Garry Breitkreuz

[Supply, March 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. We are debating our supply day motion today. I think the minister picked up the wrong speech.

[Supply, March 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The Auditor General said the cost benefit analysis had not been done.

[Supply, March 25th, 2003]

I want a cost.

[Supply, March 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I have a lot of questions and I will quickly go through them.

I want to make a comment, before I ask my questions, on the bogus statistics that the minister has trotted out. For example, he said that the number of stolen firearms has decreased 35%. Just to point out how ridiculous a statistic that is the number of reported firearms stolen has decreased, but the numbers stolen is probably much bigger. The Toronto Police Association has reported that over 70% of the handguns that are used in crime are unregistered. People are afraid to even report this anymore because the victim now becomes the criminal. That is a bogus statistic.

I could do that with every single statistic that the minister has trotted out here. It is ridiculous when he talks about social values. What do Canadians value? They value money well spent, their tax money spent effectively reducing violence and crime in their society. Because the minister has refused to release a cost benefit analysis they are beginning to suspect that the Canadian Alliance is right and the Liberal minister is pulling the wool over their eyes portraying this as gun control.

Why is the justice minister hiding the cost benefit analysis from Parliament, the police and the rest of society? That is my first question.

My second question is, what are the police enforcement costs going to be? The Library of Parliament yesterday released a report that it will be $1 billion in the next few years. That is only one cost among many that the minister is hiding. The billion dollars that the Auditor General reported were not the complete costs. The minister has not told us what the rest of the costs are, why not?

My third question is, what will it cost to go back and correct all of the errors in the system? About 78% of registration certificates contain errors. Hundreds of thousands of firearms owners do not have licences. What will it cost to correct that? There are probably 10 million guns that are still unregistered. What will it cost to register them? There are 4 million Canadians in the firearms police database. What will it cost to go back and correct that? There are 5 million unclarified firearms in the system, incorrect and not verified. It is unreliable and the police cannot use it. The Regina Police Association says it has no use for this registry and it never uses it.

A lot of what the minister is saying is completely false. I have only given an example of five things that must be corrected and the costs will be horrific. The billion dollars has been wasted already and we have not even been told what it will cost to go back and correct this. When will the minister come clean with the cost benefit analysis?

[Supply, March 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I need quite a bit of time to answer the question properly. Let me give the hon. member one example. The RCMP in Saskatchewan took a survey of their frontline police officers. Over 90% of them said to scrap the registry, get rid of it.

I am really questioning what the member is saying. I have talked to frontline police officers. I have even had reports. This month the Regina police have put out a--

[Supply, March 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, the member has asked an excellent question. It strikes at the very heart of what the government tries to do.

The government has tried to spin this out as a public safety measure, that somehow the gun registry is equivalent to gun control. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the statistics to which the member refers are precisely that the RCMP had investigated over 88,000 actual violent crimes, as an example. That was back in 1993, I believe. Of the 88,000-plus violent crimes investigated, only 73 involved the use of a firearm. If we put that in percentage terms, .08% of violent crimes involved a firearm. It begs this question. What good would a registry even do to prevent that .08%? It would do nothing.

The government continues to give Canadians the impression that this is somehow a public safety method of reducing violent crime. We could take the $1 billion, or $2 billion or $3 billion that will be spent soon on this and actually target it toward the root causes of violent crimes in our society. We ignore the other 99.92% of violent crimes and we zero in on that .08%. Even the registry would not have effect on that.

The point the hon. member should be making is that this really will not do anything to improve public safety. It is a waste of a billion dollars. We would better off to put more police on the street to go after the violent criminal.

[Supply, March 25th, 2003]

moved:

That, as this House supported the reduction of funds for the firearms program in the Supplementary Estimates on December 5, 2002, this House should continue to support the reduction of funds for the firearms program in this supply period and subsequent supply periods until the government can provide a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis for the program and provide an accurate total of expenditures to date and a realistic estimate of future costs of implementing the Firearms Act including the total cost:

(a) to fully enforce the Firearms Act;

(b) to verify the 5 million unverified firearms in the registry;

(c) to verify and correct the information in the 4 million records in the Firearms Interest Police database and to bring it into full compliance with the Privacy Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms;

(d) to register the ten million unregistered guns in Canada;

(e) to licence the half million unlicensed gun owners in Canada; and

(f) to the economy and jobs.

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time, as will all Alliance members today.

No program has been a bigger failure or a bigger embarrassment for the government than this seven year old billion dollar firearms fiasco.

The Auditor General said that Parliament was misled. We need to go back to the drawing board because that is true.

Today Parliament can decided to stop the misleading. Today is the day the process to uncover truth about the gun registry can begin. Today Parliament can do the job we were sent here to do; to start taking control over the waste of money on useless government programs. Now is the time to do what is right and that is the purpose of our debate today.

The Auditor General made it clear that the cost of the gun registry would be more than the billion dollars that she reported. The President of the Treasury Board admitted that she still did not know the total cost of the gun registry to date when she appeared before committee last week.

Before the Prime Minister whips his MPs into tears and forces them to vote for another $59 million tonight, should he not tell them how much the gun registry has cost so far and how much it will cost to fully implement? None of that has been told here. If the members opposite would listen to the debate today they might learn something.

Today we are asking the government to stop pouring good money after bad. We are asking the government to stop registering guns until a cost benefit analysis has been completed or at least cabinet releases the one that has already been done. How can we support a program if we do not know what this cost benefit analysis is?

In March 1994 the justice minister was clearly told in a briefing note from his own officials, which we obtained through access to information:

Accurate information about costs and benefits must be obtained before any firm commitment can be made....

That was in reference to the gun registry. That was never done.

Why should we approve more money when we do not have that information? The sad fact is that the cost benefit analysis was done. It just has never been released by cabinet.

Last week the new CEO of the Canadian Firearms Centre admitted, in a briefing for opposition MPs and senators, that cabinet has refused to release the cost benefit analysis. All Canadians must wonder why it would want to hide this information. All Canadians must wonder what the Liberal government is hiding, not just why.

Given the reality of violent crime in Canada, taxpayers would have to wonder why the government has chosen to go down the gun registry trail of wasted loonies. Why not spend the money in the most cost effective manner: target the root causes of violence and of crime in our society?

Some past justice ministers have claimed that the gun registry is saving lives, but every year Statistics Canada data proves the opposite. In 2001 only 31% of homicides were committed with a firearm and almost two-thirds of these were with handguns. The RCMP has been registering handguns since 1934 but 74% of the handguns recovered from firearms homicides were not registered. Therefore it is obviously not working. Surely 69 years of registering legally owned handguns is long enough to prove the registry is a failed policy option.

In December, Toronto police chief, Julian Fantino, confirmed this when he said “A law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped solve any of them”.

In 2001, 65% of the persons accused of homicide had a Canadian criminal record and 58% of these had previously been convicted of violent crimes. Over half of their victims also had a criminal record. Known criminals are the problem, not millions of responsible firearms owners.

The justice minister even trots out a police chief every once in a while to say that the billion dollar registry is worth it even if it saves one life. This is precisely why we need a cost benefit analysis. Without that cost benefit analysis we cannot make a proper judgment.

On March 17 the newspapers reported that there were an estimated 10,000 deaths in Canada each year because of medical mistakes. How many of these lives could the million dollars a year wasted on the gun registry have saved if the money had been spent to mitigate these mistakes?

Finally, here are the main reasons that the justice department's future cost estimates are so wrong. I will focus on this for the next few minutes.

First, there are more than five million firearms registered in the system that still have to be verified by the RCMP. What will it cost to go back and fix that? We have never been told.

Second, up to four million records in the RCMP's Firearms Interest Police database, called FIP, have to be corrected in order to comply with the Privacy Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There are four million Canadians on that list. What will it cost to go back and fix it?

Third, 78% of the registration certificates have entries that were either left blank or left unknown and they still have to be corrected. What will it cost to go back and do that?

Fourth, there are more than 540,000 gun owners who still do not have a firearms licence and they cannot register their firearms without a licence. What will it cost to go back and fix that?

Fifth, more than 300,000 owners of registered handguns do not have a firearms licence authorizing them to own one and they cannot re-register their guns without a licence. What will it cost to go back and fix that? The government has never told us.

Sixth, up to 10 million guns still have to be registered or re-registered in the system. What will that cost to complete?

Seventh, the registry attempts to track two million completely honest citizens but fails to track the addresses of those persons who have already been proven to be most dangerous to society. This includes 131,000 persons prohibited from owning firearms by the courts; 35,000 people under court restraining orders; and more than 9,000 persons who have had their firearms licences refused or revoked. The government does not track them but if people are gun owners and they do not notify of a change of address in one month, they could get a criminal record.

I will not have time to list all these but I will just go to my tenth point. The Department of Justice has never released its calculations on the cost to the economy and jobs.

On August 16, 1999, the department denied Parliament and the public the entire 115 page report on the economic impact of the gun registry. It was declared a cabinet secret. This is a 115 page report on the economic impact of that registry, which the House is not allowed to see. What is the government hiding? This is a Liberal ram it down their throats federal-provincial relations plan. No national program can ever work without the co-operation and full support of the provinces.

The justice minister claims that the gun registry has refused and revoked more than 9,000 firearms licences but he refuses to admit that it did not even need a gun registry to do this. He gives the impression to the public that this is somehow part of the benefits of this whole program but he does not tell us that they never follow up to see if these people do not have a firearm. We do not have enough police resources to go after the criminals in our society today. Instead we waste it on a paper pushing exercise.

We need a better administered firearms licensing system. Administer that, ensure it is working and scrap the registry.

The justice minister also keeps Parliament in the dark by refusing to acknowledge that the statistics from his own department show that the firearms licence and refusal rate was twice as good under the old RCMP firearms acquisition certificate program, FAC, than it is now. The government gives the impression that somehow it is doing a better job with the billion dollars it is spending now. If we look at the facts, it is actually worse.

Finally, the gun registry is a joke, an expensive joke, perpetrated on taxpayers and a cruel joke perpetrated on law-abiding firearms owners. It is time to put an end to this. It is time to scrap the gun registry. By the time this debate is done today I want to see the cost benefit analysis. I want to see the government produce the study that shows this is worth the $1 billion, $2 billion, $3 billion which will be spent on that in the next few years.

I put out a report yesterday issued by the Library of Parliament. It clearly indicates that in the next few years $1 billion will be spent on enforcement alone. If only one-tenth of the gun owners in Canada, who now have not complied with the law, are charged, we will spend on average $1 billion more.

Before we do that, we should be saying no to the $59 million for which the government is asking. That is what the vote is about today. I hope that there are enough people on the other side of the House who will stand up on their hind legs and start to make democracy work.

[Firearms Registry, March 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, today the Library of Parliament reported that the costs to enforce the gun registry could be a billion dollars in the next few years. We do not know how much the gun registry has cost so far. We do not know how much it is going to cost in the future to implement.

Why is the Prime Minister forcing his MPs to vote more money for this firearms fiasco? Why?

[Firearms Registry, March 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, last week the Treasury Board president could not tell us how much the gun registry has cost so far. The Auditor General said that she was still waiting for the government's report on the total costs.

Before the Prime Minister whips his MPs into tears and forces them to approve another $59 million, should he not tell them how much the gun registry has cost so far?

[Prime Minister, March 20th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Prime Minister terrorized his own caucus with strong-arm tactics that were an affront to democracy.

The Liberal government will not tell Parliament what the total cost of the gun registry has been so far. It also greatly underestimated the future costs of implementing and enforcing this legislation. Yet we are being asked to approve another $172 million.

Is the Prime Minister proud of his schoolyard bullying tactics? Is he proud that he forced his own MP to burst into tears at the thought of having to ignore the constituents who elected her? Is he proud of his anti-democratic antics?

Taxpayers have been robbed for years to pay for this firearms fiasco but now it has become a symbol of the anti-democratic devices of the government.

The Prime Minister should apologize to his own MPs and Canadians. Better yet, he should take a walk in the snow before it is all gone. A Canadian Alliance government would have the guts and leadership to put an end to this mess.