Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the very comprehensive reply to the Speech from the Throne by my hon. colleague from Provencher. He raised a number of excellent points in his speech.
Dealing with the last point that he raised, I have been maintaining over the last couple of days that as more and more facts about the sponsorship scandal leak out, it is becoming increasingly clear to Canadians that where the Prime Minister is concerned, there is only one of two possibilities. Either he was completely and utterly incompetent in his job as finance minister in not knowing what was going on in his own government and in his own home province, or he had to be complicit, he had to have weighed his options and then elected to remain silent. It could only be one of those two things. Regardless of whether it is the fact that he was completely incompetent or that he was complicit, why would Canadians trust him to run the affairs of the country?
The other issue I want to raise is an exceedingly important issue that my colleague, the justice critic for the Conservative Party, raised during his remarks. It is the issue of the gun registry. He knows as I do that like his riding of Provencher, my riding of Prince George—Peace River has been vehemently, utterly and absolutely opposed to the criminal misuse of over $1 billion since the gun registry's inception.
I wonder if he could comment and draw a comparison between a government that is trying to portray itself as a new government entering a new era, yet it has failed to bring forward a workable sexual predator registry at the same time as maintaining a huge drain on the public purse with the gun registry.