37^th Parliament, 2^nd Session
(September 30, 2002 -     )

Edited Hansard • Number 065

Friday, February 21, 2003

[Hansard – Page 3870-3871]

Firearms Registry

 Mr. Garry Breitkreuz (Yorkton—Melville, Canadian Alliance): Mr. Speaker, the justice minister's announcement today of an action plan to fix the gun registry is very much like sending the deckhands of the Titanic out with rolls of duct tape to fix the gaping gash in the side of the ship, except the duct tape is made of gold.

    The minister's action plan means that in a very few years, Parliament would be debating a $2 billion boondoggle. This is because he failed to address the real problems in the legislation and in the registry itself.

    The minister proudly proclaims that even with everything he announced today, the gun registry will still cost $67 million a year. The minister's admission means that his great action plan will save $5 million a year from the $72 million a year that Mr. Hession's report estimated the gun registry would cost without streamlining. But does anyone believe the justice minister's estimates?

    Let us take any one year and look at how much he forecasted to spend in the main estimates, and then look at how much he actually spent. The Auditor General uncovered the fact that the justice minister made inappropriate use of the supplementary estimates. The Auditor General said:

    This means that the justice department's estimates were consequently wrong and understated by 70%. This would be a good rule of thumb for Parliament and the pubic to use when they are trying to figure out how much the gun registry would really cost to fully implement and how much it would cost to maintain each and every year after that.

    How can the justice minister claim that he is being transparent when he has been keeping Parliament in the dark for the last 11 weeks? He was more open with the media this week when he admitted his cash management program consisted of not paying his bills. His action plan and cost estimates are fatally flawed because he refuses to acknowledge that he has to correct eight years of operational mistakes by his bureaucrats.

    I have made a list of the most critical mistakes that he has failed to correct.

    More than five million firearms are registered in the system but still must be verified by the RCMP. Up to four million records in the RCMP's firearms interest police (FIP) database must be corrected. Some 78% of the registration certificates have entries that have been left blank or marked unknown and they must be corrected. Hundreds of thousands of gun owners still do not have a firearms licence and they cannot register their firearms without a licence. None of these issues have been addressed.

    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. Up to 10 million guns still have to be registered or re-registered in the system, and six million guns are registered without the names and addresses of the owners on them. The provinces have registered 18.6 million cars and they have the names and addresses of the owners on them. Police will not even be able to tell where the registered guns are stored.

    These are just a few of the problems that the minister does not address. The justice minister thinks that moving the gun registry bureaucrats to the Solicitor General's department, as he announced this morning, would improve things. He should give his head a shake and fire a few bureaucrats instead of promoting them.

    Does anyone know what they are doing over there? For example, on Monday of this week, if the government had its way, it would have used closure to ram Bill C-10A through the House.

    The bill would have created a commissioner of firearms reporting to the justice minister and move the RCMP registry of firearms under the direct control of the minister.

    Four days later he is now proposing to move all of these positions to another department, four days after we were going to pass the legislation. This means that in a very short order Parliament will be debating another gun registry bill. This was not one of Mr. Hession's 16 recommendations, by the way.

    Still we are left not knowing how much it really will cost to fully implement and how much it will cost to maintain the program year after year. The minister will not even tell Parliament or the public what it cost to run the program for the last 11 weeks. Does he even know? I do not know. And for what benefit?

    The minister tells us that it will improve public safety while in the meantime police chiefs tell the Canadian people the truth. In December, Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino was asked about the escalation of firearms crime in the city. He said, “A law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped solve any of them”.

    In January, the president of the 66 member Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police said the gun registry laws are, “unenforceable until the mess is sorted out”.

    It is clear that the unenforceable mess, to which Chief Thomas Kaye was referring, will not be fixed by the amendments in Bill C-10A.

    The Deputy Speaker: I will interrupt to say that as is the practice of the House, depending on how much time the minister uses in his statement, an equal amount of time is made available to those responding on behalf of the opposition parties, so I wonder if in about a minute or so the member for Yorkton—Melville could wrap up his comments, please.

    Mr. Garry Breitkreuz: Mr. Speaker, after eight years the justice minister is still trying to convince the public and the provinces that the gun registry is gun control and that this is a wise way to spend public and police funds. It is neither, and only the Liberals do not seem to get it. The government is out of control and we should be putting more police on the street.