Mr. Speaker, the justice minister always discusses this issue of the gun registry through the prism of public safety, so let us talk about it that way. There is something called “opportunity costs”, as the member knows, where money is taken from one place and is put into another, and we had better make sure we are getting a better bang for our buck in one place rather than the other.
When we look at the statistics of homicide rates in Canada, the fact of the matter is that of all the homicides one-third are due to firearms, and a very small number of them are due to registered firearms. The fact of the matter is that over 90% of homicides due to firearms are due to unregistered firearms, as he quite correctly mentioned.
Putting it in the context of opportunity costs, the question is this: Is it worth spending $1 billion to really save the lives of a handful of people when what it is actually doing is removing that $1 billion from something else where we could save thousands of lives, for example in health care?