Let me answer that. This means replacing it with a law that has the full support of all 10 provinces, the 3 territories, the firearms community and the aboriginal community. We must remember that six provinces and two territories proposed Bill C-68 in a constitutional challenge that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The western provinces are even refusing to prosecute firearms act offences. Is that not something? For years judges have complained that the legislation was so poorly drafted, at least major segments of the legislation, that it was unenforceable.
The bill would also amend the definition of a firearm in an attempt to ensure that millions of air guns and pellet rifles will no longer be considered firearms under the law. The wording is confusing and ambiguous, and the new definition may not achieve that objective. The justice minister refused to consider a simple amendment to remove that confusion and ambiguity.
In 1995 the justice minister ignored the 250 amendments proposed by the Reform Party at that time. It has become evident that the gun registry is nothing more than a fiasco; another billion dollar boondoggle.
The Auditor General says that the firearms program is the worst example of government overspending that anyone in her department has ever seen. This is a program that the government claimed was going to break even.
When unveiled in 1995, Canadians and the House were told that the gun registry would cost $119 million to implement, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. The difference between revenue and cost of just $2 million was said to be the cost of the program. That is what Canadians and this Parliament were made to believe.
Instead, by the end of this year the registry will have cost nearly $1 billion, 500 times more than the originally projected costs. Of course this is not the first time we have learned of Liberal overspending gone wild.
Who can forget the HRDC boondoggle when the government used job creation programs as a means to throw cash around like drunkards? More recently there was the Groupaction affair in which the government gave sponsorship funds to its Liberal friends in the name of national unity. This included $500,000 for non-existent or missing reports.
Since 1993 it has become clear that the Liberal government only admits to wrongdoing when confronted by the media reports or is caught by the Auditor General. However no one on the government side ever takes responsibility for his or her actions.
Where was the former finance minister, who is listening to the debate now, when he spent all those billions of dollars on the gun registry? I will tell everyone where he was. He was writing the cheques. So much for fiscal responsibility. How many other spending fiascos remain hidden?
The firearms registry was introduced with hollow claims that it would help the police do their jobs. Supposedly, it would provide firearms registration information to dispatched patrol officers, allowing them to know before entering a property whether or not the occupant has a firearm and how many guns are in the residence.
The registry was also purported to help curb the illegal gun trade by allowing the police to trace guns to their original owners and enforce the requirement that guns only be sold to licensed individuals. The justice minister gave $380,000 to a coalition of gun control to promote its anti-gun agenda while it cut $65,000 from the firearms safety training program. How can the justice minister justify that?
The police cannot rely on the billion dollar gun registry to do anything the Liberals promised. Police will not know where the guns are because there is no legal requirement for gun owners to store their registered firearms at their home address or tell the government where they are stored.
Police will not know where the guns are because between 500,000 and 1.3 million gun owners failed or refused to obtain a firearms licence and cannot register their guns without one.
Police will not know where the guns are because the government has lost track of at least 300,000 guns in the old handgun registration system.
Police will not know where the guns are because the government still has to register between 3.4 million and 12 million guns before the government imposed registration deadline.
Even if police do find the guns, there are so few identifying characteristics on the registration certificates that it is impossible to verify that it is the firearm registered in the system. For example, 4.5 million registration certificates have been issued without the owner's name. Can anyone imagine that? There are 3.2 million blank and unknown entries on gun registration certificates. Of the 3.2 million certificates that have already been issued, more than three-quarters of a million of them do not have serial numbers. How will the government keep track of those?
The bill would remove all of the RCMP's authority for the firearms registration system which it has been responsible for since 1934. All authority previously granted in law to the RCMP would now be transferred to a new government agency under the control of a new bureaucrat called the Canadian firearms commissioner.
We have one question. Why? If the RCMP bureaucracy cannot make the gun registry work after 59 years of experience, how will the new bureaucracy do any better? It is likely to further erode public and police confidence in the gun registry, a system so riddled with errors that it is of absolutely no value whatsoever to the police in their day to day law enforcement functions.
The bill would give the minister the power to exempt non-residents from the application of the Firearms Act, regulations and 14 sections of the Criminal Code of Canada. It exempts foreigners. Why does the justice minister trust foreigners with firearms more than he does Canadian citizens?
The bill would give any designated firearms officer any of the duties, powers and functions of the chief firearms officer. Do Canadians really want private eyes running around with all the powers of a CFO to investigate and harass law-abiding citizens?
How will we ever know if the private eye is using his powers as a firearms officer to investigate people for his other clients and for his personal gain? Even the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating this issue.
Let us look at some statistics. Statistics Canada recently released homicide statistics for 2001. These numbers provide further evidence of the absolute futility of registering guns as a policy for reducing the number of murders. Of the 554 homicides in Canada in 2001, 31% were stabbed to death, another 31% were shot to death, and 22% were beaten to death.
Of the 171 firearm homicides in 2001, 64% were committed with handguns that the RCMP have been registering for the last 69 years, 6% were committed with firearms that are completely prohibited in Canada, and 27% were committed with a rifle or shotgun.
Since 1991 handgun use in homicides has steadily increased from 49.8% to 64.3% in 2001. Over the same period of time homicides committed with rifles and shotguns have steadily decreased from 38% to 26.9%. Between 1997 and 2001, 74% of handguns recovered from the scenes of 143 homicides were not registered weapons.
Toronto's recent wave of street murders, more than 40 since the beginning of 2001, is further evidence disproving the claim that the Liberal government's gun registry is making Canadians safer from crime. Nearly all of the Toronto murders have been committed with handguns and yet handguns have been the subject of registration in Canada since 1934.
Registration has done nothing to stem the use of handguns in murders. In the past 15 years the proportion of all firearm murders committed with handguns has nearly doubled in Canada, from just over one-third to nearly two-thirds.
Pistols are easily concealed, which makes them the weapon of choice for gang members and drug dealers, the two groups responsible for most of the Toronto shootings and even many of the shootings in British Columbia.
Smuggling from the United States is the source of most of the handguns used in Canadian murders, up to 90% according to the Ontario Provincial Police.
In December, when Toronto police chief, Julian Fantino, was asked about the escalation of firearm crimes in his city, he said “a law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped us solve any of them”.
Even if a national registry could produce information useful in preventing crimes, or even just solving them, it would be at a loss to produce it on nine out of ten handguns used in Canadian murders since those guns would not have been registered in the first place.
While the licensing process for gun owners was initially turning down more potentially unfit owners than the old firearms acquisition certificate program, the Liberals' haste to boost the number of licensed owners caused them to forgo meaningful background checks on hundreds of thousands of applicants in late 2000 and early 2001. As a result, the rate of refusals for the new licensing scheme is half that of the old system.
How can the new program be making Canada safer if it is turning away only half as many risky owners as the old one? The registry is nothing more than a sinkhole for taxpayer money, to the extent that the gun registry is diverting resources and police officers from real security matters. It is more of a threat to Canadian safety than no registry at all.
It clearly is time for the government to consider shutting down the gun registry and redirecting the money and other resources to real crime-fighting measures.
Depending on who we talk to, there are anywhere from two to seven million firearms owners in the country, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, tax paying and hardworking people. If a safer Canada is the goal, the solution is not to attack law-abiding Canadians.
We feel there is simply no reason to believe that spending exorbitant money is producing any significant results. The system has no government accountability or transparency. This is just another horrendous example of gross mismanagement and abuse of the government's dictatorial authority.
The regulations are not submitted along with the legislation as I have always said. The government is ruling, not governing, through the back door with regulations. The government failed to submit or table regulations along with the legislation.
For many years, many groups and individuals, including the government, have said they want a safer Canada, but they are not thinking outside the box. They are stuck in a rut and believe that the only way to accomplish this is through the firearms registry.
My Canadian Alliance colleagues and I believe this is the wrong approach. It is not working and it is a waste. We should put more police on the street to go after criminals rather than in offices. This law is simply a waste of money and a betrayal of the trust of Canadians.