Madam Speaker, the hon. member did not ask me anything about the main point of my speech. That should be obvious by his question.
We are spending an inordinate amount of resources tracking law-abiding citizens and not tracking criminals. If the government were serious about that it would have fixed CPIC so that the criminals whose whereabouts we know nothing about would be the emphasis and the focus. Rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on something that is producing a benefit, it spends it in a useless area.
The member mentioned his own area of Etobicoke North. Ontario Provincial Police officers have told people who have come to them asking for information on how to register their guns that they want to have nothing to do with it. They do not want to be told about the problems people were having with registering guns and complying with the legislation. They do not want to have anything to do with it. It does not do them any good. Rather they emphasized that they need resources to deal with the criminal element, that they need to put more police on the street.
The government is not doing what is necessary even in the area the member just mentioned: improving the CPIC system. It is not tracking sex offenders and properly registering them.
The government has put forward a spurious argument. We need a sex offender registry. The government committed to it and now it is backtracking on it. At least it should keep one promise.