Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the taxpayers of Canada I would like to thank the governments of Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Yukon for their constitutional challenge of the Liberal government's flawed national firearms registration system.
Last week the provincial justice ministers argued publicly that the registration of rifles and shotguns will not be effective in reducing crime; that gun registration does nothing to reduce crimes involving firearms or smuggling; that gun registration is an inappropriate use of scarce resources right across the country. They said that the federal government has repeatedly failed to produce evidence of a correlation between a firearms registry and reduction in crime. They said it is time to target criminals who use weapons to commit crimes, not penalize law-abiding citizens under the guise of gun registration.
If this court challenge is successful, then the hundreds of millions saved will be able to be redirected to fighting real crime and real criminals by putting more police officers in our communities rather than keeping them back in the office processing useless bits of paper.