February 19, 2003

Mr. Grant Obst, President

Canadian Police Association

100 – 141 Catherine Street

Ottawa, Ontario

K2P 1C3

Dear Mr. Obst:

Re:  CPA Executive Officer’s Letter of Support for Bill C-10A

On behalf of the Canadian Alliance Caucus, I would like to thank you for the letter from your Executive Officer reminding us of your Executive’s steadfast support for the Liberal government’s billion-dollar gun registration scheme.  Despite evidence to the contrary, your Executive seems committed to accepting and repeating the Liberal government’s position instead of telling Members of Parliament what police on the streets are saying about the gun registry.

The CPA Executive’s position is at odds with recent comments from a growing number of Chiefs of Police across the country.  In December, when Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino was asked about the escalation of firearms crime in his city, he said: “A law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped us solve any of them.”  In January, the President of the 66-member Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police said the gun registry laws are “unenforceable” … “until the mess is sorted out.”  It is clear that the “unenforceable mess”  Chief Tom Kaye was referring to isn’t going to be fixed by the amendments in Bill C-10A.

Every survey ever conducted of police on the streets shows they have never supported Bill C-68, especially the gun registry.  After reading Bill C-68 in 1995, the vast majority of your membership knew that the registry wouldn’t be able to tell them where either the registered or the unregistered guns are located.  Bill C-10A does not correct the drafting errors in Bill C-68 responsible for this fact.  Three Justice Ministers have completely failed to deliver on the Liberals’ main gun registry promise to the thousands of members of the Canadian Police Association that the registry would be able to locate these firearms.

Your Executive Officer’s letter supports the Justice Minister’s hope that he can fully implement and operate the gun registry cost-effectively without the support of the 8 provinces and 3 territories who oppose it, without the assistance of the 6 provinces and 3 territories who refuse to administer the registry, and without the help of the growing number of provinces who are refusing to enforce it.  No national program of this nature can ever work without the full cooperation and support of the provinces and the people living in them. 

It is also apparent that the government’s current estimates of future costs for fully implementing the gun registry of $541 million over the next ten years are greatly understated.  The government has failed to consider in their analyses all the problems that have to be addressed.  None of the problems and mistakes related to the gun registry are remedied by the amendments in Bill C-10A.

With respect to your comment on cost savings, here are ten reasons why the Justice Department’s cost projections are understated:

1. More than 5 million firearms registered in the system still have to be verified by the RCMP in order to ensure the accuracy of the information in the system and in order to comply with your own Association’s demands. 

2.      Up to 4 million records in the RCMP’s Firearms Interest Police (FIP) database have to be corrected in order to comply with the Privacy Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

3. Seventy-eight percent of the registration certificates have entries that were either left blank or marked “unknown” and they all have to be corrected. (3.2 million registration certificates as of August 29, 2002). 
4. More than 540,000 gun owners still don’t have a firearms licence and can’t register their firearms without a licence. 
5. More than 300,000 owners of registered handguns don’t have a firearms licence authorizing them to own one; and they can’t re-register their guns without a licence. 
6. Up to 10 million guns still have to be registered or re-registered in the system. 
7. The registry attempts to track 2 million completely honest citizens but fails to track the addresses of those persons that have already been proven to be the most dangerous.  This includes the 131,000 persons prohibited from owning firearms by the courts and more than 9,000 persons who have had their firearms licences refused or revoked.  The law has to be amended to require these proven-to-be-dangerous persons to report their change of address to police and give police the authority to “inspect” their homes for illegal firearms. 
8. On February 27, 2002, the Department of Justice admitted they had already lost track of the addresses of 38,629 licenced firearms owners.  The department has yet to figure out a way of keeping address information in the gun registry current let alone the cost of doing so.  This was one of the main reasons why the 69-year-old handgun registry had between a 40% and 50% error rate. 
9. The Department of Justice has never provided any estimates for: police enforcement costs, court time and court costs, corrections costs or the cost to police and municipalities for collecting, recording, returning and/or destroying firearms. 
10. The Department of Justice has never released its calculations of the cost to the economy and jobs.  On August 16, 1999, the department denied Parliament and the public the entire 115-page report on the economic impact of the gun registry by declaring it a Cabinet secret. 

The Justice Minister says that the public supports the gun registry but refers to polls that are more than a year old to make his case.  It is interesting to note that on December 12, 2002, the Globe and Mail/CTV/Ipsos-Reid poll reported that 53% of Canadians now want the gun registry scrapped.  The majority of the Canadian population is now in full agreement with the long-held position of front-line police officers.

As Parliamentarians, we have an obligation to the people of Canada to put in place cost-effective public safety measures.  The Canadian Alliance, along with your membership, believes that putting more police on the streets would have been a better expenditure of a billion dollars.

It’s time for the CPA to reconsider what could have been done with the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been wasted on the Liberal’s failed gun registration scheme.  It’s time to scrap the registry before it becomes a two billion-dollar boondoggle.  It’s time to go back to the drawing board.  We would invite the CPA to work with the Canadian Alliance to convince the present government that there are better crime control measures than the gun registry.

Sincerely,

Garry Breitkreuz, MP

Yorkton-Melville