He can speculate as to who this benefits, but my legal training tells me quite clearly who might want to get something out there and try to divert people away from the real substantive issue, which is the gun registry itself, which is a sad Liberal legacy in this country.
We had a report a couple of years ago that outlined the sad legacy--the effectiveness of this program, the massive waste of taxpayers' money--and the thing just went on and on. We were told by Allan Rock that the thing would cost us $8 million. There are tons of things we could do to make streets safer in this country for which we don't have the resources or things in place, but we continue along this path of failure.
What we really should be doing is preparing ourselves for the report tomorrow. Hopefully the speculation in this story is without basis, and we will find that the Liberals did correct these massive defects in their gun registry, and this is a great system. But we should be focused on making this government more effective and more accountable.
To me, this sort of thing is problematic. I'm of the view that you can have all the rules in the world and all the security you want in the world, but it only takes one bad apple in the system to jeopardize any security system. I'm sure the President of the United States today and in the last year or so has numerous examples of things that were leaked--security matters that shouldn't have been out there that have caused him no amount of anguish--and he probably has security coming out of his ears to prevent that sort of thing.
If it were that easy--just more rules, as Mr. Christopherson said--why wouldn't we just pass one law and outlaw dishonesty? If we outlawed dishonesty this should never happen again. We can make more and more rules, and more and more things complicated, but if somebody really wants to jeopardize security they can do so.
Let's be clear. We've had eight of these things since 2001. That's an error rate of about 7%. Seven of those occurred under a Liberal administration, and I don't recall having any special meetings to deal with all the breaches that occurred under the other....
To Madam Fraser, when we had these other seven breaches, do you know whether the Prime Minister's Office really conducted a due diligence examination of how these breaches might have occurred, or whether any investigations were ever carried out by Prime Minister Chrétien or the most recent Prime Minister?