Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the commentary. I am astounded frankly that the government still tries to defend the indefensible.
To use his own example, and I say this with the greatest respect to his dear sweet mother, if the cost of his house was going to be $2 million and it ended up costing $2 billion, I do not suspect he would have to burn it down, he would have to go bankrupt. Thankfully, the Government of Canada has not gone bankrupt. We know that it has collected almost $9 billion too much from Canadian taxpayers.
I want to get back to the real issue here. I have kept in touch with a lot of law enforcement officers who are still out there on the street doing the important work of law enforcement. What I hear from front line police officers is that they cannot rely on the gun registry. If they receive a domestic call where there is a suspicion of violence, it does not do them any good to go to the computer system to find out whether in fact there is a gun present or not. They should presume that there is a gun present in every case.
I have also heard the argument about the tracking of the gun and that it may help solve crime. I do not buy into that either because in many cases the weapon in question, if it has been stolen from a household, if it is traced back to the original owner and then determined whether it was stored safely or not does not do anything to prevent crime. It is a nice after the fact way to maybe attribute blame to somebody for safe storage. The difference here is that there has not really been an effective case ever made on behalf of the government that this has an effective prevention element to it.
It is just as if I took one of those little laser stickers that they are now putting on guns and put in on a chair, and then punched that number into a computer. It would not prevent me from picking that chair up and hitting my friend over the head with it. That type of thinking, and this type of Cartesian thought, that we can simply legislate away crime and put in place these convoluted systems is simply lost on the Canadian public.
More to the fact, the cost overruns are simply astronomical. It is absolutely beyond belief that they would be a thousand times more than were initially predicted by the government.
I am afraid I do not buy the argument. I have met with many police on the issue. I continue to maintain that the money would be better spent putting actual live, breathing, trained law enforcement officers on the street.