Mr. Speaker, what we are hearing today from the hon. member across the way is just absolutely unbelievable. He is suggesting that we should get concurrence from all the attorneys general and all the police forces across the country—I do not know whether he is going to take the time to ask every single police dog what it thinks too—before the government gets off its hind end and actually thinks about passing some legislation to protect our children.
It absolutely confounds me that the government has no problem imposing upon every legal law abiding gun owner in the country that he or she must register their firearm. When that was brought forward it was supposedly because if one life was saved it would be worth the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost, worth all the inconvenience it would impose and worth the attack on the privacy of our citizens. The government said it was fine if it saved one life, but when it comes to bringing forward meaningful legislation to initiate a sexual predator registry, suddenly we have to get all the provinces, all the police forces and everybody else in line. That did not seem to be a problem when it imposed upon the provinces the so called national firearms registration.
Why is it that the government can pick and choose? It can bring in something very quickly when it wants to, like the registration for firearms, but it has to have everybody singing from the same song sheet when it comes to something as fundamental as protecting the lives and welfare of our children.