Stephen Harper

[Firearms Registry, December 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, what this party will do is tell the chiefs of police across Canada to put policemen on the street to enforce real laws against real criminals including the thing the minister is unwilling to do today, to have tough laws against child pornographers and pedophiles.

Let me go on. The minister has no idea how the policy will work but he continues to defend it. Let me ask him a couple of straightforward questions.

How much more money will he need to finish the gun registry? How much will it cost annually to maintain after that? Does he have any idea?

[Firearms Registry, December 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, society is protected by being tough on crime, not by spending $1 billion on a gun registry.

The government says that it will go ahead. If the government actually needs the $72 million that it is now not asking for and not spending, how will it finish the gun registry when, by its own admission, 2.5 million to 3 million guns still need to be registered? How will this thing go ahead?

[Firearms Registry, December 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the government will get consent from this party not to spend any more money, I can assure him of that.

However, for a majority government to walk into the House on the day of its estimates and pull its request for the money is unprecedented political and financial mismanagement. It has already committed to spending $113.5 million. This request for supplementary money was tabled in October.

I want to ask the Minister of Justice this. If we do not proceed with this today, is he assuring us that none of the $72 million has already been spent?

[Firearms Registry, December 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General has confirmed that the costs of the universal gun registry have ballooned from $2 million to $1 billion; 500 times more. The Prime Minister, the Minister of Industry and other Liberals are out there blaming gun owners, blaming the provinces and, in some cases, getting it accurate and blaming each other.

Today the Minister of Justice has on the Order Paper a request for another $72 million for the registry. Is he now prepared to withdraw his request today for that additional money?

[Government Contracts, December 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the numbers, he says, are well known. The truth is, the justice minister does not have a clue about how much this is costing.

On another issue of mismanagement, yesterday the public works minister prevented a second audit of the sponsorship scandal from seeing the light of day. He is hiding behind a police investigation to prevent this information from coming to Parliament.

Surely the minister is not suggesting that every page of a 2,500 page audit is subject to police investigation. Will the minister agree in the House to reveal the portions of the audit that the police are not using in their investigation?

[Firearms Registry, December 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the justice minister says the numbers are known. In his defence of the massive overspending on the firearms registry, yesterday his office put out a press release stating that the projected costs for this year were $113.5 million. That forecast did not even include the extra $72 million that the justice minister asked for and received from the House in supplementary estimates two months ago.

How can the justice minister's financial oversight be so incompetent that he does not even know about the current expenditures in his own department?

[Auditor General's Report, December 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I want to return to the Auditor General's report and government mismanagement.

Last week the government denied suggestions of a billion dollar cost overrun in the firearms registry, yet the Auditor General says the government has known this for two years.

All of this sounds very familiar. The government denied the billion dollar boondoggle at HRDC, it is attempting to sweep the sponsorship scandals under the rug and it is headed toward a multi-billion dollar boondoggle on Kyoto.

My question is straightforward. What financial controls will the new finance minister put in place to end the mismanagement problems of his predecessor?

[Kyoto Protocol, December 3rd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the plan says they are both open and not open, which I guess does not surprise me.

Let me give an example of what happened when the government set targets without a plan, the gun registry. The Auditor General today said that cost overruns are without precedent. Instead of costing taxpayers $2 million, the gun registry has now cost $1 billion.

How can Canadians trust the government on Kyoto or anything else when it is running 500 times over budget on the gun registry?

[Kyoto Protocol, December 3rd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, that is not what it says in the plan. There is still a gap between the reductions that the government can identify and the Kyoto targets. Kyoto was made in Japan by the way.

The international trading credits scheme is a dollars for jobs scheme. We send our jobs overseas and they get the dollars too. Without an implementation plan we cannot know how many credits the government will buy and we do not know how much they will cost.

Therefore, let me ask the minister, is the government open or not open, under any circumstances, to purchasing emissions credits to meet its Kyoto targets?

[Kyoto Protocol, December 3rd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the worst part of the Kyoto accord is the international emissions trading credits scheme, whereby Canada buys credits rather than actually reducing emissions.

Recently members of the government and the Liberal Party have been speaking both for and against these things. They are suggesting that one can be for Kyoto but against this particular part of the accord.

To be clear, when the government ratifies Kyoto does it intend to ratify the whole accord including sections dealing with international emissions trading?