Mr. Speaker, I regret to say that I actually have looked down the barrel of a gun because someone did pull a gun on me. It was not my favourite day, shall we say.
The hon. member seems to have adopted the Prime Minister's somewhat selective memory on issues with respect to crime. Overall crime is down to something in the order of 25% since 1991 and violent crime has actually decreased 7.6% over the same period of time. So again he is wrong.
What the hon. member does not seem to understand is that when the Conservatives basically destroyed the gun registry by de-funding it and by doing pretty well everything possible to destroy the gun registry, they made guns more available. When guns are made more available, it follows that more criminality will occur, more people will be in the justice system, more people will be in prisons and therefore those prisons will need more funds.
What the Minister of Public Safety is doing is funding more prisons. Why does he not deal with something real simple like getting those guns off the street?