Mr. Speaker, the answer, of course, is that it is not addressed in the bill. We now have provinces that have taken a close look at this in the last few years. Eight provinces and territories do not want to have anything to do with it. There are only two provinces left, Quebec and Prince Edward Island, that are trying to co-operate with the federal government in implementing the firearms registry. That is a huge problem for the government.
It begs the question: If there are this many provinces and territories that do not want to have anything to do with the firearms registry, why on God's green earth is the government still plowing ahead with the proposed legislation? Do these provinces and territories not care about public safety? Do they not want to put in place laws that are going to be helpful to the people of this country? If there are that many people objecting to this and there is a criminal law that exempts certain segments of the population, that criminal law ought to be scrapped. That should be self-evident. Why are we continuing to go ahead with something like this?
These amendments do not address some of the huge problems that we see in the bill.
In fact, we have the government saying, “Canadians still support us”, but there now are polls being done that indicate the complete opposite.
The other day the government claimed that Canadians support it. An Environics poll said that 53% of Canadians supported the firearms registry. I was asked to go on national television to respond to that poll. Before I would go on, I said I wanted to see the questions asked in this poll that showed Canadians wanted the firearms registry. At first, they refused to even let me see those questions, but I demanded it, saying that before I would go on and face a Liberal MP I wanted to know what those questions were all about.
Had I known I would be asked this question, I would have had them in front of me. I discovered in reviewing those questions that in fact the government had asked a whole series of questions like the following. “Do you support safe storage of firearms?” “Do you support the gun registry?” That was mixed in there. “Do you support safety courses that firearms owners should be asked to take?” They were asked if they supported a whole bunch of things, all in one question. If I were faced with that I would have to answer yes, and I know what a huge boondoggle the firearms fiasco is. Yet the government then appeals to that particular question as huge support for the gun registry when in fact that is not what the question was really about. Then it went on to a second question that again mixed up several things and the government says, “This is support for our firearms registry”.
There is not public support for the firearms registry once the public knows what it is. The government calls this a gun control bill. When the public discovers that it has nothing to do with gun control, that it is merely a gun registry, that it is merely laying a piece of paper beside every firearm in the country, they do not support it any longer. When the public is asked the question in a poll, “do you support gun control?”, in essence, we all do, but the firearms registry is not gun control.
As the hon. member just asked me about, that is why the provinces and territories said, “Get rid of this and give us more money to put police on the street”. We could put up to 12,000 police on the streets of this country and that would improve public safety. It has been demonstrated by other governments that this actually works in reducing crime. That is at the heart of the question. What is cost effective? What really works to reduce crime?
The previous finance minister, the member for LaSalle—Émard, approved the spending for this entire program without giving us a cost benefit analysis. In fact, he violated the government's own guidelines. The Treasury Board guidelines mandate that before a big new program like this we should have a cost benefit analysis: Is it going to improve public safety and is it going to be cost effective in doing that? That is why the provinces and territories are saying, “Scrap this program. We need effective measures to reduce crime and improve public safety”.
I could go on and on. The bill shows the lack of consultation on the part of the government. It rammed ahead a piece of legislation that is now seriously flawed. The bottom line is that these amendments do not correct the huge deficiencies in Bill C-68. They do not make it gun control.
That is why the Canadian Alliance is going to oppose this. It is just a waste of taxpayers' hard-earned money.