NOTE: Don Martin's column also appeared in: Regina Leader Post, Charlottetown Guardian, Halifax Daily News, The Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Victoria Times Colonist, Calgary Herald

PUBLICATION:              National Post

DATE:                         2003.04.22

EDITION:                    National

SECTION:                  Editorials

PAGE:                         A19

COLUMN:                  In Ottawa

BYLINE:                     Don Martin

SOURCE:                   National Post

DATELINE:                 OTTAWA Canada 

NOTE:                        dmartin@nationalpost.com

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No beefing about this registry

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OTTAWA - The feds asked a simple question: Where's the beef?

While finding the answer, Ottawa stumbled on to the economical, effective, world-renowned tracking technology needed to create a successful gun registry.

The secret, believe it or not, is courtesy of cows. Millions of them. Tagged and data-based with every change of address documented, all for a per-animal price that's less than half the cost of this newspaper.

American, European and South American cattlemen are beating a path to the Calgary headquarters of the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency these days, trying to figure out how an industry-administered, federally monitored system can track a diseased, infected or merely suspicious slab of cow to its herd of origin within 30 seconds.

The comparative figures are astounding when you consider the gun and cattle registries both handle millions of files, began gearing up in tandem roughly seven years ago and only hit their full operational stride last year.

Number of cows registered: 25 million.

Owner compliance with mandatory cow registration: 95%.

Total cost of the program after a four-year start-up period: Less than $4-million, of which $1.6-million was start-up cash from Ottawa with the rest covered by a token fee per cow tag of, get this, 20 cents.

Number of staff to handle the entire herd identification program: Six.

Now brace yourself for a nightmare-by-numbers comparison with the federal gun registry, which was recently given a last-minute $59-million top-up by Liberal MPs who were forced to approve the bailout under threat of party eviction.

Number of firearms now registered: 6.1 million.

Compliance by gun owners: 75%.

Operational cost: Priceless. OK, officially $788-million -- and rising.

Size of herd, er, staff: 316.

There'll be the obvious argument that comparing cow registration to Canada's low-calibre, oft-vilified firearms boondoggle might seem a tad simplistic. But how?

The gun registry assigns a number to a weapon and links it to an approved owner at a specific address with the information instantly accessible by police. All in the name of public safety, you understand.

The cattle registry attaches a number to the animal, identifies the owner by name, location and even e-mail address and can instantly track the animal's life through fields and feed lots to its final slaughterhouse destination and, in some cases, beyond death to a specific meat counter. All in the name of carnivore consumer safety.

It all sounded a bit too good to be true, so I challenged agency general manager Julie Stitt, considered the agency's miracle worker, to download a specific beast's data and do it pronto. She delivered the short, tragic biography of basic Bessie #298278605 within seconds.

The bar-coded tag was bought in Nov. 16, 2000, and attached to a calf by Ontario cattleman John Newman on March 20, 2001. The cow happily grazed and grew until Aug. 1, 2002, when what they euphemistically describe as Bessie's "retirement" was held at the Better Beef Packing plant in Guelph, Ont., featuring a fresh spread of hamburger, steak, roast and ribs. Much as licensing and registration was resisted by gun owners, cattlemen initially resented tagging their cows. Placing the national herd under government surveillance ceased in the mid-1980s after the eradication of tuberculosis and there's a natural agricultural suspicion of all things growing out of Ottawa.

But as foot-and-mouth and mad cow diseases surfaced in Europe amid threatening talk of a bioterrorist attack on the food chain, the need for instant, reliable tracking information made the registry an obvious priority. And involving cattlemen in designing government rules and regulations made the process an easier sell.

"They grumbled, but in the back of their mind they knew they couldn't get away with producing food for the nation anonymously anymore," Charlie Gracey, an original consultant on the project, told me. "Once the producers had their say and it went into operation, we ramped up to 95% compliance overnight in July, 2002."

The agency has already performed 90 successful traces upon demand from Canadian food inspectors concerned by suspicious lesions and residue on carcasses.

So all credit to the cattle industry. They've created a low-cost, comprehensive registry with a total cow-control budget equal to just one week's tab for gun control.

And to the federal government, with a firearms registry that's basically very rich bovine-enhanced fertilizer, we now have compelling evidence their project should finally be put out to pasture.