Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Prince George—Peace River for that question. I had the opportunity to be in his riding a while ago and saw the hardworking cattle farmers, farmers and small townspeople who pay their taxes regularly. Sometimes they do not like it but they pay those taxes because it is our duty as Canadian citizens. We as parliamentarians in the government have an issue of trust that has now been breached. It is not just that government but it is in fact the people there.
Why trust the government? My learned friend says that it is either incompetent or it is complicit. If it is complicit it suggests that the Prime Minister has been involved in theft, and I cannot make that kind of suggestion in the House and I will not. Therefore I am left to say that it is utter incompetence and there is no reason to trust the Prime Minister and his gang of cabinet members.
The Liberals talk about the failure of the gun registry and say that it is something new. No, it is not. Small arms have been registered in Canada since 1934. This was not a new concept. It was a stupid concept but not a new one. They could have expanded the old one, as stupid an idea as that would have been, but this is not a new one. Again, this demonstrates incompetence.
Yet, in trying to apply the same principle, not to honest farmers, hunters and people who use a .22 rifle as a tool on the farm, they had no problem applying that to the innocent, but when it came to the criminally judged guilty sex offender, there was suddenly a constitutional problem. I remember the minister saying that we could not register convicted sexual offenders because there were issues of double jeopardy and issues of presumption of innocence--