Thank you. After hearing Mr. Thompson, I would still like to ask you one basic question. My introduction will be far shorter than his.
First of all, I would put a lot more stock in his arguments about police officers', probation officers' and victims' demands if he applied the same reasoning to firearms control. The police, victims, doctors, basically everyone wants the registry maintained. And yet, they want it eliminated. Yes, there are studies. We asked for studies at the outset of the committee's deliberations. I will read just 10 lines from the long report we received.
After decades of relatively steady increases, Canada's overall crime rate began to drop significantly in the early 1990s. From 1991 to 2004, crimes reported by police forces dropped by a little over 22 per cent, or by an average of 1.6 per cent per year. The drop in crime was particularly sharp in the 1990s. From 1991 to 2000 alone, the rate dropped by nearly 26 per cent, or an average of a little over 2 per cent per year. The downward trend in the overall crime rate was followed by a period of stability between 2000 and 2002, then a notable increase of 6 per cent in 2003, largely due to the increase in crimes against property. The slight decrease of 1 per cent posted in 2004 appears to indicate a return to the downward trend that started early in the decade.
That is what you find out when you take the trouble of consulting Juristat, which very few people do. Crime is tracked daily in Canada through the compilation of police reports. Most people do not know that. They find out about crime through the newspapers they read everyday and by watching television. And I suspect that to a large extent, anglophones in Canada are informed about crime by American television, which reports on all of the horrors that occur in the United States, where the murder rate, do not forget, is three times higher than Canada's. So the public perception is that...