Madam Speaker, on November 6 the solicitor general and the former justice minister failed to answer my question about a firearms registration certificate being issued to an individual who does not own the firearm in question. Because the RCMP was responsible for the error, I asked the solicitor general:
The privacy commissioner is investigating a number of firearms licences that were issued with the wrong photos. Now we have a documented case of a firearm being registered to the wrong person. The unhappy recipient complains, “I do not want to be responsible for a firearm that I do not possess”. Could the solicitor general please explain how the registry of firearms made such a potentially catastrophic mistake?
For some reason I still do not understand why the former minister of justice would not let the solicitor general answer his own question and she did not answer the question either. In her response the minister chose to play politics rather than to address a very serious error in the gun registry that threatens both the privacy and safety of a Canadian citizen. A strange response for a minister who claimed to be fully accountable and responsible for the entire Canadian firearms program.
Since this incident was documented in November we have had another firearms owner complain to his member of parliament that the same thing happened to him. He wrote on the bogus registration certificate:
Never registered this gun. Never owned this gun. Never even seen this gun.
Perhaps the new Minister of Justice will take more seriously the consequences of the bungling by his bureaucrats.
Earlier today I issued a news release documenting just a few of the more recent errors in the gun registry. These errors were documented by the minister's own department and provided to me in response to an access to information request. Other errors were reported in newspapers or to me personally.
I have in turn notified the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Auditor General of Canada of these errors and their consequences for the rights and safety of Canadian citizens.
Here is a short list of the errors I uncovered and made public today: there were 300,000 unclaimed guns in the old handgun registry; the gun registry lost track of more than 38,000 licensed gun owners; 832 duplicate firearms licences were issued; 28 duplicate firearms registration certificates were issued; there were 57 registration certificates for 16 guns; re-registration of 10 handguns resulted in a 50% error rate; a muzzleloader was registered as a single-shot machine gun; 3 rifles were registered to the wrong man; a handgun was registered to the wrong man; 2 rifles were registered as shotguns; 6 identical registration certificates were issued for 1 handgun; registration forms were sent to a wrong address; there was a woman's photo on a man's firearms licence and a man's photo on a woman's firearms licence; and 3 Winnipegers got the wrong photo on their firearms licences.
On Monday the new Minister of Justice proudly proclaimed to parliament that the gun registry works well. The minister should look again. His own department's documents prove otherwise. Here is a huge list of serious errors and we need an answer.