PUBLICATION: GLOBE AND MAIL
DATE:
THU JAN.08,2004
PAGE:
A22
CLASS:
Editorial
EDITION:
Metro DATELINE:
WORDS:
574
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It's
time to dismantle the national gun registry
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Whatever
noble intentions may have led to the federal gun registry's creation, it has
been a policy failure and a fiscal disaster. Never mind refurbishing this
program or redirecting some of its $113-million-plus annual budget. Prime
Minister Paul Martin should scrap it. Consider the history. In 1991, in reaction
to the Ecole Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, the Conservative government of
Brian Mulroney introduced sweeping changes to federal gun rules. When the
Liberals assumed power in 1993, then-justice-minister Allan Rock quickly began
working on a new firearms law of his own, Bill C-68, which became law in 1995.
The gun registry was its centrepiece. In 1994, when C-68 was still a twinkle in
Mr. Rock's eye, the Justice Department estimated that the cost of licensing
people to own guns, and then registering each gun, would be $2-million. This was
the difference between $119-million in expenses and $117-million in projected
fees to be paid by gun owners.
But
in very short order, costs ballooned out of control, even as the registry itself
remained woefully ineffective. By 2001-02, Ottawa had spent $688-million and
garnered less than $60-million in revenues. One problem was that the regulations
were exceedingly complex. Another was that several provinces, particularly in
the West, refused to co-operate. Five provinces still refuse to help with data
collection, and eight won't enforce the law that makes it a crime not to
register a gun.
The
program went under a cloud in earnest in December, 2002, when Auditor-General
Sheila Fraser published an audit chronicling not just enormously
higher-than-expected costs ($1-billion by 2005, 500 times the original
estimate), but also egregiously bad management and shoddy reporting. Among her
most damning findings was that the Justice Department knew of the enormous cost
overruns as early as May of 2000, but neglected to share them with a
parliamentary committee looking into that very issue.
All
this explains why, last March, more than a dozen Liberal MPs were absent on the
day the Liberal government allotted another $59-million to the registry. Two
votes approving the spending passed easily, but not before then-prime-minister
Jean Chretien threatened to toss MPs from caucus if they balked.
No
doubt Mr. Chretien was swayed by the fact that the most fervent Liberal critics
of the registry were also diehard Paul Martin supporters. But now that the
Martinites are in charge, they cannot simply offer up token patchwork on the
registry.
What
should Ottawa do? For starters, it should abolish the registry and divert its
budget to more important areas, such as border security -- in particular, the
combatting of the trade in illegal handguns from the United States. Second, it
should stiffen the penalties that accompany any crime committed with a gun.
Having
done that, and in recognition of the fact that stolen handguns do pose a danger
to the public (as farmers' and hunters' shotguns and rifles typically do not),
Mr. Martin's people might determine whether they could somehow track just
handguns, perhaps with co-operation from target-pistol clubs across the country.
They could put more resources into firearms safety training. And they could
maintain and enhance the safe-storage component of the current gun regulations,
which make eminent sense.
Either way, the universal gun registry should die. To maintain it would be to throw good money after bad