Well, those are all very good questions.
First of all, of course I agree that it's important not to confuse licensing with registration, in the same way that we should not confuse gun control generally with the issue of registration. You'll see the proponents of the registry talking about gun control and trying to use studies from gun control matters generally on licensing and the like, and attributing those characteristics to the registry when they're quite frankly not attributable.
Secondly, our government took huge steps in hiring and facilitating the hiring of police officers by local jurisdictions—provinces and municipalities. That was a commitment our government made, and we delivered on that commitment. It was not only in the context of provincial and municipal police forces, but also in the context of the RCMP, which of course has an impact on many provinces who choose to have the RCMP as their provincial police or municipal police forces.
Back in 1998 when I was the attorney general of Manitoba, the former Liberal government shut down Depot, shut down the training of RCMP officers in this country, at a time when half of the RCMP officers would be eligible for retirement within five years. It was one of the most foolish things that could ever have been done, causing us huge problems in actually going after the bad guys and getting criminals. They shut down the police training.
When we came into government, on average we were only producing 300 officers out of Depot every year. I think to reach a break-even point there have to be around 1,000. We ramped this up to 1,800 coming out in the first year, because of the neglect of the prior government in actually getting police officers. They stressed things such as the gun registry and said that it was going to protect the public—that it was going to “make them feel safe”, as the NDP said—but they neglected to actually put officers out on the street.
Our government has consistently put out many troops through Depot, and we've encouraged provincial and municipal governments to hire more officers as well in order to meet the true criminal safety needs of Canadians.