Mr. Speaker, again we are having some interesting debate here on the firearms legislation. It just keeps coming back to haunt the government and rightly so, because the government is now saying that Bill C-10 in this form is the panacea. It does not matter how it brings it back in here, either in through the Senate, or through the back door or the front door: the government says this is going to make everything better.
As for the $1 billion the Auditor General found, whether we say it is a full billion or only $680 million, she did not have time to go to the well again and get all the numbers because she had to report to Parliament on a given day. She got up to $680 million and said they knew it would be a lot worse than that, that they knew it would be $1 billion within a year.
Another little factor has come to light, too, and perhaps Mr. Speaker will correct me if I am wrong, but the dollars that went to Quebec to implement its own registry are not reported in the same way. Quebec does its own thing in a lot of instances and this is one of them. The cash transfers that are done in the political envelope to that province are not reported in the same way on this bill. The numbers could actually be higher yet. That may bear some looking at.
Bill C-10 is supposed to be the panacea. It is supposed to make everything better. The government claims it will streamline things and pick up on the errors and omissions. The government is saying this will all be cleaned up under this one bill. That is a big job.
We have heard a lot of arguments from Liberals on the other side today trying to justify what has been done, how it has been done, and how they can go home and sell it to their folks. They are claiming that it is all about public safety and then they cancel the training. If this is about public safety, those types of things have to be done.
Canadians are a common sense people. We just do the right things. We do not have to be told again and again. We do not need legislation telling us to store our firearms safely. We do that as a matter of course because it is common sense to handle firearms safely. These guys seem to think they need more rules and regulations.
Here is what amazes me. We have seen what happened with the SARS outbreak in the last little while, but Bill C-68 created this monster today. As a result of the over-production of that bill, the overreaction to a situation that happened in Montreal where they politicized the heck out of it, the government came out with Bill C-68. But then we had a SARS outbreak and the government would not do a thing; it procrastinated to the point where it got totally out of hand. So we have two ends of the spectrum here. The government overreacted with Bill C-68 and under-reacted with the SARS crisis. We have to try to justify one to the other and I do not think the Liberals can do that; they are found lacking at both ends.
The Liberals have talked about streamlining this registry and saving $3 million a month. They say they are going to save that but they still will not tell us what the cost is. They are saving $3 million of what? Is it $100 million a year or $200 million a year? It is going to be a five year cycle now, so for anybody who is in the system, when their five years are up they will not know what it is going to cost them to re-register the guns they have already registered for $10 or whatever today; maybe the fee was waived. They do not know what it is going to cost, so maybe we will start to recoup all of that money, but it will be solely on the backs of firearms owners. Those owners who have more than one firearm could be hit hard. We do not know, but we do not trust these guys.
The member for Mississauga South talked earlier about this huge 90% error and omission rate. He was talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in those errors and omissions. No one from outside the CFC has had a look at the errors and omissions other than those cards, the PALs, the POLs and the little registration cards themselves that my guys are getting back. The errors and omissions I have seen are committed not by the gun owner or the gun but by the CFC.
One fellow I know received 12 cards back because he registered 12 long guns, twenty-twos, shotguns and rifles. Every one of those cards was identical. Every card indicated “unknown” under barrel length. The serial number was unknown. The make of gun was unknown. The action was unknown. He did not send in the card like that. It would not have been entered like that. The officials would have gone back to him right away. I have seen PALs with somebody's picture and somebody else's name on them. Nobody sent them in that way.
So as for the errors and omissions, the member for Mississauga South said it was those terrible gun owners who subverted the government. He said it was a protest. What a load of hogwash. It did not happen that way at all. Yes, there were people who waited until the bitter end. People do that every year with Revenue Canada; I have been one of them. We do not want to send in that money because we do not think we are getting any bang for our buck. The member said these serious errors and omissions are all because of gun owners. That is hogwash. That will not fly at all.
As for the whole idea that this will streamline things and save money, that there will be more done on the Internet, as members well know, the e-mails we all receive and the work that is done on the Internet now is prone to error. People do have to type it in. The best way to say it is garbage in, garbage out. The gun control registry system is still going to be prone and susceptible to errors. It is bound to happen when we are talking about makes of firearms and serial numbers of firearms. A lot of them have no serial number. This has to be entered; the system has to come to grips with this. This is where the problem started and the bill will in no way ease any of those facts or figures. It will continue being a huge, dark money loss.
There is another side of the argument. My colleague from Yorkton—Melville has done a tremendous job on this file. He has been light years ahead of everybody on this one and it turns out that he was right in a lot of his submissions. He also talks about how enforcing the firearms bill could be a huge black hole. Let us look at convictions and tracking people down and so on; it would not be hard to spend another billion dollars enforcing it, simply against people who had no intention of going against the law but who, because of the way this thing is written, implemented and enforced, become criminals.
There are a lot of us who find ourselves in that situation. There were things we thought we had registered, but now it turns out the government has lost them. So now we are criminals and we have to try to fight our way out of that bureaucratic malaise there.
I have had some discussions with some CFC officials on one piece that I own. When I explained everything that was wrong with the way the registration did not carry through, the guy said I had two choices. He said I could weld it shut and keep it or I could turn it in. Those were my two choices.
I said that neither one of them was acceptable to me. I talked to the RCMP. The officer said they could not even take it in because it is considered prohibited at this point. He said, “Sir, maybe the best thing I could do is say that we never had these discussions”. He was ready to sweep it under the rug. That is public safety: just ignore it and it will go away.
The bill started out as a combination of a cruelty to animals bill and some changes to the Firearms Act and what it came back as is cruelty to firearms owners. That is really where we are at this point.
Mr. Speaker, in your riding you know there are hunters up there. I have been through your riding and it is a beautiful piece of Canada, beautiful country, and there are a lot of hunters and fishermen and so on. You probably enjoy that yourself, Mr. Speaker, so I know you are going to have some problems with this in trying to justify where this has gone.
If the government were really and truly concerned about public safety and felt that this was the right way to go, why have we had six amnesty periods since 1998? Why is it taking that long to implement the bill? We have seen bills come to the House and slam-bam they are gone.
The majority government brings in a bill that it wants. It has what is called a majority. It has control of the schedule and the planning. It decides what is up on a given day and how long it will stay up. It can push through the bill, but with this we have seen them test the waters and pull back, test the waters and pull back, which has a lot more to do with backbench solidarity over there. We have seen some comments from a lot of these folks over there who say, “Oh, this is terrible. We should not vote in the $59 million that they wanted at the end of the year. We should not”. But they all stood up today and invoked closure. A Liberal is a Liberal. They just cannot help themselves. They have to be there when their government comes knocking and calling.
There is another huge thing. The government talks about streamlining and being more cost effective, yet the Liberals are adding millions more people and firearms to this list with Bill C-10, such as all the pellet guns and anything with certain muzzle velocities and so on. A lot of them have never been tested for a decision on what they are; a lot of them have been modified and so on.
We have a lot of kids who are 8, 10 or 12 years old, especially out west, who use pellet guns to control varmints around the farmyard. These kids are not criminals. They cannot vote. They are not old enough to vote out this piece of junk, but they are criminals because their pellet guns are over the muzzle velocity that some Liberal member decided on. How ridiculous. There are millions of kids out there with pellet guns. They are not hurting anyone. They are plinking sparrows and crows and so on. For all we know, maybe they are helping us control the West Nile virus every time they shoot a crow.
There is also another big problem. Some of the members on the other side have said that public support is at 74%, that the public just loves the bill, but that is until people find out what it costs. If those polls are really accurate, can anyone explain to me and the people of my riding why eight provinces and three territories are dead set against this? Five provinces and three territories will not administer it. They will take no part in it. If the polling numbers are accurate, why are the provinces not on side? They are the same people, the same constituents. It does not make any sense to me at all.
Then there are the police chiefs. Some of them have been politicized. We have certainly seen that in the way they handle it, but a lot of them are now saying to their police forces, “Please do not arrest the guy because we are not going to do the paperwork. We cannot make it stick. We have an unenforceable law. Even though the Supreme Court loved it, we cannot implement this on the ground”.
Whether we streamline this through Bill C-10 or ignore it for another five years and try to bring it back, nothing will change here until we change the government on the other side.
