I don't know how much clearer I can be. The suggestion--and I think it's an artificial distinction without a difference--that somehow the registry is separate from the data.... The registry is the data; without the data there is no registry. So when our government and our party made the very clear commitment that we would scrap the long-gun registry, that we would end it, implicit in that, indeed explicit, is that we would be destroying the information that's been collected under the authority of that legislation. There's simply no other answer to that.
It's disingenuous for someone to say to Canadians that when we were going to end the registry, we were actually going to keep the information. I think if any politician had made that claim on the campaign trail, they would have been thoroughly discredited. This is a revisionist type of excuse that some are making in order to try to justify flipping their position on the registry.