Ottawa refunded nearly $21 million to long-gun owners for their licensing fees in 2006 following the Conservative government's decision to waive registration for the weapons, according to a report released Tuesday.

Back in May 2006, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announced several major changes to the controversial gun registry brought in by the previous Liberals that effectively gutted the program.

Among the changes was a two-year waiver of fees for the renewal or upgrade of firearms licences for individuals. Licence holders who had already paid a fee to renew their licence were issued a refund.

Tuesday's report by the commissioner of firearms, the first since the 2006 changes to the gun registry, says that 350,000 people were repaid that year.

The report also states that police have used the gun registry more than 2.3 million times while investigating crimes and complaints in 2006, or nearly 6,500 times a day.

The 53 per cent increase from the previous year was attributed to several police forces making policy decisions to increase use of the gun registry.

Canada's largest police force, the Toronto Police Service, set up an interface system so that certain queries of a person or address automatically resulted in a query of the gun registry, the report says.

Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh said the high usage of the registry is enough to justify keeping the system around.

"This government will tell you, 'Here and there it may work, but usually it doesn't work.' But the fact is that the consistent use by the police forces of this registry shows that it does work, that it is useful, that it should be there," said Dosanjh.

As for the registry's future, the Conservatives have vowed to kill the long-gun registry and re-introduced a bill last fall to repeal the requirement for long-gun owners to register their weapons.

The Conservatives first introduced a bill to amend the Criminal Code and Firearms Act in June 2006 so that owners of non-restricted rifles and shotguns will not have to register their weapons. But the bill died when the Parliamentary session ended in the fall.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper campaigned on a promise to scrap the long-gun registry. It was supposed to cost $2 million when the Liberal government introduced it in 1995, but wound up costing roughly $1 billion.