Mr. Speaker, insiders tell us the RCMP's budget for the Canadian firearms registry has been cut by 40%. Twenty verifiers already have been laid off. Scenarios of up to 100% layoffs have been discussed with staff and union officials. Meanwhile, the staff has been directed to triple output.
In the past two years the RCMP has issued only 550,000 firearms registration certificates and the current backlog is over 180,000.
There are between seven million and twenty million firearms left to register in the next two years. The registrar says that there is a 90% error rate in the applications received and that it will take until 2010 to register all the legally owned firearms in Canada.
Why is the solicitor general cutting the registry's budget and laying off staff? I wish it was because the Liberals were rethinking the billion dollars they will waste on this futile exercise and spending it on fighting real crime. Unfortunately the layoffs probably have more to do with the justice minister's privatization plans than common sense.