tip police and the Canadian Firearms Centre to individuals who should not own firearms.
Another headline reads “Country's gun-death rate drops to an all-time low: Anti-gun groups hail firearm regulations, but don't credit the federal gun registry”. What does that say? It is basically a waste of money to register the shotguns of duck hunters and target shooters.
According to the Canadian Press the rate of gun deaths in Canada fell to an all-time low last year providing fresh ammunition for gun control advocates and drawing envy from south of the border. The 26% of homicides committed with a firearm was the lowest proportion since statistics were collected in 1961. Statistics Canada reported yesterday that stabbing was the most common method of killing, accounting for 31% of the homicides, beatings resulted in 21% of the deaths, while strangulation or suffocation came in at 11%.
In other words, it is time that we suspended the long gun registry and that we had a public inquiry into this mess. There are many reasons that we need to have an inquiry.
More than half a million gun owners in Canada failed to obtain a firearm licence and cannot register their guns without one. Are they criminals if they are caught with an unregistered firearm or if they are unregistered themselves? More than 600,000 individuals still have to register or re-register their firearms.
Justice Department officials admitted they had received only 53,000 letters of intent to register this summer. The government refuses to release the entire--