Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the officials for being here. They've been here for the whole time. The minister has now left, but in response to the questions I asked previously, the minister indicated that one of the purposes and motives of Bill C-71 is the ability for the government, or the police, or law enforcement agencies to trace a firearm back to its original owner, whereupon I basically said that means there has to be a registry because we're not going to run a query against the wind. I mean, it has to be information that's kept some place. You can call it a repository. You can call it a registry. You can call it whatever you want. There's a repository of information that's transaction-based.
The minister was very clear that the purpose behind that was in order to trace that. However, Mr. O'Reilly, you just suggested to this committee that in a person-to-person transaction—so if I were to sell my firearm to Mr. Fraser over there—none of the information with regard to the firearm will actually be kept, only the reference number.
If that's the case—