PUBLICATION:              National Post

DATE:                         2003.11.27

EDITION:                    National

SECTION:                  Editorials

PAGE:                         A23

SOURCE:                   National Post

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Gun registry debacle continues

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Garry Breitkreuz, the Saskatchewan MP and Canadian Alliance firearms critic, says the federal gun registry will burst through the $1-billion expenditure barrier by 2004, rather than 2005, as once predicted. We see no reason to doubt him. Mr. Breitkreuz has been riding the gun registry file hard from the outset. And despite Liberal efforts to play shell games with the program's soaring costs, he's almost never been wrong.

The polite, balding, 58-year-old former school teacher from Yorkton, Sask., has filed more than 400 Access to Information requests concerning the registry's inner workings. That may seem like obsessive behaviour. But sadly, these requests are the only way to make the federal government come clean on this boondoggle. It is quite possible the Alliance's deputy whip now knows more about the registry than the justice ministers and solicitors-general who have been in nominal charge of it during his watch.

Mr. Breitkreuz was the first to expose the registry's massive cost overruns, the ridiculously high error rates and delays in applicant screening, the numerous licences issued to the wrong applicants, the $200-million-plus computer system that still does not work properly despite a series of costly retrofits, and the multiple snafus in which registry staff have approved the transfer of guns known by police to be stolen.

All along the way, the Liberals have scoffed at Mr. Breitkreuz's claims, even questioning his sanity. But the Alliance MP has never backed down.

Most famously, when the Liberals were still insisting the registry had cost no more than $400-million and would still break-even through user fees, Mr. Breitkreuz patiently insisted the registry had already blown through $687-million, only a tiny fraction of what might be recovered from the charges levied against gun owners for licences. Jean Valin, then the registry's official spokesman, sniffed that the $687-million figure was a "gross exaggeration" and a "story that the gun lobby and some members of the Reform party has been spreading."

But over time, Mr. Breitkreuz's claim was vindicated. In her well-publicized expose of the registry last December, Sheila Fraser, the Auditor-General, pegged the cost of the registry to the end of March this year at $688-million, just one million off the sum Mr. Breitkreuz and his legislative assistant had arrived at on their own.

No one who read that AG report will find it hard to believe the registry will hit the billion-dollar mark 12 months ahead of schedule. Ms. Fraser called the registry the worst cost overrun ever seen by her office. She even pulled her auditors from the registry audit early because the books were so poorly kept they couldn't make full sense of them.

If anything, $1-billion may prove to be a conservative figure. The Library of Parliament has estimated the total cost of enforcing Ottawa's firearms law -- including the cost of taking police officers off the streets to check the authenticity of registry certificates, and having Crown prosecutors try alleged violators of the mandatory licensing provisions -- will contain hundreds of millions in indirect costs.

Mr. Breitkreuz also revealed yesterday that the Liberals have awarded a $300-million contract to an outside computer firm to clean up the very same database on which it has already wasted $227-million since 1995.

If the gun registry really protected Canadians, perhaps all of this waste might be viewed as an embarrassing footnote to an otherwise worthy government program. But as the three gun murders in Toronto this past weekend illustrate -- the city's 56th, 57th and 58th murders of the year -- the registry is useless in preventing the gun crime Canadians fear most. By definition, criminals aren't law-abiding to begin with. So no matter how much of our money Ottawa is prepared to squander, the people most likely to use a gun in a crime are the people least likely to register those guns in the first place. Early this year, when Toronto was suffering a similar spate of murders, Julian Fantino, the city's police chief, admitted his officers had never encountered an incident in which the registry "enabled us to either prevent or solve any of these crimes."

Wildly expensive and totally useless: Perhaps that should be the registry's motto.