Mr. Speaker, rather than entirely focus on the costs and waste, I should commend the member who introduced the bill, the member who has the holy seat of the two saints.
Rather than dealing with the costs and waste involved in this, I would like to approach it from another standpoint. I believe that the firearms registry was an ill-conceived plan from its very inception. People did not strategically work their way through this concept and try to figure it out. That is the fatal flaw with the whole system. It was never conceived and properly thought through to begin with. I would like to zero in on a couple of areas that bring this home.
Back in my home province of Saskatchewan we pioneered something called the personal property registration system 15 years ago, which every province in Canada has now adopted. It is a tool for lenders, credit unions, banks, trust companies and private lenders, to secure personal property. Personal property, as hon. members would know, is anything basically other than real estate. It is moveable property: automobiles, fridges, stoves, etc.
The big dilemma in creating that system was to create a registration system for people dealing with property. For example, if I bought a new piece of property for someone, I could do a search and determine whether I would get clear title to the property. We looked into whether we should make it a serial number search system or should the property be described?
We looked carefully at that concept and spent a lot of time figuring it out so that we would have a good system that would work. The personal property registration system is a solid system. We looked at the question carefully and came to the conclusion that the system would fail if we were to use a serial number registration system because personal property would not have a uniform consistent serial number registration system. Only motor vehicles have a uniform consistent serial number registration system.
The world has a uniform standard serial number registration system for motor vehicles and there is only one serial number for every vehicle on this planet. There are no duplicates. However, when we get into fridges, tractors or any other type of personal property, the serial number system is full of flaws, and that includes firearms.
A policy choice was made that the personal property system would be a failure or defective if we were to create a registration system based on serial numbers. The founder of that system probably knows more than anybody on the government side or in this bureaucracy about all the problems that exist in trying to register something by serial number, least of all firearms.
Once we get the firearms system up and running, and presumably get everything registered, if we were to do a search on a serial number on some of those firearms, I would not be surprised if we got 289 call-ups on it, all with the same number. What service will that provide to law enforcement, the courts or anything else?
As a former lawyer, I think defence lawyers will look on this as a loophole and a technicality to get their clients off because we have to prove things in a criminal court beyond a reasonable doubt. We are only creating all sorts of loopholes for defence lawyers. That is another problem with the whole firearms registration system.
I have a number of other objections. People in the other House call themselves charter fundamentalists. They believe in a charter of rights. The Auditor General has pointed out serious violations of our privacy rights with the legislation. I am not a charter expert like my Liberal friends on the other side, but I would think privacy rights are something fairly important which should be part of our charter. However the Liberals total ignore that. Privacy means nothing. They have made some serious intrusions into our private lives in this country with the firearms registration system.
When they pass a law on which they have spent over $1 billion and they let off a lot of hot air about the system, surely they intend to enforce that legislation. Why would they pass a law and spend all those resources on it if there is absolutely no intent to enforce that law?
I have folks back in Saskatchewan who are prepared to play the game of civil disobedience. They want to be charged under this law because they feel it violates their constitutional guarantees under the charter. They have lawyers lined up and so on. They want to be charged in order to test this law. They have tried everything under the sun.
But we can guess what is happening. The government will not charge them. It spent a billion dollars creating this monster and then it does not even have the guts to try to enforce the law. I cannot think of anything so stupid. We should not be passing laws in the House that the government is not prepared to enforce. If that is what it is playing at, it is playing a billion dollar political game with people. That is what the government has to admit.
Let us talk about national priorities. Members on the other side of the House used to say “if this would save one life”, but I can tell those members that a billion dollars would have bought 350 MRI scanners in this country. I think I could bring in doctors and medical people who could talk about thousands of lives that would have been saved with MRIs in cancer treatment alone. The government cannot prove one single case of where anyone's life has been saved with this billion dollar firearms registry, not one single person.
The government can come up with some sort of bogus justification for it. It might have conned someone in some organization to back it up and give testimony on it, but if we talk to the rank and file people who work in those organizations they totally reject the whole concept. It is a total waste of their time and effort.
In the private sector there is an old saying, “When you've made a mistake and it's not working out, you cut your losses”. Bankers would always say that the first loss is the best loss, that we should cut it and back out of it. But this government, despite hundreds and hundreds of solid arguments for why the firearms registry is a total absolute failure, insists on pushing ahead and throwing more money into this hole. The government should admit that it screwed up. This is a totally flawed concept. It is poorly conceived.
Quite literally, for a lot of informed and knowledgeable Canadians who have taken the time to actually analyze it and not play the politics of the game, this is becoming nauseating. What the government is doing with taxpayers' dollars compared to all the things it could be doing with that sort of money bothers their stomachs to no end. We have roads falling apart in the country. People are being killed because the infrastructure is falling apart. Accidents are happening because the roads are falling apart, but there is no money to fix them.