Madam Speaker, on May 2 the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice gave a most unsatisfactory answer to a direct question. The RCMP has provided reports documenting hundreds of thousands of errors in the gun registry. I again ask my question. How can a garbage collection system like the minister is running be of any benefit to the police?
Last week the parliament secretary contradicted the documented evidence from his own department and the RCMP by claiming that 99% of all firearms were correctly registered and 99% of firearms licences correctly issued.
On May 22 the justice department, in response to one of my access to information requests on error rates in the gun registry, stated:
The error rate for applications received up to July 18, 2001, was 90% of a total of 362,375. In addition to errors detailed in Appendix A, 42% of firearms registration applications contain errors in the firearms description, in comparison to the Firearms Reference Table...The sum of the errors exceeds the number of applications received because the application is only counted once even though it may contain multiple errors.
On April 9, 2002, in response to our access to information request, the RCMP provided the cold, hard statistics used to calculate the justice department's 90% plus 42% error rate in firearms applications. As of July 18, 2001, the RCMP's Canadian firearms registry had received 362,375 firearms registration applications. The RCMP provided a two page document listing 60 different types of errors. Amazingly this RCMP document records a total of 970,647 errors.
Here are some of the more common firearms application errors the RCMP documents: 226,024 applications required the firearms owner's licence numbers; 88,886 applications were awaiting payment while the funds for 23,211 applications were not acceptable; 48,282 applications did not have the firearms make, while for another 40,528, the make was invalid; 79,456 had an invalid model description; 71,539 required a client match; 59,640 had address errors; 56,374 required the calibre for the firearm; 34,830 did not have the number of shots; 18,434 did not have a serial number; 16,313 did not have the barrel length; and 20,978 had not been signed.
The minister and the parliamentary secretary would have us believe that in the 11 months they have fixed almost a million errors in these 362,000 applications and have stopped clients from making similar errors on the other 3.4 million firearms applications they received since. In another 11 months, through another access to information request, as has been happening continually over the last six or seven years, we will find that is not true. The minister's claims stretch--