Thank you.
Before I get to my third question on basically the wilful attempt to deceive Parliament, which is really the crux of the value and the importance of this committee--that question will go to Mr. St-Jean--I would like to ask a question of Mr. Baker. It's basically about the effectiveness of our system.
With all due respect, sir, I heard you say that you are pleased with the results. My God, how can you be pleased with the results of a program that has basically been the next thing to being out of control? The Auditor General has stated that the volunteer verifying work is weak, CFIS II is still not declared an operational system, and there is a complete hole in the validity of all the data. On many occasions misinformation or lack of information is totally worse even than no information.
Sir, I was a police officer many years ago and I can recall when we went to CPIC or NCIC or whatever to validate information. To have unreliable data is dangerous, absolutely dangerous. How can any police officer in this country walk up to a domestic residence for a domestic dispute and/or a business and/or any area where they would have to verify and confirm presence of firearms and/or judge the capacity of people who are using firearms not knowing that the information is consistent, accurate, and true? If they base their assumptions on that kind of information, they're in trouble. They have to blindly assume that on each occurrence, whether it's stopping someone on the side of the road for a traffic ticket and just jumping across to verify it, there's a weapon in the car, because quite obviously the system just is not reliable.
I could just give you one of, I suppose, millions of examples. Sir, I was a gun owner. I'm not an avid person who's going to run around...but I registered my guns. I registered them online as normal Canadians would do. I'm not registered. I have a copy, a printout that says my guns are registered, but I checked in to see where my guns are. I'm not registered, sir. I'm just one of millions of people. The information is not reliable.
So how can you in all good faith say you're pleased with the results of the gun registry? Can you give me a response?