Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of points I would like to make on the member's statement. I will leave the one on the protest until last.
First, the program did waste $1 billion. It had nothing to do with safety and it had little to do with gun control. It was simply one more example of the government using the opportunity to take away any criticism that might have been put on the shoulders of the government about the policies it had undertaken as a fairly new government in 1994.
The Liberals made promises, some of which they kept. One of them was to scrap the helicopters, which has come back to haunt them. Their promise on Pearson airport came back to haunt them. There was also their promise to get rid of the GST which they never intended to keep.
Those were the issues that the gun control bill was brought in on, as well as the issue of free trade that the Liberals were going to scrap. That is the issue. It had nothing to do with gun control.
Most members in the House support gun control. I support gun control and I have no problem in saying that. I do not support the registry. It has wasted $1 billion.
The member wanted to break it down as $300 million to catch up on the people who had not registered accurately. Perhaps the forms were too complicated. Did he think of that? Somehow, for 80% of the people who registered, it is their fault but not the fault of the system that did not work.
On the $200 million in advertising, that was a waste of money. He should be ashamed of himself for even bringing it up. I do not think any member of the government should bring up advertising after the sponsorship program where again, hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted in advertising. One such advertisement we got a photocopy for cost the people of Canada $500,000. I do not think there ever should be a member of the government who would want to talk about advertising. If $200 million was spent on advertising the gun registry, I would like to see a forensic audit done on every penny of it.