BREITKREUZ’S
RESPONSE
ON
THE CANADIAN FIREARMS PROGRAM
by
Garry Breitkreuz, MP - December 12, 2002
Mr.
Speaker, I listened carefully to the Minister’s statement.
I was wondering why he even bothered to make a statement because he did
not say anything new. There’s
nothing of substance that merited taking time in the house to make this
statement. He’s
saying the same old nonsense we have heard for a long time.
He continues to defend a program that Parliament refuses now to fund.
We
were hoping that the Minister would finally accept responsibility for this
fiasco and announce his resignation for the biggest cost overrun the Auditor
General has ever seen in any government program.
We
were hoping the Minister was going to announce that he was scrapping the gun
registry because it has already wasted almost one billion dollars.
For that billion he will only have registered one-third of the guns in
Canada. Is he going to waste
another billion or two or three before he admits the program is a dismal
failure? How much is it going to
be? We cannot get that response.
If
he wasn’t going to resign or scrap the registry, at least he could have
announced a general amnesty to allow all firearms owners the time they need to
fully comply with the law. Because
his own bureaucracy cannot get the paperwork done, he has put in place a six
month moratorium or amnesty for them to their papers, all because his
bureaucrats need more time to process the firearms licences and registration
certificates. Does he really want to drive millions of gun owners and guns
underground?
The
Liberal’s issued a general amnesty in 1978 and the Conservatives also did it
in 1992. What possible excuse can the Minister have for sticking to a
completely arbitrary political deadline of December 31 of this year?
The
Minister’s own User Group on Firearms tells the Minister that the way his
program is designed is driving firearms into the black market – the exact
opposite of what the public and Parliament was promised.
Is the Minister listening to his own User Group?
Has he even met with them yet?
Poorly
drafted legislation and a 90% error rate in the system makes it impossible for
police to know who owns guns or where they are stored - the very thing the
Minister’s promised the police the gun registry would do.
Three
Justice Ministers who have been in charge of this file have so infuriated the
provincial and territorial governments that eight of them have opted out of the
administration of the gun registry and the Western provinces refuse to enforce
the Firearms Act. This is criminal
law for which the provinces do not want any part of.
That ought to indicate to Canadians that there’s a serious problem
here.
This
week, the Nunavut Court of Justice suspended firearms registration requirements
to the Nunavut Inuit because of lack of service, poor communication and low
compliance. I remind the Minister
that he is responsible for ensuring that all Canadians are treated equally
before and under the law. If they
no longer comply with it, what about the rest of us?
The
Minister’s gun registry is such a boondoggle -- and all those people
blathering over there better listen carefully -- that the Minister doesn’t
even keep track of the current addresses of the 131,000 persons prohibited from
owning firearms and has no provision to check if their guns have been removed
from their possession or to ensure that they haven’t acquired more guns
illegally. Instead of keeping track
of 131,000 convicted criminals, he is going to try to keep track of two million
law abiding gun owners. Is there
any sense in that?
He
has his priorities backwards because he thinks it’s easier to track two
million law abiding, honest people than 131,000 convicted criminals.
That is the only explanation I can imagine.
Now
the Minister claims thousands of convicted sex offenders have privacy rights.
Where are the Minister’s concerns about the privacy rights of two
million completely innocent firearms owners whom he forces to report their
change of address or go to jail for up to two years?
What
the Minister should have said today is that the gun registry is such a mess that
it is impossible to fix, that he is going to do the right thing and kill it,
scrap it, and abolish it!
Garry
Breitkreuz is the Member of Parliament for Yorkton-Melville, Saskatchewan,
For
more information you can visit Garry’s website at: www.garrybreitkreuz.com