Thanks very much for raising that question. I'll try to be brief.
One of the things that is clearly not well understood, and some would argue has been deliberately confused and misrepresented, is the fact that firearms are registered once--one time only--unless they're sold or traded. Hence, 7 million firearms are registered. Most of those never, ever have to be registered again; hence, it is a sunk cost. The $4.1 million, which I think is the estimate from the RCMP of what would be saved if we ended the registration of rifles and shotguns tomorrow, represents the costs of registering guns that are traded or sold.
The big-ticket item, both now and in the past, the item that has cost the most—I know you have the Auditor General coming, and I'm sure she can address this—was licensing, which everyone here says they support. What I find interesting is that there's this hue and cry over the $4 million that maintaining the long-gun registry will cost given that we've sunk all those other costs, and nobody has raised a peep at the $22 million in waived and refunded fees that this government basically wasted in terms of taxpayers' money. I think that's critically important.
The other thing is that one complex murder investigation can easily cost $2 million. The value of the registry as an investigative tool and the costs that will be incurred as a result of not being able to trace guns back to their source is immense and inestimable.