Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Central Nova.
We just heard the phrase “value for money”, and that is exactly what I will be zeroing in on as I make some remarks about one of the biggest areas of misspending that the Liberal government has ever endeavoured upon. It is an area in which we would like to have a modest reduction of about $20 million, or $24 million if we take in both motions, that we would like to see in the vote that will take place later today.
The issue I am talking about is the gun registry. The government wants to portray this as gun control but it has gone 500 times over budget at this point and it could even be more than that. It is unbelievable that we would have the government portray this as wise spending and a good investment.
I want to begin with a statement that was made by the Auditor General in December 2002 when she brought down her report on the gun registry. She said, “Parliament is being kept in the dark”. I assert today and I want to impress upon the members of the House of Commons that Parliament is still being kept in the dark. I believe that the minister and the bureaucrats are still deceiving MPs and Parliament.
I have put in over 500 access to information requests on this issue trying to find out what this government is doing. It hides the information, not just from me, but by extension Parliament and all Canadians. It is one of the hugest boondoggles ever and we as Conservatives would like to reduce the spending in this area a little bit.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety sent out an e-mail a couple of days ago. In that e-mail he made 17 claims that I am going to point out are blatantly false. They are at variance with the truth and I will take them one by one and go through them.
Twenty minutes ago a Liberal, who has since disappeared, came in here and said that she wants to hear some rational arguments. I am going to give some and I wish she would be listening because I do not think they can vote to support the ridiculous spending that is still going on with the gun registry.
The following is the first claim that was made by the parliamentary secretary. He said, “important client service and public safety results are being achieved by the gun registry”. Nothing could be further from the truth. The entire premise of the gun registry defies all logic. Let us think about this. We have a firearm and beside it is a registration certificate. How can laying this piece of paper beside this gun prevent anyone from pulling the trigger or doing something with that firearm? It defies logic that it would ever work and yet that is the entire premise of the gun control measure that the government has portrayed as being an important client service and public safety results being achieved. That is why we do not see anything being accomplished by this.
The following is the second claim the parliamentary secretary makes. He says, “An Environics survey taken in January 2003 found that 74% of Canadians support the current gun control legislation”. The questions that were asked in that survey were: Do you support gun registration? Do you support safe storage of firearms? Do you support background checks before people buy a firearm? Do you support safety courses being taken by firearms owners? If they had asked me those questions I would have forgotten they were even talking about gun registry by the time they went through the whole list and I probably would have said that I support those things, which I do, but the registry is the biggest boondoggle. Therefore to say that 74% of Canadians support the registry is misleading at best.
I want to tell members about another survey that was taken in April, 2004 by JMCK. The question it asked was whether we would want the gun registry scrapped and put that money into fighting violent crime and devoting it to other areas such as frontline policing. The results, which I think were a very accurate indication of where Canadians were at, were that 76.7% of the people said to scrap the registry and put the money into places like frontline policing where it will do some good. That is what we are asking.
It is very misleading for the Liberals to say that the public is on side. They are not.
Another claim that the Liberals make is that the Canadian firearms program is much more than gun registry. It comprises safe storage, handling and transportation of firearms, safety, training and education, effective border controls, in addition to the licensing of firearms owners.
Before the government passed Bill C-68 we had all of those things and it was done for approximately $10 million a year. Now the government is saying it will try to get the costs down to $85 million per year. It has been way above that at the present time.
We had all of those things prior to 1995. Now the Liberals are starting to make the claim, “Oh, this is what it is all about”. That is extremely misleading and Canadians had better take a closer look when they begin to support the Liberals on this because it is not true.
Let me talk about another Liberal claim. The government says that there are about two million firearms licence holders and about seven million firearms registered, a true success story in just over five years.
I gasp when I hear the Liberals make this kind of a claim. They know and I have revealed to them the information that I have garnered through my access to information request. The government says five years. The Liberals cannot even count. The bill was passed in 1995. They cannot count years.
The Liberals claim it was a success, when according to academic studies that have been done on this, more than 400,000 firearms owners are still unlicensed. Some 400,000 are unlicensed. According to the government's own import and export records, there are still at least eight million guns in this country that are unregistered.
The government claims this is a success story. If there are less than half of the firearms registered, how can that be a success?
That begs the question, even if the firearms were registered, how does that piece of paper affect what the criminal does with his firearm? It does not. He is probably not even in the registry.
Here is another Liberal claim. Approximately 12,000 individual firearms licences have been refused or revoked to date by the chief firearms officers across Canada. What does that amount to? It is a 0.6% success rate. Canada had a 20 year licensing program previous to this which had over twice that rate and we did not have to spend over $100 million per year.
What does that $2 billion firearms centre do with the 12,000 newly identified criminals, the 12,000 who have not been approved to buy a licence? They are taken off the list and they are never checked again.
In fact, there are 176,000 people in this country who have been prohibited by the courts from owning firearms. There are 176,000 people who do not have to report their change of address, but if they are licensed firearms owners they do.
If a person does not report their change of address within one month, that person could end up in prison for up to two years. However, if a person does not have a licence and the person is one of those 176,000 that should not own a firearm, that person does not have to report a change of address and no one will check.
If I were cynical I would say that if a person wanted the government to stop hassling him, he should apply for a licence and be rejected and then he would not have to worry any more. Then he would not be hassled by the government.
I have counted 17 claims that the parliamentary secretary made that are blatantly false. I would like to deal with more of them, but my time is running out.
I will read something that was said in reply to the Liberal claim that there are 6,000 firearms that have been traced in gun crimes and firearms trafficking cases within Canada and internationally. Here is what the police chief of the largest police force in Canada said:
We have an ongoing gun crisis including firearms related homicides lately in Toronto, and a law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped us solve any of them. None of the guns we know to have been used were registered, although we believe that more than half of them were smuggled into Canada from the United States. The firearms registry is long on philosophy and short on practical results considering the money could be more effectively used for security against terrorism as well as a host of other public safety.
That sums it up.
