Mr. Speaker, on June 13, I asked the justice minister a question which she refused to answer.
On behalf of my constituents, I sincerely hope that after almost four months she has been able to find the courage to tell Canadians the truth about her badly bungled gun registry and how much it has cost taxpayers. For the benefit of the minister, I will repeat my original question.
In 1995 the justice minister tabled a document entitled “Financial Framework for Bill C-68” that projected a deficit of $2.2 million over five years for implementation of the gun registration scheme. It is now five years later and the minister has collected less than $17 million in user fees and the deficit is more than $300 million. That is 150 times larger than the deficit first projected.
Who is responsible for this huge waste of money, the previous minister's ridiculous estimate or the current minister's mismanagement of the scheme?
In my supplementary question I asked the minister about the cost of her latest advertising blitz and the firearms outreach program. She ducked that question too, spouting statistics about refused and revoked licences and blocked sales of legally owned guns, all this while the minister knows full well that taxpayers did not need a half a billion dollar gun registry to achieve these results. All that was really needed was better administration of the 20 year old FAC program. As if we needed more proof, in 1999 the United States blocked 160,000 gun sales and it does not even have a gun registry.
Will the minister please provide us with a cost benefit analysis of her gun registry program? Will the minister please explain how requiring the registration of grampa's shotgun helps to generate these bogus blocked gun sales statistics? Will the minister please explain how she is preventing these now potentially dangerous gun owners from acquiring firearms illegally from the nearest Indian reserve?
Just last week I received a response to an access to information request from the minister's department. Her bureaucrats failed to provide any information about the costs of her firearms outreach program as I had requested. The minister's bureaucrats did provide enough statistics, however, to prove her firearms outreach program was another fantastic flop in a five year series of firearms flops.
Documents show that the justice minister's plan was to process 1.4 million licence applications this summer. In fact the department's own website reveals it received less than 300,000 applications and processed only 102,000 firearms licence applications.
Will the minister tell Canadians how much her outreach program and ad campaign cost taxpayers and explain why the program was such a dismal failure?
The minister's departmental website also reveals a bigger problem than the waste of half a billion dollars of public money. As of September 2, 2000, her bureaucrats had issued only 286,000 firearms licences in the last 21 months, an average of 13,630 per month, and 339,000 licence applications were in processing or in backlog.
At its current rate of production, it will take the Department of Justice more than two years to get rid of this backlog and 12 more years to process the licences from the remaining two million gun owners. The government's very low estimates still have not even been applied. The minister's impossible deadline is now less than three months away.
Finally, the Minister of Justice still refuses to provide this year's budget for the Canadian firearms program operated by her department. The minister's minions are even stonewalling investigations from the Information Commissioner of Canada.
Sources close to the minister tell us that the gun registry has already cost taxpayers $260 million this year and will exceed $300 million by the end of March 2001. Will the justice minister tell Canadians what she is trying to hide?