NEWS RELEASE

NEWS RELEASE

October 5, 2000

For Immediate Release

FIREARMS LICENCING OUTREACH PROGRAM WAS A TOTAL FLOP

"Their plan was to process 1.4 million licence applications this summer. In fact, they received less than 300,000 applications and processed only 102,870."

Ottawa – Today, Garry Breitkreuz, MP for Yorkton-Melville, exploded another one of Anne McLellan’s myths. Just last week, in the House of Commons, the Justice Minister ducked one of Breitkreuz’ questions stating, "In fact, Canadians are complying by the tens of thousands with our new firearms licencing and registry program." What the Minister conveniently forgot to mention, and what a Justice Department response to an Access to Information request this week reveals, is that her bureaucrats projected that hundreds of thousands would be complying – in order to meet the arbitrary departmental deadline at the end of this year.

This April, the Department of Justice launched their Licencing Outreach Program. Documents state their problems were that only 25% of gun owners had applied for licences in the new gun registry and 50% of the applications received had errors. The stated objective of the Outreach Program was "to reach, inform and process 1.7 million firearm owners" before December 31, 2000. This objective was to be achieved by:

Existing Firearms Officers in the field processing 91,800 licence applications
125 mobile teams employing 260 students processing 618,800 licence applications
85 storefront counters employing 180 students processing 729,300 licence applications.

So, as you can see, the Department of Justice planned for their Licencing Outreach Program to process a grand total of 1,439,900 licence applications before the end of August 2000. So how did they do? Well, information posted on the Canadian Firearms Centre website reveals the truth even if the Minister can’t find it in her talking points. On June 4, 2000, the Justice Department boasted that their registry had 588,409 "Names Available to Police." On September 2, 2000, they had increased this to only 872,396 "Names Available to Police" in their system. "This was an increase of only 283,987 firearms licence applications in the last three months - not the 1.4 million applications their multi-million dollar Licencing Outreach Program and ad campaign was supposed to deliver this summer," observed Breitkreuz. "Once again, the Justice Department refused to provide information on how much this latest firearms fiasco cost taxpayers."

He added, "As of September 2, 2000, the Department of Justice website reveals they had issued only 286,233 firearms licences in the last 21 months (an average of 13,630 per month) and that 339,663 licence applications were in processing or in backlog. At their current rate of production, it will take the Dept. of Justice more than two years to get rid of this backlog and 12 more years to process the licences from the remaining 2 million gun owners (the government’s very low estimate) who still haven’t applied. Their impossible deadline is now less than three months away!"

"It’s too late for the Liberals to pull a rabbit out of the hat," concluded Breitkreuz. "They’ve been deceiving Parliament and the public since 1995 on this issue. It’s time to come clean with Canadians, tell the truth about their newest billion dollar bureaucratic boondoggle, repeal Bill C-68, and start over by working cooperatively with the provinces and responsible gun owners and doing what police on the street really want."

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For more information, please call or write:

Ottawa: (613) 992-4394

Yorkton: (306) 782-3309

E-mail: breitg0@parl.gc.ca

Web Site: www.garry-breitkreuz.com