Mr. Speaker, this Government of Canada is committed to effective firearms control that targets criminals while maintaining the highest standards of public safety. There is no reliable evidence indicating that registration has reduced crime committed with long guns.
According to the Auditor General, data in the firearms registry is often unreliable. Paragraph 4.61 of the Auditor General's report from this past May notes that at least 9% to 12% of firearm registration certificates contained inaccurate information. This limits the reliability of the registry for police.
Supporters of the registry often claim that the police use the registry 6,700 times a day, but this is somewhat misleading. Whenever police officers in certain jurisdictions access the Canadian Police Information Centre, CPIC, for any reason, such as a simple address check, an automatic hit is generated with the Canadian Firearms Registry On-line, whether the information is desired or not. This is the case, for example, with the Toronto police services, the Vancouver police services and the B.C. RCMP, which accounts for nearly 12,000 police officers.
In 2006 the Auditor General estimated the registry has now cost over $1 billion. Two Library of Parliament studies further estimate that the enforcement and compliance costs are substantial, running into hundreds of millions of dollars.