Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Cumberland--Colchester.
I listened to the member's speech and was impressed with his comments and the fact that he took a look at this and is following the issue objectively. He has taken a principled stand.
It is a complicated issue that is much more basic than the government would like us to believe. I would ask Canadians to think about this issue for a moment in terms of the cost. At the end of the day and in terms of costs and the success of the bill, I would ask them to think about what has changed in their communities with regard to long gun registration. What has changed on the street they live on? What has changed in their homes? What has changed in the overall safety of our schools and our communities after we have spent $1 billion trying to register long guns that are owned by law-abiding citizens?
As the member for Regina--Qu'Appelle already mentioned, screening was already in place under Bill C-17, the Conservative gun control bill. Firearms acquisition permits were all there previously as well.
This long gun registration is smoke and mirrors. It just obscures a number of other issues concerning justice, safety and public safety. It does nothing to make our streets any safer. It does not take guns out of the wrong hands, because Bill C-17 did that. It does not strengthen the storage responsibilities of a gun owner, because Bill C-17 did that. This legislation does not put in more licensing requirements, because Bill C-17 did that.
What it does is force all of the people who have already jumped through the hoops under Bill C-17 to prove they are safe firearms owners and to register their firearms. The very group of people that we have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on to ensure that they are not a threat to public safety are now being told they have to register their firearms. But the people who are a threat to public safety, the criminals, the bike gangs, the organized crime groups in this country who routinely eliminate their competition, are not about to register their firearms.
Not only that, the majority of gun owners, I would say, have no criminal records. Many of them are seniors who have hunting rifles in their homes that are used for deer hunting or duck hunting. They have refused in large numbers to register their firearms. I do not have one or two neighbours in rural Nova Scotia who have not registered their firearms, I have hundreds. These people stop at stop signs. They do not have any speeding tickets. They have said, “We feel this is ridiculous and we are not going to register”. They are law-abiding men and women, yet the government is going to force this down their throats. There is something seriously wrong with this.
I have no difficulty at all rising in this place and supporting reasonable, responsible, sensible gun control. I have a responsibility to my constituents to do that. I have a responsibility to members of my own family to do that. Safe storage, safe handling, screening of prospective gun owners, common sense: all of it was there under Bill C-17.
The new bill was brought with the promise that it would cost $2 million a year to operate. We spent $1 billion, with which every page in this place could have free tuition and, not only that, every one of their brothers and sisters in this country could have free tuition. If we want to help the youth in this country and do something with a billion dollars, there are a lot of things we could with it. For $1 billion, every university student in Canada could have free tuition this year. If we want to spend $1 billion wisely, I suggest that this would be a wise use of $1 billion.
This has stirred up more controversy and, quite frankly, wasted more debate time in this House, when there are other issues we should be debating, than any other subject I am aware of. We should take a look at the Auditor General's report. I urge Canadians to read it. She stated that the Department of Justice currently estimates the program costs at $1 billion but this estimation “does not include all financial impacts on the government”. In November 1994 when the government tabled its bill, the estimated cost of the program was $2 million. This $998 million is not just a miss; we are not even on the same map.
She also stated, “...the Department of Justice did not provide Parliament with an estimate of all the major additional costs that would be incurred” even though there was a “regulatory” requirement for the department to do so. What does that say? The government broke the rules, broke its own laws and kept Parliament “in the dark”. Somehow that is okay because the government will mask this as public safety instead of just filling Liberal pockets like they usually do.
Funds were allocated to various other government entities such as Correctional Service of Canada and the National Parole Board. Of the $126 million allocated to these two departments, only $7 million was actually used by them, with “$119 million of the original $126 million” reallocated “to the Department of Justice for the program”. Canadians were lied to. The money was allocated to one department, was surreptitiously taken out of that department under the cover of darkness, and transferred to another department.
The Auditor General's report states that only a mere “30 percent” of the total funds of $750 million, which was the amount in 2001-02 used for the long gun registry, was acquired “through the main appropriations method”, meaning that 70% of the funding for the implementation of the program was acquired through supplementary estimates. That is not what the supplementary estimates are meant to be used for.
Again it is this: break the rules, steal from the public, persecute a group of people who have no criminal records and have never broken the law and make a decision that they have become a danger to society when there is absolutely no statistical evidence to prove that.
I have only a minute left, but I want to know when the government plans to start arresting all these people, because there is not a dozen or a half a dozen, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands who have said, “We do not agree with this law. We have obeyed it up to this point. We agree with the safe handling, the safe storage and the courses and we agree that this makes us better gun owners and more responsible citizens, but we are not going to register our long guns”.
These are people's fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers. Does the government intend to start throwing them in jail because enforcement is what the Auditor General does and she now controls the package?