Mr. Speaker, this week I made public the fact that more than a million firearms owners failed to apply for a firearms licence before the January 1 deadline. Of course the government has done its best to keep this phenomenal failure of the gun registry a secret.
The Liberals ignored all the common sense advice they received in 1995 concerning Bill C-68, and look at the jam they are in now. This type of backlash is predictable when millions of good citizens are treated like criminal suspects.
The government made the dubious claim that the gun registry would somehow be useful to police, but how will a registry with more than a million gun owners missing from it be of any benefit? No wonder the vast majority of front line police officers are so opposed to the gun registry.
On September 22, 1998, the justice minister said that the debate on Bill C-68 was over. If the debate was over back then, why did she have to introduce 22 pages of amendments to it? Six hundred million dollars sure would have put a lot of police on the street.