PUBLICATION:
The Calgary Sun
DATE:
2002.12.14
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
Editorial/Opinion
PAGE:
15
ILLUSTRATION:
drawing
SOURCE:
BY LEE MORRISON
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VOICE
IN THE WILDERNESS MP'S DIRE WARNINGS WERE GREETED WITH SNEERING DISDAIN
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Allan
Rock's voice came oozing out of my car radio. The auditor general has just
delivered her damned report on the gun registry he had conceived when he was
minister of justice.
His
attempt to rationalize the financial mess in his misbegotten gun control program
almost made me physically ill -- and I haven't thrown up in a car since I was
four years old.
Everyone
was to blame, it seems, except poor aggrieved Allan. It was the fault of the
nasty provinces for not throwing their support behind him. It was the fault of
recalcitrant farmers and hunters who didn't leap to conform and had to be
cajoled with $61 million worth of advertising by outfits such as the
Liberal-friendly rascals of Groupaction.
Rock's
silly claim that his 1994 estimate of $85 million for gross start-up costs was
based on the best available data conveniently ignores the facts.
He
was repeatedly warned, not only by the Opposition but by independent experts and
by members of his own caucus, that the cost would be well over $500 million.
There were precedents.
Canada
had had a primitive handgun registry since 1934 and its costs were a matter of
record. Moreover, there were accurate accounts of the cost of issuing Firearms
Acquisition Certificates when police actually fulfilled background check
requirements.
Rock
scoffed and said he wouldn't proceed with anything so expensive.
Now,
with costs approaching one billion dollars for a program in shambles, he and his
colleagues are trying to pretend the effort was "well worth the money"
and "a useful tool."
For
seven years, Alliance MP Garry Breitkreuz has been a voice in the Ottawa
wilderness, exposing the lunacies of the firearms control program with a
blizzard of press releases.
Because
he is cautious and meticulous, his information was all verifiable and confirmed
by Access to Information responses. Hardly anyone was interested.
Whenever
Breitkreuz would rise in the House to question Rock, Rock's puppet successor
Anne McLellan, or the current justice minister, the hapless Martin Cauchon, he
was invariably stonewalled with sneering, irrelevant answers, but he persisted
in his lonely crusade.
The
financial and administrative chaos in the Canadian Firearms Centre, recently
made public by Auditor General Sheila Fraser, was examined by the Senate a year
ago, when the overall cost had reached $690 million. By then, Breitkreuz had
been regularly exposing stratospheric cost overruns for years. It's a sad
commentary that information brought forward by a mere MP was treated as
irrelevant. It required action by a senior bureaucrat to draw attention to the
mess.
This
isn't denigration of Fraser or her work.
She
is a formidable auditor and it appears that, wonder of wonders, her report may
bring arrogant justice department poohbahs to heel.
A
proposal to flush yet another $72 million down the CFC toilet has at least been
deferred until the February budget.
Obviously,
the justice and finance ministers hope that, by February, the furor will have
abated, the media will be chasing other rabbits, and it will be business as
usual.
There
will then be a wonderful opportunity for those Liberal backbenchers who have
raised their heads to protest against the fiasco to show some courage by
continuing to demand remedies, even at the risk of bringing down the government.
They
would be popular heroes, and a forced election would be a salutatory lesson to
future ministers with regal aspirations.
If
resistance fizzles, and the government ultimately fleeces the public for more
than a billion dollars and proceeds to declare victory in its war on guns, it
will not have accomplished its objective.
The
justice department's absurdly lowball estimates of both the number of gun owners
and the number of firearms in Canada have been twice revised downward to avoid
admitting the registry is short at least a million gun owners and several
million firearms.
Even
if one accepts the dubious premise that firearm registration serves a useful
purpose, this grossly incomplete registry will serve no purpose.
The
original Justice Department estimate (1974) of more than 10 million firearms in
Canada was probably reasonably accurate because it was based on a survey
completed before Canadians were afraid to reveal such information.
Unlike
most hardware, guns are rarely destroyed or discarded, even when unused.
It
is known, mostly from import records that, until recently, the inventory
increased by almost a quarter-million annually. On this basis, Breitkreuz
estimates that there are about 16.5 million firearms in Canada.
In
1994, the RCMP estimated there were between seven million and 11 million guns in
Canada, and the justice department claimed there were 3.3 million gun owners.
Now, with only about two million Canadians licensed to possess firearms, the
estimated number of owners has miraculously fallen to 2.2 million.
Thus
it can be claimed "only" 200,000 Canadians have been vulnerable to
criminal prosecution since Jan. 1, 2001.
It
gets worse. Of two million Canadians licensed to have firearms, less than 1.5
million have applied to register anything. It now appears applications to
register 5.2 million of the seven million (or 16.5 million) guns believed to be
"out there" will have been filed by the year-end deadline.
For
this, the treasury has been whacked for almost a billion dollars and counting.
Heads should roll, but in what passes for parliamentary democracy in Canada, the chance of retribution is slim indeed.