PUBLICATION:          Vancouver Sun

DATE:                         2004.12.09

EDITION:                    Final

SECTION:                  BusinessBC

PAGE:                         D3

COLUMN:                  Michael Campbell

BYLINE:                     Michael Campbell

SOURCE:                   Vancouver Sun

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Gun registry waste is in a league of its own

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For nearly 48 hours there was a brief glimmer of hope that arguably the most inept and possibly corrupt program of the last generation was going to be pulled off life support.

On Monday, Liberal backbencher Roger Gallaway declared that he would call for a separate vote on the $80 million earmarked for operating that National Firearms Registry (better known as the "gun registry") for the remainder of the year when the spending estimates came before the House of Commons today.

To put it bluntly, the Liberal power elite went nuts at the prospect. Justice Minister Anne McLellan denounced the call, while party insider Warren Kinsella threatened Gallaway with sure defeat at his riding's nomination meeting. The pressure seems to have worked. On Wednesday, Gallaway said he would not put forward his motion.

Keep in mind the Liberals, with the help of the NDP and Bloc, are circling the wagons over a program that federal gun control adviser William Stenning declared was in a league of its own in terms of incompetence. As he said in referring to the findings of the government's own audit team, "They've seen lots of terrible things, but they've never seen anything like this."

Many Canadians are versed with the fact that taxpayers were promised that total costs for the registry would be no more than $85 million -- when in fact the numbers are fast approaching $1.4 billion. Put another way, if the average Canadian taxpayer sends Ottawa $8,000 per year, it's taken 1.75 million taxpayers to fund a program that has little support among rank-and-file police officers.

Speaking of police officers, it is not lost on our front-line workers that, while the total number of RCMP officers has declined 10 per cent on a per-capita basis since 1975, we now have about 1,800 bureaucrats working on the registry. They know that while sufficient funding is not available to fight organized crime, we have a registry that continues to suck much-needed tax dollars away from other policing programs. Auditor-General Sheila Fraser estimates that an additional 10,000 officers could have been hired with the money that went to the registry.

Actually, the financial mismanagement is worse than that. The overruns are so great that many question whether mismanagement alone can explain the costs. I have yet to find a technology expert who can offer any explanation as to how the cost of creating the registry's computer system has gone from the original estimate of $1 million to $750 million.

Even if you factor in overruns at 10 times the original estimate, the cost overrun is the equivalent of planning to have two children and ending up with 163. The point is -- it's impossible. No amount of incompetence gets you from $1 million to $750 million.

The gun registry's shortcomings go beyond profound financial mismanagement. As Simon Fraser professor Gary Mauser summed up in studying the relationship between gun registries and violent crime: "There is no evidence that merely increasing the difficulty of obtaining a firearm through stricter gun laws has any important effect on crime rates."

Is it any wonder why taxpayers are cynical? While other important public safety issues go underfunded, our MPs stand ready to defend a program that has been grossly mismanaged and provides little public benefit other than reflecting the "depth of our concern" about violent crime.

Michael Campbell's Money Talk radio show can be heard on CKNW 980 weekdays from 6 to 7 p.m. and Saturdays from 8:30 to 10 a.m.