Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise in the House to speak to the motion put forward by the member for Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert. We have just had an amendment placed before the House, but the original motion that was suggested by the member reads:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should immediately suspend application of the Canadian Firearms Programme in order to hold a public inquiry into the reasons for the programme's extraordinary cost overruns, and to submit a structured and detailed strategic plan that would have to be approved in advance by this House.
I realize that the amendment has now been put and the member has accepted it, but I did want to say that we in the NDP, while we understand the intent of the member's motion to draw attention to the need for further scrutiny of the massive mismanagement of the gun registration program, find that the motion as worded and laid out in the House today is very problematic. It is problematic for us in that it requires the whole program to be suspended.
It is important to note that two-thirds of the firearms program, although many people refer to it as the gun registry program or the gun control program, has to do with the licensing of gun owners. Certainly, from the point of view of the NDP, we support the licensing of gun owners. It is something that is often overlooked in terms of what the program is actually about because the attention has been focused on the gun registry. It is important to note that the majority of the costs of the program are associated with the licensing.
There is a lot of information that is not known by members of the House in terms of what has taken place with the program. I have been following some of the debate, not only in the House but also in committees, and I know that the public accounts committee has been tracking and monitoring the program.
We are not talking about a small cost overrun of a program where we would go through the estimates, pick up on something, and notice there was a problem. Then through a committee we would begin to ask questions. We are not talking about a small overrun of 5% or 10%. Even that in some circumstances would be a serious issue. We are talking about a program which has a difference of about 500 times the original estimate, something with which the public accounts committee has been grappling.
As recently as March 17, 2003, our finance critic, the member for Winnipeg North Centre, was doing an excellent job in committee questioning the President of the Treasury Board as to why, when in 1999 a $41 million contingency fund was established, this would not have set off all kinds of alarm bells to which all departments would have been alerted? Why would there not have been some sort of extraordinary program put in place immediately to deal with what was a massive contingency that the government was forced to bring forward. It is interesting, in reading through the records of the public accounts committee, what the President of the Treasury Board said on March 17:
At present, as President of Treasury Board, I transmit those reports to Parliament. They are not checked line by line by the Treasury Board Secretariat. It is only after they are tabled that some problems may come to light.
She goes on to say:
...the situation has also sent a strong message to the Treasury Board Secretariat, which has to be much more proactive in overseeing information quality.
I certainly appreciate the comment from the President of the Treasury Board, but it is really mind-boggling to think of a major project such as this when in fact in earlier testimony the Auditor General has made it very clear that the firearms and the gun registry program was classified as a major crown project and that as a result certain rigorous reporting requirements should have been met. Given that context and that history, it really is quite astounding that even when the first problems came to light and these massive contingencies began to emerge in terms of a financial commitment by the government to pour money into this program, still there was nothing that was done in terms of an emergency response or an accounting through the House, which could have corrected the problem at that time.
I think this has really highlighted a major problem within government operations. In fact, as I have remarked before in the House, if we had a culture and an environment where estimates were treated more seriously in the committee process, maybe again this would have been a procedure whereby these serious problems would have come to light earlier for members of the House to address.
Clearly, the onus is on the government's side. The onus for the management of this program is on the government's side.
I would say that the need for an inquiry is something that is very strongly supported. Within our own caucus we have members who strongly support gun registration. We have other members who have serious problems with the registration aspect on a matter of principle. Our leader, Jack Layton, supports gun registration, but all of us have been deeply concerned about the mismanagement of this program and how the government itself, through its lack of foresight and through its lack of transparency and accountability, has actually created the crisis that now places this program in jeopardy. In fact, the very credibility of the government is one of the issues that we are debating in examining this program.
The amendment has been placed before the House. The motion has now been amended. We in the NDP believe that it is necessary to have a thorough investigation of what has taken place here. We want to ensure that there is full transparency and accountability to Parliament for this program and for the expenditures that have happened in the past and are now being sought for the future.