Mr. Speaker, it interesting to see that the minister has appeared in the House I think on three occasion on the firearm program. It is a clear indication that the government is struggling to put a brave new face on this program. We listened with interest today about yet another plan which tries to convince Canadians that everything is fine with this program, that it will work and that there will be no problems.
The government likes to refer to this program as the gun control program. It does not like to use registry. Maybe we should rename it the damage control program because clearly that is what it has now become.
Clearly questions arise from the minister's statement, where we now have a whole new action plan and a transfer to the Solicitor General's office. By shuffling the deck or shuffling the responsibility to a new department, what assurance do we have that the fundamental concerns and recommendations of the Auditor General will be met?
There are two issues here. One is that the government has not yet been able to demonstrate clearly the link between the registry, the administration and the management of that registry to its overall objective of gun control and, as it says, that is public safety, which is an honourable goal and is something we all support. At the very best, there is scepticism about whether it has been able to demonstrate that link. Of course the worst case scenario is that there is outright opposition to the registry on whether it fulfils those objectives of public safety and gun control.
While there are those who clearly oppose the registry, as long as it exists, there is a second issue. How is it being managed, how is it being administered and how is it being accounted for? That is at the very heart of the Auditor General's recommendations.
One of the basic problems that got us into this terrible mess in the first place is the complete lack of absence of controls, through the House, to review all estimates. In the past a department would be grilled. At committee, members of the House could go through line by line for more than just a couple of hours and bring the government to account on any particular item. That has now all been lost. If that were in place, I do not think we would be in this situation today.
The government has made the decision over the years to basically bypass Parliament, to bypass the mechanisms of checks and balances that allow us to do our job in holding the government to account.
We have this action plan that talks about accountability and transparency, improving service and reducing costs. We need to have the mechanisms in place, mechanisms that are more than a program advisory committee or an annual report to Parliament. We need a full accounting of those estimates. That is what it will take for this place to determine whether the objectives of this program are being met. The onus is on the government to do that. It has not yet demonstrated that nor has it made the clear link between the benefits of this registry and what it will accomplish or has accomplished, and the overall objective of public safety.