PUBLICATION:              Montreal Gazette

DATE:                         2003.06.08

EDITION:                    Final

SECTION:                  Editorial / Op-ed

PAGE:                         A10

SOURCE:                   The Gazette

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Bad law just got worse

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It's bad enough Canada's bloated, billion-dollar gun registry is poorly conceived, badly run and obscenely overpriced. But now we are coming to realize this project is threatening to balkanize the country's criminal-justice system, as well. So far, five provinces - Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta - have said they will press ahead with gun-possession charges in cases related to other criminal activities but will refuse to prosecute gun-owners who simply fail to register their firearms before the July 1 deadline.

That means if the federal government wants to haul an otherwise law-abiding Prairie farmer or Atlantic fisherman into court for having an unregistered hunting rifle up in the attic, it will have to send in the Mounties and use its own prosecutors.

Provincial frustrations are understandable. For several years now, Ottawa has been building up fat budget surpluses, at least partly by downloading responsibilities onto the provinces. Now the feds demand the provinces use their dwindling resources to track down ordinary citizens whose only sin has been a failure - deliberate or otherwise - to meet the requirements of an absurdly bureaucratic and poorly planned program.

The provinces can no doubt find more productive ways to use the manpower of police and Crown attorneys. As Nova Scotia Justice Minister Jamie Muir said: ''We believe the public is served best when our prosecution service focuses on serious criminal matters; it makes no sense to clog up the courts with procedural matters on long-gun registrations.''

So we have some sympathy for the balking governments. Still, the provinces are crossing a dangerous line here. In this country, the federal Parliament writes the Criminal Code and the individual provinces administer most of it. It's a somewhat clumsy arrangement, but it works fairly well, and it's a lot less confusing than having 10 criminal codes (or 50, as they have in the United States - not to mention the U.S. federal code).

And that, of course, is the danger: If provinces start deciding which bits of the Criminal Code they'll apply and which they won't, Canada could end up with the equivalent of several different criminal codes.

Although the provinces have, and need, a certain amount of flexibility in deciding their law-enforcement priorities, we certainly don't want a situation where Canadians in one province find themselves paying heavy fines, serving jail terms and acquiring criminal records for activities that would get them no more than a nudge and a wink in another less rigorous jurisdiction.

And there's also the danger that the wholesale public defiance of a specific law can undermine the administration of justice as a whole and sap the sense of fairness that is always required to hold societies together. This remains true even if the law is a stupid and unpopular one. So the provinces should tone down the rhetoric and apply the law as judiciously and fairly as they can, given the normal constraints of police manpower. 

In the meantime, they can - and should - also press ahead with efforts to get this law repealed and the gun registry scrapped. That won't be easy, mind you. The federal government's attitude on this issue is beyond stubborn: It's mule-headed. Solicitor-General Wayne Easter won't even extend the registration deadline, despite the news last week thousands of people recently and unknowingly had their registration records wiped out when the government's computer system crashed. That's a good metaphor for everything about this law, which has so far cost $1 billion, with no end in sight.

It would be nice to think Ottawa's obduracy grows out of a conviction the registry will do something to prevent such horrors as the mass murder of 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 and the murder of four professors at Concordia University in 1992.

But the sad fact is there's no evidence at all it will accomplish any such thing. What's keeping this law on the books is merely, shamefully, this government's inability to admit it made an enormous mistake.