NEWS RELEASE
April 17, 2000
For Immediate Release
MORE THAN 1,400 EMPLOYED TRYING TO IMPLEMENT USELESS GUN REGISTRY
"The promises made in 1995 to get Liberal gun control laws passed have been broken."
Yorkton –
Today, Garry Breitkreuz, Member of Parliament for Yorkton-Melville and Official Opposition Critic on Firearms Issues, released the latest employment numbers for the Liberal government’s faltering firearms registration scheme. "The Library of Parliament Research Branch report prepared for me shows that there are now more than 1,078 employees flailing away trying to implement Allan Rock’s 1995 blunder," reported Breitkreuz. "And the report doesn’t even include the hundreds of workers employed by the Quebec and BC Firearms Offices who still haven’t provided the information requested. Officers in the Sûreté du Québec say there are 269 working in the separate Quebec registry that is paid for with federal tax dollars. Sources in British Columbia advise that there are 90 people working in the provincial firearms office including 24 RCMP officers taken off the street. That puts the total number of paper pushers working for the Liberal’s useless gun registry at more than 1,400. This is more than double the 612 workers identified in last May’s report by the Parliamentary Research Branch. What do you think Canadians would have said if they had been given a choice between hiring 1,400 police officers or 1,400 useless paper pushers?"Breitkreuz commented, "It might be different if the government could demonstrate that they can do the job they promised, but they can’t." To prove his point he quoted from the Auditor General’s April 2000 report on the RCMP, "7.81 The Department of Justice indicated that 500,000 licences had been issued by 1 February 2000. It estimated that 1.7 million owners remain to be licenced by 1 January 2001. Over 300,000 firearms had been registered, with 6 to 10 million to be registered by 1 January 2003."
"Even using the government’s ridiculously low, ever changing estimates of the number of legally owned guns and responsible gun owners in Canada, they admit they have only licenced somewhere between 14% and 25% of the gun owners and only registered about the same percentage of guns," Breitkreuz observed. "Even with this paltry intake, the Dept. of Justice also admits that, as of March 31, 2000, they have a backlog of 44,644 licences applications and 80,272 registration applications. What are they going to do when they have to increase production by more than 30 times to meet the licencing and registration deadlines?" asked Breitkreuz. "The Library of Parliament has given us the answer: Hire hundreds more people, divert more resources that could be going to help police on the street fight crime and spend hundreds and hundreds of millions more!"
"When will the Liberals be held accountable for the misinformation they spread in public and in Parliament to get Bill C-68 passed in 1995?" asked Breitkreuz. "The Justice Minister told Parliament the gun registry was going to cost only $85 million over five years. Five years later the costs are over $350 million and heading for a billion. Allan Rock told Parliament that the entire program would be paid for with user fees but Treasury Board reports only $6.4 million in user fees collected in the first year? Would the Liberal backbenchers and Bloc MPs have supported Bill C-68 if they had known the truth? When does political deceit become fraud?"
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Garry Breitkreuz Web Site: www.garry-breitkreuz.com
For a copy of the Library of Parliament report, please call:
Yorkton Office: (306) 782-3309
Ottawa Office: (613) 992-4394
e-mail:
breitg0@parl.gc.ca
SNAPSHOT OF NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES
WORKING ON THE LIBERAL GUN REGISTRATION SCHEME
By Garry Breitkreuz, MP (Yorkton-Melville) – April 14, 2000
Department/Agency Number of Positions
Dept. of Justice – Canadian Firearms Centre (Ottawa) 73
(+ 22 vacant positions)Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency 19
Central Processing Site (Miramichi, NB) 280.5
(+ 4 vacant positions)Canadian Firearms Registry (RCMP) 292
Contractors (146 for EDS Canada + 96 others) 242
Federal Chief Firearms Officer’s Offices (RCMP) 76
(+ 13.5 vacant positions)Nfld Chief Firearms Officer’s Office (CFC employees) 11 (+ 1 vacant position)
Yukon Chief Firearms Officer’s Office (CFC employees) 4
--------------------------------------------
Total Federal Government Positions: 997.5
(+ 40.5 vacant positions)Provincial Chief Firearms Officer’s Offices
- Quebec (separate gun registry paid for by Fed. Gov’t) 269*
- Ontario (does not include part-time staff) 53
- British Columbia (includes seconded RCMP) 90*
- New Brunswick 15
- Nova Scotia 11
- Prince Edward Island 3
--------------------------------------------
Total Provincial Government Positions: 441
(+ unknown # of part-time)--------------------------------------------
(+ 40.5 vacant positions)GRAND TOTAL: 1,438.5
part time)(+ unknown # of
*Sources