EDITION: National

SECTION: Editorials

PAGE: A23

SOURCE: National Post Politics; Canada

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Another day, another lame attempt to explain away the Liberals' $1-billion gun registry fiasco. The latest rationalization emanates from Anne McLellan, currently our Minister of Health. From June, 1997, to January, 2002, Ms. McLellan served as justice minister, and in this capacity oversaw the registry. On Monday, she said that when she assumed the post, "we had to rebuild the [registry computer] system" because the one installed under her predecessor, Allan Rock, "could not deliver."

"No one is more disturbed than I am around the escalating costs," she added. "I hadn't anticipated rebuilding the system, but that's basically what had to happen."

These excuses obscure some inconvenient facts about Ms. McLellan's role. As noted above, she became justice minister in June, 1997. But the registry did not come into force until December, 1998. This means she had a year and a half to set things right. But according to the Auditor-General, Ms. McLellan's ministry did little to fix inherited computer glitches except tinker at the margins. The result: By 1999, the ministry had recorded more than 1,000 internal requests for changes. The endless debugging that followed consumed $227-million -- about one quarter of the total registry cost. Yet, it was money wasted: Earlier this year, a consultant judged the system -- the one Ms. McLellan said she rebuilt -- to be so outdated that it should be scrapped entirely.

In any case, the gun registry story was never about defective computers. It was about across-the-board indifference to cost escalations fed by the Liberals' blind, missionary zeal for a photo-op gun control program. A boondoggle as pointless and wasteful as the gun registry cannot be set right by switching from PCs to Macs, tweaking the database code, or changing the mouse pads. The program the Auditor-General's office calls the "largest cost overrun we've ever seen" is a stain on the record of all three of the justice ministers who'd overseen it. The Prime Minister must direct Martin Cauchon, the incumbent, to shut it down.