Mr. Speaker, on March 19 of this year the Minister of Justice must have misunderstood my question because he did not answer it. In fact, just after asking him specifically about the fact that the $700 million gun registry had already lost track of over 38,000 licensed firearms owners, he responded by stating “The gun registry system works well”. The minister called losing track of 38,629 licensed gun owners working well. Just a year after his bureaucrats claimed that they had licensed all the gun owners in Canada, they cannot find more than 38,000 of them.
Was not the whole point of the registry to help police identify homes with guns in them? Now the justice department cannot even tell police where these 38,000 gun owners live. An internal Department of Justice document dated January 9, 2001, revealed that only 600,000 of the 900,000 guns registered in the old RCMP restricted weapons registry system would be re-registered by the end of 2002. This would leave 300,000 previously registered firearms that would be declared as unclaimed by the minister's department. The RCMP and the Department of Justice have also lost track of 300,000 restricted and prohibited weapons registered in the 68 year old handgun registry.
On March 19 I asked the minister to explain how the police can rely on a gun registry that is missing hundreds of thousands of guns and tens of thousands of gun owners. The House is still waiting for the answer.
Last week my office received new information from the RCMP that there are 49,000 individuals from British Columbia listed in the restricted weapons registry system who do not hold a valid firearms acquisition certificate and who also have failed to apply for a possession and acquisition licence as required by the Criminal Code of Canada. This is despite a penalty of up to 10 years in jail for knowingly being in unauthorized possession of a firearm.
The justice minister's new $700 million gun registry is suffering from the same problems that made the 68 year old handgun registry totally useless at solving and preventing crime. Gun owners fail to report their changes of address. Gun owners die and the government loses track of the owners and the guns they used to own. Gun owners and bureaucrats make mistakes on forms. As a consequence, the information in the gun registry is so riddled with errors that it has been deemed useless by the courts for determining who actually owns the firearms listed in the registry.
On February 28 I released a report titled “Errors, Errors and More Errors”, which listed 24 different types of errors being reported to my office and in the newspapers. Today I issued a second report titled “Errors Just Keep Piling Up in the Gun Registry”. Today's report listed 14 different types of errors.
I do not have time to go through all of this, but I will give an example. The justice department's own documents show error rates of 71% in firearms licensing and 91% in the gun registry. The RCMP admits in access to information documents that it is responsible for but not in control of the gun registry processing. Why has the RCMP been removed from this important task? The RCMP has 68 years of experience in registering guns.
I think it is incumbent on the government to begin to explain why it is plowing ahead with this.