Mr. Speaker, I come from a rural area where people had such a bad experience with how the registry was developed. I have heard it said again and again that it should never have cost $1 billion. We could have spent $1 billion on a whole manner of other more useful functions than a computer system that took so long to get off the ground.
That being said, when I talk to people in Timmins—James Bay, I say that the Conservatives' solution is to take that billion dollars' worth of records and have a bonfire. People say that is really stupid, and it is. To take a billion dollars' worth of records and say, “What a waste of money” and then to show us what a waste of money it is they are going to set fire to all this data that is being used by the police and could be used by the provinces.
That is the fundamental difference between good policy and Conservative policy. If we have paid for that data and we are using it, we should maintain that data because it is important for public safety.