Mr. Speaker, the fact is it was an impossible task to register the millions upon millions of long guns in the hands of farmers, hunters and sport shooters. Guns have been passed on from generation to generation. Some do not even have the serial numbers on them.
Because the member has asked, it is only fair that I use the quote from the Auditor General when she looked at that. She said, “The quality of the information is doubtful”. This is not very reassuring to a police officer pulling up to a home and thinking that he or she is going to be able to get exact, precise information about a certain type of long gun or not. However, what a police officer can know is that an individual has a licence to possess firearms. We can have this information without spending $1 billion trying to register every type of firearm. That is the disconcerting part.
I have quoted a police officer who says that the officers cannot trust the data. What they trust is their training and they approach every situation as if there is a firearm present.