Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The amendment is to insert a new clause after clause 30:
30.1 The Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness must, within three years after the day on which section 29 of this Act comes into force, undertake an analysis of the cost to the federal government associated with the destruction by the Commissioner of Firearms of all records in the Canadian Firearms Registry related to the registration of firearms that are neither prohibited firearms nor restricted firearms, as well as all copies of those records, and must report to both Houses of Parliament on the particulars of that cost.
This is a transparency function, Chair. We are opposed to the destruction of these records. We've offered opportunities for other people to use them. There is some confusion as to what's going on here. We've got objections from the Information Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner that this is in violation of legislation, which obviously is being changed here now. This is something there's been no openness about. We know the firearms we're talking about here, the records themselves, are extremely important.
We haven't talked about the clauses themselves, other than the amendments, but our major concerns here, of course, are the ease with which guns will be able to be transferred without any proper controls on them, and this is going to incur a cost. It's not simply saying that we're abandoning the registry. As has been pointed out, those who followed the law, the law-abiding citizens that the government likes to talk about, have paid to have their firearms registered. The government is going to be spending considerable money to do this, and we want that to be reported to the House.