Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate that. I rose on a point of order to bring that to your attention. He also referred to the minister's crooked calculator. I think he should withdraw that as well. However I will respond and you, Mr. Speaker, can deal with that accordingly.
I have been clear about the cost of the firearms program. I said publicly that we have spent a cumulative total of $327 million on the program between 1995 and March 31, 2000. The government of Canada is responsible for this program and is proud not to have been shirking any of its responsibility concerning this major public safety initiative.
The government is accepting its responsibilities, including its financial accountability. It would be refreshing if the members opposing this valuable legislation would accept their responsibility for playing a positive role respecting the public safety of all Canadians.
As of October 14, we have more than 1.3 million Canadians who hold or have applied for licences under the legislation. More than 1.6 million firearms are registered. Since December 1, 1998 more than 959 licence applications have been refused for public safety concerns and 1,207 licences have been revoked from individuals deemed not to be eligible to hold a licence because they pose a safety risk. The number of revocations are over 20 times higher than the total of the previous five years.
The problems that I acknowledged with our start-up in the spring are now well in hand. We have an aggressive program in place to deal with providing enhanced service to Canadian firearms owners. Elements of this include the following. We have been providing face to face assistance to help people to complete their applications for licensing. We have drastically simplified our forms. We have implemented processing and system efficiencies throughout to provide better service to Canadians more quickly. We have enhanced our call centre services to provide better and faster individualized assistance. At the same time as we are providing better service to firearms owners, we are providing better public safety to all Canadians. We are now able to background checks before any legitimate firearm sales can proceed.
We have had good results from these initiatives. Our outreach programs have contributed to over 528,000 applications and the numbers continue to increase. Our advertising program has been appearing on prime time and specialty TV, in national and ethnic press and on radio consistently reminding owners of their—