“Could this be part of the government’s
plans to turn this huge mess over to the private sector?”
Ottawa
– Relying
three separate sources inside the RCMP gun registry, Garry Breitkreuz, MP for
Yorkton-Melville, left both the Solicitor General and the Justice Minister with
some explaining to do. “Since the
RCMP started springing leaks in 1997, our sources have proven to be right every
time. I have directed my staff to
file the usual Access to Information requests to document what these sources are
telling me. But this information is
too important to sit on for the next few months while the RCMP and the Justice
Department stall and stonewall. It’s
time to see if the news media can confirm some of these facts and make them
public. Even denials now can be
useful when we finally uncover the whole truth,” said Breitkreuz.
Here’s the statement
Breitkreuz made in the House of Commons:
Mr. Garry Breitkreuz (Yorkton—Melville, Canadian
Alliance): Mr. Speaker,
insiders tell us the RCMP's budget for the Canadian firearms registry has been
cut by 40%. Twenty verifiers already have been laid off. Scenarios of up to 100%
layoffs have been discussed with staff and union officials. Meanwhile the staff
has been directed to triple output.
In the past two years the
RCMP have issued on 550,000 firearms registration certificates, and the current
backlog is over 180,000. There are between 7 million and 20 million firearms
left to register in the next two years. The registrar says there is a 90% error
rate in the applications they receive and it will take until 2010 to register
all the legally owned firearms in Canada.
Why is the Solicitor
General cutting the registry's budget and laying off staff. I wish it was
because the Liberals were rethinking the billion dollars they are going to waste
on this futile exercise, and they will spend it fighting real crime.
Unfortunately the layoffs probably have more to do with the justice minister's
privatization plans than common sense.
“In addition to filing
Access to Information requests, I will be writing letters to the Privacy
Commissioner and the Auditor General to help me dig up the truth on this
file,” advised Breitkreuz. “I
will be asking the Privacy Commissioner to investigate the information we have
received, that there is a 50% error rate in the RCMP’s database of the 3.5
million Canadians they class as ‘potentially dangerous.’
I will be asking the Auditor General to have his auditors examine what
effect the RCMP budget cuts, layoffs, tripling of production and elimination of
the firearms verification program will have on the stated objectives and
effectiveness of the gun registration system.”
“All the signals we are
getting from the Minister and her bureaucrats is that the Liberal’s gun
registry is in trouble – trouble of Titanic proportions.
The more they try to patch the problems in the system, the more problems
they create. This Titanic is going
down just like the last one did,” concluded Breitkreuz.
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