As is so typical with this issue, Mr. Chair, Ms. Hoeppner's last statement of course ignores the reality that the incidence of using knives to commit murders has increased in proportion to guns committing murders since the licensing was tightened up and since the registry came into effect. If you go back before that time, the reality is that guns were used to commit a greater number of murders than were knives.
Mr. Chair, I just want to make a statement before I ask what will probably be my only question.
What is going on here today—and I want the Canadian public to know this—is really a farce in terms of democracy. If this government were serious about dealing with gun crimes in this country, they would have continued, as opposed to sitting back and not proceeding, as they should have.
They introduced a very similar bill in June of 2006. We then had the election in 2008, so it died on the order paper when it had made absolutely no progress at all; it never even came for debate. They then reintroduced it as Bill C-24 after the 2008 election, and it had exactly the same fate: it just sat there. It has now been introduced again in the Senate, after one of the prorogations that this government has called, and it's sitting over there doing nothing.
The farce of democracy that's going on here is that the person sitting in that chair where Ms. Hoeppner is should be either the Minister of Justice or more likely the Minister of Public Safety and National Security, with whom we should have sufficient time—perhaps even having him come back more than once—to deal with the types of factual inconsistencies that we're getting from Ms. Hoeppner today.
We're not going to see that. We're going to proceed in a way such that there is no way the Canadian people will actually be able to hear enough evidence to make a logical decision on this bill and on the registry as a whole.
Let me finish with this question.
You have raised the issue today of the.... I'm assuming you don't know this, but the reality is that in 2009 there were four million inquiries to the Canadian firearms registry online—not to CPIC, which received 67 million inquiries. There were four million inquiries: police officers in this country asked four million times about whether there were firearms, including long guns, in the residences they were going into.
Do you not think that this alone justifies keeping the long-gun registry in place?