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NEWS RELEASE

November 4, 2005
For Immediate Release

STILL NO EVIDENCE GUN REGISTRY IS IMPROVING PUBLIC SAFETY
“Public Safety Minister’s feeble responses show deliberate flaws in system design.”

Ottawa – Saskatchewan M.P. Garry Breitkreuz, the Conservative Firearms Critic, is disappointed with the Public Safety Minister’s lack of answers in her responses to two of his written questions. “If Parliamentarians are going to do a better job of controlling government spending, we need better answers than this,” exclaimed Breitkreuz. “From these responses, I can only conclude that the Liberals have deliberately designed the system so that it can’t produce the hard data Parliament needs to determine whether or not public safety has been improved and if taxpayers are getting value for their money.”

As evidence, Breitkreuz provided the government’s responses (not answers) to two of his written Order Paper Questions that he introduced on September 26, 2005: Q-177 with respect to the tracing of firearms and Q-178 concerning statistics about the effectiveness of the system (see below for links to Q-177 and Q-178 on Breitkreuz’s website).

Breitkreuz offered up three examples to prove his point:

  EXAMPLE #1: Breitkreuz asked: "How many successful firearms traces linked crime scenes to the accused? McLELLAN’S RESPONSE: “The RCMP does not keep statistics on the outcome of a trace.”
BREITKREUZ’S COMMENT: No wonder the Prime Minister embarrassed himself when he claimed that 50% of crime guns are smuggled into Canada from the U.S.A. – his own Minister doesn’t collect the information!
  EXAMPLE #2: Breitkreuz asked: “How does the program track the addresses of these 13,500 now too-dangerous-to-own-firearms persons once their firearms licences have been refused or revoked? McLELLAN’S RESPONSE: “The Canada Firearms Centre does not track the address information for individuals whose licence has been refused or revoked.”
BREITKREUZ’S COMMENT: “Instead of tracking the addresses of a few thousand dangerous individuals, the government tracks the addresses of two million law-abiding gun owners. That’s Liberal logic for you!”
  EXAMPLE #3: Breitkreuz asked: “What specific types of information in the system are actually being accessed and accessed most often by police? McLELLAN’S RESPONSE: “CFRO can only provide the total number of queries made by all agencies with access to it.”
BREITKREUZ’S COMMENT: “More than 5,000 queries a day but the Minister doesn’t know who is accessing it, for what purpose or whether they are actually helping police fight crime. The police and the people of Toronto won’t be comforted by the Minister’s vague responses.

“Why would the Liberals deliberately design a system that produces numbers but no results?” asked Breitkreuz. “I challenge Minister McLellan to explain how this paper-pushing exercise is actually making our streets safer and how wasting a $100 million a year on the gun registry is a better value than putting more police on our streets and highways to catch real criminals. Her latest answers are an insult to the intelligence of taxpayers. Stop pouring good money after bad. Scrap the gun registry.”

BREITKREUZ’S QUESTIONS Q-177 & Q-178 & PUBLIC SAFETY MINISTER’S RESPONSES
http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/news/newinfo2005.htm

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