Mr. Speaker, many individuals, such as members of the NRA, often try to take advantage by using misinformation in order to espouse a specific side.
We need to treat issues of this nature fairly. When police officers and members of police chief associations, emergency response teams, paramedics, ambulance attendants, firefighters and first-time responders from across the country say that there is great value to the gun registry, at the very least we need to listen and respect that.
Part of respecting that is to ensure there are actual facts brought to the debate. Facts have been lacking and I would encourage that we look at what is the most responsible thing to do in this debate.
I have risen in regard to the cost factor for the province of Quebec. I have raised that because it speaks volumes in terms of to what degree the government has chosen to sabotage and completely kill the gun registry. Whether it is good or bad is truly irrelevant to the government. It has chosen to kill it at any cost.
I believe the Quebec example is a great example to use in terms of how the government sometimes fails to recognize common sense. I will explain.
The government has said that it wants nothing to do with the gun registry and is killing it. The registry has a database. The Conservatives say how much they believe it costs. In reality, we know it is substantially less. However, the data bank is there and is in place. They want to destroy the data bank. They want to hit the delete button. They want the shredders working overtime to ensure there is nothing out there to show there is a gun that is registered in Canada. They are determined to do that.
The province of Quebec is saying that the government should wait. People in the province believe that having a gun registry makes sense. They want to listen to what members of our law enforcement agencies and many different advocates, such as women's groups and other groups, are saying. They are saying that it has true value. In fact, it is one of the many tools that law enforcement officers can access. They recognize its value and they want to have it. Therefore, they contacted the government and asked to have the information in that data bank, which makes sense.
The government came up with some lame excuse. It said that it could not provide the data bank due to privacy. Prior to that it said that it did not care if it were provincially or federally administered it wanted nothing to do with it. Therefore, the Conservatives are prepared to waste tens of millions of dollars. They would rather have the province of Quebec re-establish the data bank at a substantial cost. By forcing Quebec to do that, the government is causing it to use valuable tax dollars that could be spent on community policing, an outreach office, capital infrastructure programs to have youth more involved in positive activities or a litany of other initiatives.
Whether one is for or against the gun registry, anyone looking at that would say that is plain dumb and a stupid policy of the government.
The government should be looking at what it is saying. When it talks about building federal-provincial relationships, how can it sit at the table and say that it does not want to give provinces the information in the data bank and that they have to create their own, causing the provincial government to spend tens of millions of dollars when it is in fact not necessary?
The bottom line is the gun registry has had a lot of proponents over the years. If the government is going to do something with it, as we continue to go through the debate, in a very limited way I must say, it should at least respect the facts and stop trying to feed misinformation which we know is just not true. It does not add to the debate. If anything, it adds to the anger and resentment that government cannot be honest.
