Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the hon. member for Peace River from my wonderful province of Alberta that I put to one of his colleagues in the House earlier. As I mentioned to his colleague, I met with the former chief of police and the head of the red gun registry in Alberta, both of whom expressed strong support for continuing the registry. They gave me a number of examples of how the registry has been found useful in detecting and bringing charges in serious crimes. One of those was the case of Mayerthorpe. They informed me that the key reason that the officers were able to detect the owner of the guns used to kill the four RCMP officers at Mayerthorpe was through the gun registry.
In view of the fact that not only those officers from Alberta and the Canadian Association of Police, the Canadian Professional Police Association, Canadian emergency associations and so forth have supported the long gun registry, would the member prefer that we do not have this mechanism anymore to detect offenders?