Mr. Speaker, public policy must be judged by its real effects on the ground, and not by its intentions. When it comes to real effects, the part of the firearms registry dealing with long guns has never in any way helped prevent crime in Canada. Furthermore, regarding the data, I would like to remind my colleague what the Auditor General said on September 26, 2006:
We found the information in the database to have significant quality problems:
...
Verification frequently determined that information on the weapon's action, make or serial number was wrong.