Mr. Speaker, on April 23 the Minister of Justice must have misunderstood my question because he did not answer it. Consequently I ask it again.
The provinces have registered 18.1 million vehicles in Canada, each one with the owner's name on it. The justice department has spent $700 million to register only 3.3 million guns without the owners' names. How can the provinces get it so right and the justice department and the federal government get it so wrong?
The minister went on to brag and I would like to quote from his answer:
The registration, licensing and mechanisms are working quite well.
That is not a joke. That is what he said. This will come as a big surprise to police on the street who continue to ridicule the gun registry and all the bonehead mistakes made by the justice minister and his bureaucrats.
Everybody knows what happens when a police officer checks their driver's licence and vehicle registration. It will be interesting to see what will happen when a police officer checks someone with a gun in their car.
After confirming the identity of the driver of the car and matching it up with the firearms licence, the officer will turn his or her attention to the firearm in the vehicle. The driver will say he is going out to hunt gophers on a nearby quarter section of land. The officer will examine the firearms licence to determine if the hunter is authorized to be in possession of the type of firearm in the car.
Then the police officer will ask for the registration certificate and the hunter will produce the certificate because the law requires it. But the police officer will see that the firearms registration certificate does not have the registered owner's name on it so the officer will ask the hunter if it is his gun. When the driver answers yes or no, the police officer will have to check the computer system to see if the driver is telling the truth.
In this case the driver who is in possession of the firearm will tell the officer that he borrowed the rifle from his neighbour, which is perfectly legal as long as the rifle and registration certificate are together. In order to confirm that the driver is telling the truth, the police officer will be forced to go back to verify this information on the police computer system.
There are two possible outcomes to checking a gun registration certificate on a police computer system. The officer finds the record of the gun or he does not.
In scenario number one, because of the hundreds of thousands of errors in the registry, the officer will not find a record of the rifle in the registration system. The officer will seize the firearm until the ownership can be confirmed.
In scenario number two, the officer's check of the gun registry computers will confirm that the rifle is indeed owned by the hunter's neighbour. To be sure that the hunter is telling the truth, the officer will call the neighbour, but the registered owner of the gun will not be at home and the gun owner's wife will have no knowledge of the firearm being lent to the neighbour. To be on the safe side, the officer will seize the firearm until he can confirm the legal ownership of the firearm with the registered owner.
A week or two later this routine stop by the police officer will be successfully concluded when, first of all, the officer is finally able to sort out the computer errors and confirm that the firearm is in fact registered to the driver's neighbour or when it is confirmed that the hunter did in fact borrow the rifle from his neighbour.
In those scenarios the embarrassed police officer, who has wasted scads of police time checking out the perfectly legal lending of a firearm between two individuals and who has completely irritated and frustrated two law-abiding firearms owners, will be forced to return the perfectly legal firearm to the hunter he took it from and apologize for the mix up.
All this extra work will have been caused by not putting the name of the registered owner on the firearms registration certificate, one colossal bureaucratic blunder caused by politicians trying to meet impossible arbitrary registration deadlines.
Does anyone really think a police officer will go through this complicated, time consuming, useless process a second time? I do not think so.