Madam Speaker, I want to begin by congratulating my colleague for Yorkton-Melville for introducing this amendment.
The universal registration of firearms is one of the most controversial and ineffective sections of Bill C-68. The amendment separates gun control from crime control. It allows the crime control portions of the bill to be dealt with separately and expeditiously.
For the last year members of the Reform Party have been telling the government that Canada has a crime problem, not a gun problem. It is a difference it has so far refused to recognize. The government persevered and introduced Bill C-68 which is seriously flawed.
The minister claims his intention is to crack down on the criminal use of firearms. Certainly that is an area I would support him in. In fact, all he has done so far is to take aim at the easiest available target: the legitimate owners of guns. He really means that gun control lies at the heart of the Liberal Party's effort to derail the nationwide surge in interest in tougher and more effective criminal justice.
Public safety must be the overriding goal of any government. Punishment of crime should come before all other objectives. The Reform Party believes the target should be the criminal use of firearms, not the law-abiding gun owners.
Passage of this amendment would allow Parliament to get on with dealing with the crime problem. There is no connection between the legitimate gun owner who owns a firearm for hunting, target shooting, or for the protection of his family or his animals from preying wildlife and the criminal who obtains a firearm illegally for the purpose of committing a crime. There is no correlation between the two at all.
As my friend pointed out, last Thursday in Ottawa a few miles west of this Chamber there was an armed robbery. Not only were two of the participants in this botched hold-up on parole, but they also had a history of armed robbery convictions. That is what they had been jailed for on their last convictions. One of them was even prohibited from owning a firearm for life.
How would gun registration have made any difference whatsoever in this case? Would it have saved the two Ottawa police officers from the gunshot wounds they suffered? Not likely. Let us face facts here. No amount of gun control regulation would have stopped this trio from obtaining the guns they needed to carry out their robbery or any other robbery they might plan.
The real problem here is the criminal misuse of firearms. Those convicted must be severely punished. The separation of this bill into two parts would accomplish that goal.
More crimes are committed in this country with knives than guns, but no one is suggesting we register our kitchen knives, at least not yet. This government is more interested in proceeding with the mandatory registration of firearms than it is with solving our crime problem. Mandatory gun registration is not just a tax on law-abiding gun owners, but one that will cost all Canadians millions of dollars to implement.
The minister's supporters, the anti-gun lobbyists, claim that firearms registration is justified because we register our cars and our dogs. The truth is that these registrations exist primarily as a form of taxation.
The Minister of Justice estimates universal registration will cost $85 million. If you will pardon the expression, I think that is a rather conservative estimate. Experts at Simon Fraser University put the cost somewhere between $400 million and $500 million.
Here we have a Liberal government using parliamentary time to debate gun control when we will be paying some $50 billion in interest this year. This government has its priorities completely mixed up. So much for an assault on the deficit. This is merely another assault on the wallets of Canadian taxpayers.
In addition, mandatory registration will turn police officers into bureaucrats. The Minister of Finance announced in the February budget that thousands of public service jobs will be eliminated and he is going to shrink the bureaucracy. Someone should tell the Minister of Finance that his colleague, the Minister of Justice, is creating a whole new bureaucracy. Once the minister turns police officers into bureaucrats, they will be so bogged down with paperwork and chasing otherwise legitimate gun owners that they will not have time for regular law enforcement duties.
We have asked the minister repeatedly for evidence proving that a national gun registry will save lives. So far he has been unable to give us that information and has been successfully ducking the issue. We know the reason he cannot give those. He simply cannot. He does not have a shred of evidence to provide to us.
The Minister of Justice has taken on gun control purely as a personal crusade. Somehow he has managed to confuse crime control with gun control. Now legitimate gun owners are afraid that this minister is so blinded by his personal agenda that he will stop at nothing until he reaches his ultimate goal: the complete confiscation of all firearms in Canada, maybe with the exception of law authorities and military. We have heard this minister and other members of the government state that they would like to see a society in which only police officers and the military have weapons. The only way that can come about is through confiscation.
The minister hopes that by making firearms ownership so complicated and expensive that Canadians will give them up. More than likely, it will put more guns into the underground market, not less and ultimately, more guns into the hands of criminals.
The Minister of Justice hopes that all this attention on gun control will divert attention away from the roots of our crime problem. After all, the Liberal Party policy on crime is that it somehow is society's fault. He often drags out polls to support his stand.
If he is really interested in the polls and what people think, he should look at the Simon Fraser University opinion survey. It showed that Canadians knew little about gun control laws and that their support for firearms registration weakened as they became more knowledgeable about this issue.
The reason people voice support for gun control when questioned by pollsters is that they think or hope that registration of firearms will somehow improve public safety and reduce violence. Most Canadians do not know that handgun registration has been in effect in Canada since 1934, 61 years. There is no record to show that a single crime has been prevented as a result of this registration.
Most Canadians do not know that experiments in firearms registration were expensive failures in Australia and New Zealand. As my friend has pointed out, they are now being given up in those countries.
Most Canadians do not know that in 1993 the auditor general reported to Parliament that the previous government had no statistical basis for implementing the last round of gun control regulations.
Most Canadians are unaware of the findings of project gun runner which was undertaken by the Ontario government. Project gun runner found that 86 per cent of all handguns used in the commission of crimes were smuggled into Canada. Does the minister really believe that the new owners of these smuggled
weapons will register them? Surely, he is not that naive. I do not believe he is.
Reformers are not opposed to the government's plan to crack down on smuggling. That is why we believe the only solution is to split this bill so that crime control and gun control can be dealt with separately.
It is too bad the Minister of Justice cannot see that his determined efforts to reduce crime are so far off base. He started down this road and he is too proud to admit he is lost. He is afraid that if he turns back he will be seen as abandoning his principles.
The minister should thank his colleague from Yorkton-Melville for bringing forth this amendment. The member has done him a big favour. He has given the minister an avenue to save face. If he takes it, he can preserve his standing in the next leadership race.