Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to talk a little more about this important issue. It is important enough that one of the ministers handed it off to another minister. I want to read a quote from one of the newspapers:
--if you walk around with a great ungainly reeking, rotting albatross lashed snugly around your neck. The federal justice minister, grasping this simple truth firmly enough, has dumped the national firearms registry onto someone else's desk and marched briskly away from it.
He has only had it for a few months, but it is already far too hot for him to handle, particularly with his supposed leadership ambitions. I would suggest that if he is going to be a real leader, he will have to handle problems a bit better than he handled this one.
I know there are others who would love to ask questions, but I want to quickly talk about the fact that the registration system has been far too cumbersome. We have heard time and time again of people who have actually tried to participate in the system but have not been able to get through. The minister assures us that he will correct that, but it has been five years now and the system is not fixed yet.
We have heard about his bogus claims of success, that it has turned away some 7,000 claims over the years. What is interesting is that most of those claims would have been turned away under the old FAC system anyway. They would have been rejected, so that claim does not apply.
In moving the firearms registry to another department we hear a surrender, an admission of complete failure in the program by the cabinet and by the cabinet minister. We will see over the next while that this program will begin to wind down because the government has realized how ineffective and inefficient it is.
I would like to suggest a very simple solution on the gun registry problem, which is that we go back to a system as we had before. In the FAC system the owners were registered and there was no worry about registering the weapons. In that way the police know, if they need to, whether someone has a gun if they are going to a person's place and they need to be concerned about it. They do not know how many guns people have now anyway. If someone is breaking the law, it is very unlikely the person has registered the gun.
The old system worked fairly well. People took courses, registered and then were able to use their guns as a tool, as many of us do. If that were done, it would be a big help.
In conclusion, there is a lack of leadership. The Auditor General stated:
Without better direction and clear expectations, these initiatives will flounder. Even the best-intentioned department can't make up for a lack of leadership.
I would say that is what we have faced in so many different areas in so many different departments.