NEWS RELEASE

January 31, 2003                                                                                                  For Immediate Release

RCMP CONFIRM FIVE MILLION GUNS IN REGISTRY STILL HAVE TO BE VERIFIED

“The Justice Minister ignored bureaucrats’ warnings in 2001.  Now they have to go back and do it right.

Is this the beginning of the second billion to be wasted on the Liberals’ firearms fiasco?” asked Breitkreuz.

Ottawa – Today, Garry Breitkreuz, Official Opposition Critic for Firearms and Property Rights, released another damning report from the RCMP concerning the alarming inaccuracy of the records in the Liberal billion-dollar gun registry.  “The RCMP report that only 18% of guns registered in the system have been verified and 30% of the firearms can’t be uniquely identified from the information provided by firearms owners,” reported Breitkreuz.  “In 1999, the members of the Canadian Police Association (CPA) made accuracy and verification of firearms one of their six conditions of support for the government’s universal gun registry.  I wonder what the CPA Executive will say now that it’s been revealed that the Liberal government has broken yet another promise made to them?” asked Breitkreuz.

RCMP documents dated January 23, 2003, and provided to Breitkreuz in response to a request made under the Access to Information Act, state: “Total number of firearms in the CFR [Canadian Firearms Registry] that have been verified.  We can confirm 1,081,589 firearms have been verified.  Total number of firearms in the CFR that can be uniquely identified based solely on the description of the firearm provided by the firearm owner, 4,220,176.” [RCMP File: ATIP2002-44709].  The most current statistics posted on the Canadian Firearms Centre website on January 18, 2003, show a total of 5,920,839 “unique firearms have been registered.”

Another document obtained by Breitkreuz from the Department of Justice dated January 9, 2001, clearly shows that the reason the government stopped verifying firearms is that it was going to take 8.8 years to register seven-million firearms using the “full matching” process [Justice Dept. ATIP File: A-2001-0156].  Click here for full details: http://www.cssa-cila.org/garryb/breitkreuzgpress/GunControl52.htm .  An RCMP officer who works in the firearms registry called Breitkreuz’s office in February of 2001 and said:  “We were just told to stop verifying and to enter whatever the gun owner put on the registration application into the system.”

The Justice Department’s Special Bulletin to Police No. 11 dated June 7, 1999, states: “Verification is a quality-assurance measure for Canada’s new registration system.  Basically, verification involves a physical examination of a firearms by someone authorized by the Registrar, to make sure the description of the firearm is complete and accurate, thereby confirming that the registration information is reliable.”

“Justice Minister McLellan was given a choice to either: (1) Meet the completely arbitrary political deadline of January 1, 2003, to have all the guns registered, or (2) Stop verifying firearms and not worry about the accuracy of the information in the gun registry,” said Breitkreuz.  “The Minister chose politics over accuracy and didn’t achieve either objective.  There are five million firearms in the system still to verify and millions more still to register.  It’s going to be interesting to see how this Minister fixes ‘McLellan’s Mess’ because when they stopped the verification of firearms, they also abandoned thousands of volunteer verifiers that had been recruited and supervised by the RCMP.  Breitkreuz concluded with two big questions: What will it cost to go back and do it all over again?  Is this the beginning of the second billion to be wasted on the Liberals’ firearms fiasco?”

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