Mr. Speaker, a lot of statistics were cited and I wish I had time to go over each one.
The member made quite a point about police confiscating or getting a court order to remove 180 firearms from a residence. A key thing that the Liberals do, the Bloc does and some of the NDP members do is confuse registration and licensing. What we need and what the police would like is to have more resources to deal with this, but there is a difference between laying a piece of paper beside every gun in the country, which is gun registration, which is what we are dealing with in this legislation, and the licensing of every firearms owner.
The courts have made over 200,000 prohibition orders in this country but they are never enforced. Why? Because the police do not have the resources at this point to do it.
If the member were in government, which he is not, he would have to make the decision on the best way to spend our money: do we put $1 billion into a paper pushing exercise that does not affect the criminal, or do we put it into enforcing the laws of this country, such as prohibition orders? Why do we not have more police to check the people who are not supposed to own firearms? That to me seems logical.
I want to quote what a former provincial Liberal candidate had to say. By the way, Brian Ford was the Ottawa Police chief and he was upset. This is from the Ottawa Sun of May 17, 2006:
Ottawa's former top cop says he supported the gun registry because he didn't know the Liberals were lying to him. "I was assured by government -- it's on budget"—
The budget was $2 million and it has gone 500 times over budget. He publicly supported the registry as chairman of a Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police committee. He said, “They were lying to me. It bothers me. I was telling people what I believed was the truth”.
That is what we need to have come out. We do not need all this rhetoric, theorizing and explanation about how it might work.
I want to refute something else the member said, that gun control is working in some countries. England went to very strict gun controls recently to the point where it banned all handguns. Gun crime has increased. One cannot simply implement these laws and say that passing the law is going to work. We have effective laws in this country. People are not allowed to carry handguns. Let us start putting police on the street to—