Mr. Speaker, I should probably say, on behalf of Canadian firearms owners and on behalf of the Conservatives, how grateful I am to the Minister of Public Safety for telling the truth about the Liberal government's sham of a buyback. Unfortunately he has not been so candid in the House of Commons when he knows the cameras and the microphones are rolling, but when he was speaking with a constituent, a tenant, an ordinary Canadian raising very legitimate concerns, he said that it is a waste of time. It is a waste of money. It is not going to go after the causes of gun crime in this country, which has run rampant after 10 years of Liberal government and mismanagement of the justice file. Of course, when he is called on this in the House of Commons, he retreats back to the Liberal talking points that I am sure his parliamentary secretary will give us this evening.
. I want to ask a very fundamental question about the buyback, because we know that the order in council prohibited what was at first over 1,500 models of firearms, many of them used quite regularly and quite routinely for hunting, some of them obsolete and non-existent in the Canadian market. The order in council, which launched the prohibition that has justified the so-called buyback, came after a tragedy in Canada, a killing spree in Portapique, Nova Scotia, to which every sensible, reasonable person in this country would respond with disgust and horror.
The problem is that it was not a spree that involved legally owned firearms. It was not a spree that would have been prevented by the very measures the Liberal government introduced in the days that followed. The reason I bring this up is that the last time I spoke to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety about firearms, he invoked that tragedy to justify the Liberal government's gun confiscation scheme, a scheme that by its very design targets only law-abiding gun owners, because the criminals in this country are not the ones who will be lining up to turn over their illegal firearms to the government, regardless of whether there is any compensation.
What we have here is something the government says will cost three-quarters of a billion dollars. By the way, with Liberal math, I believe we need to triple it and add 50% or something to get somewhere close to the real number. Even if we take at face value that it will cost three-quarters of a billion dollars, that is money that could be going towards beefing up law enforcement. It is money that could be going towards beefing up the border to cause us to be better able to intercept illegal firearms coming from the U.S., the firearms that genuinely end up in violent street crime in Toronto, Surrey and other communities across the country.
There were police experts before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights last week, who were very candid, as candid as the Minister of Public Safety is when he does not know he is being recorded. They said there will be not minimal but zero effect on gun crime when the gun confiscation scheme goes forward.
I asked the Prime Minister why he has not fired the public safety minister, who does not even know what a firearms licence is, does not even know what the Canadian firearms safety course is and does not know the classifications of firearms but thinks he somehow has the credibility to tell Canadian gun owners who are vetted and trained that they should turn over their property to the government.
Therefore I ask the government, when will it drop the pretense, drop the facade, get rid of this sham of a buyback and go after real criminals, not law-abiding hunters and sport shooters?