January 8, 2004
The Vancouver Sun
Letters to the Editor
Suite 1 - 200
Granville St.
Vancouver, B.C.
V6C 3N3
To the editor:
As you know, you will find no stronger advocate of
scrapping the federal firearms registry, as suggested in your editorial (“The
best ‘review’ of the gun registry is to scrap it entirely,” Jan. 8/04)
than me.
Over
the years, my office has filed more than 400 Access-to-Information requests
trying to get to the bottom of the firearms fiasco, and I’ve spoken at
countless town hall meetings with Canadians from coast to coast who share the
view of me and my party: that the
registry targets law-abiding gun owners instead of criminals, and is a complete
waste of money.
The
registry’s accumulated cost will hit a billion dollars by the spring.
The vast majority of those dollars, which could have been spent on things
that would actually reduce crime, like front-line policing and tighter border
screening, were spent under Paul Martin’s watch as Finance Minister.
Your
statement that Paul Martin “wasn't part of the government that kept (the
registry) going,” is in error. While
the bills for the firearms registry were piling up, first under Justice Minister
Allan Rock, and then under Anne McLellan (who has recently been put back in
charge of the program), Martin gladly signed the cheques.
The
Auditor General’s report showed that Parliament had been kept in the dark
about the true cost of the registry, but it is naïve to think that Martin, as
the chief financial officer of the country, was in the dark too.
In fact, Mr. Martin has seen the crucial “cost-benefit analysis” of
the firearms program that is to this day being withheld from parliamentary and
public scrutiny because it has been declared a cabinet secret.
No matter how you slice it, Martin’s complicity in this
billion-dollar boondoggle is undeniable. And
Martin’s admission on Wednesday that he has no intention of scrapping it only
confirms that this public policy disaster will continue until the Liberals are
replaced.
Sincerely,
Garry
Breitkreuz, MP (Yorkton-Melville, SK)
Opposition
Critic for Firearms and Property Rights