Mr. Speaker, today we return to debate the federal budget. This is the Prime Minister's swan song budget, which is the best way I could describe it. It is not the budget that is needed for Canada because the priorities are all wrong, and as a result, I do not support it. As I said earlier to the member from Prince Edward Island, many farmers across the country do not support it.
I only have a limited time of 10 minutes for my speech, so I will touch on the main topics of agriculture, health care and, of course, the firearms registry.
Priority spending by the government is the problem and the Firearms Act is the best representation of the mammoth waste of money. A billion dollars has been spent so far with more being spent every day and this budget will continue to support that.
City people and non gun owners should be opposed to the registration of all the rifles and shotguns in the country because it is such a mammoth waste of time. There are so many priorities that need to be dealt with in the cities, that even they need to be against this waste of money. It is the duty of every Canadian, and in particular every firearm owner, to oppose this firearms policy and this bill that was formerly known as Bill C-68 and the continued funding for it. We heard points of order in the House this morning about how the government allegedly continues to deceive not only the House but also Canadians in general.
I do not know if the justice minister is listening to my speech this morning. I hope that he has some staff members listening to it.
In the farming and ranching communities we use firearms, rifles and shotguns on a regular basis. Farmers also have a hard time making a net profit and here we have the government imposing all these additional costs on them with no benefit to them.
The government calls it user fees, but in fact firearm owners are not the users. The government thinks it is going to control crime, which it will not of course, but that is who the real user is, supposedly the Canadian general public.
Therefore, I have to stand here and tell the justice minister that along with tens of thousands of Canadians across the country who are firearms owners, I will never register a rifle or shotgun. We need them in our ranching operations, but this mammoth waste of money and the infringement on individual rights in the country has to stop someplace. This is the time for all of us in Canada to take a stand and see the end of the firearms registry. The mismanagement and waste continues to grow. The government continues to fund it out of this budget.
In the town of Beausejour, in my area, there are not enough police resources to fight crime. What the town of Beausejour had to do was take its bylaw enforcement officers off their regular duties of enforcing bylaws during the day and put them on night shifts to do the work of police officers who were not available. That is real crime control, not registering the rifles and shotguns of duck hunters, farmers and ranchers like myself.
There is very limited money to combat child pornography in Toronto and Montreal. Can members imagine how many children a billion dollars would save?
What about lives? I mentioned I was going to talk a little about health care. In Manitoba last year we had three heart patients waiting for surgery. There were just not enough doctors, nurses or facilities available. They had their surgery rescheduled and rescheduled, and those people died waiting for surgery. That is a terrible shame of mammoth wealth being misused and prioritized in the wrong way.
We have spousal abuse cases. This too is a very sad commentary.
In the province of Manitoba, of course, the NDP government is unwilling to properly fund our crown attorneys. It is unwilling to do anything innovative about health care. As a result, the NDP government in Manitoba says that it will not be innovative, but that it will send heart patients down to the States, out to B.C. or wherever people are innovative, to get their treatment and it will pay for it, but that there is no chance that it will change the health care system. The NDP government in Manitoba only deserves a little bit of blame for that. The federal government deserves a lot of blame for insisting that provinces cannot innovate with the mammoth amount of health care money that is going in there.
It is St. Patrick's Day and I might look like I am mad about the budget that has come down but the truth of the matter is that I am bloody mad about the waste of money by the government. We are on the verge of trying to remove a dictator out of a country, a dictator who is tremendously sadistic and kills his own people. Of course I am talking about Saddam Hussein. The world has always had to stand up to cold-blooded killers and people who attack the innocent, the unarmed and the people who cannot defend themselves. That is what Saddam Hussein is doing to his own people, whereas our budget on military matters is very limited. The budget throws in a little bit more money to it but it is so limited that it will just keep the armed forced going in their current situation with no real improvements.
Here again, priority of spending, back to the firearms registry. This is how the firearms registry is working. This is a letter from a constituent:
I would like to take this time to let you know what my experience with the firearm registration has been like. I had seven firearms to register. I was going to be ahead of the game when registering my firearms so I sent in ALL my information for my firearms via mail using the old application forms. In April 2002 I received my registration cards. I took a quick look at the registration cards and placed them in my desk and did not look at them till just the other day, February 23, 2003. Well to my surprise there were only five firearms accounted for!
I then proceeded to re-submit the information for the firearms that were missing via the website. As I took a closer look at the registration cards I noticed that one of the guns registered on my licence was not even one of my firearms! So now FOUR of my firearms are not registered. I sent in the information for these firearms through the website and sent an e-mail explaining what happened.
Today at work I started to think about this and wondered if my firearms were registered to someone else. Well I guess time will only tell.
I'm the type of guy who will usually not voice his concern. This takes the cake. We trust that competent people are in charge of this whole gun registry. My application is proof positive that this is not the case.
I was a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 30 years. I am telling the government and Canadians that the firearms registry of rifles and shotguns will not work. It will not reduce crime and it will continue to waste money forever and ever if the government continues to support it.
I am really disappointed in the Canadian Police Association executive, not the policemen on the street, but the Canadian Police Association executive. It will be coming to Ottawa in the next few days to tell us all how the government should continue to spend billions of dollars on the firearms registry when in fact it knows that in the big cities of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, police are trying to fight child pornography and child prostitution on our streets. That is the kind of crime that needs to be fought, not the registration of rifles and shotguns by farmers, ranchers and average Canadians.
My final comments on this to the justice minister and to the whole budget process is that I will not register my rifles and shotguns under this system.