WHAT DID TAXPAYERS GET FOR THEIR BILLION DOLLARS?

By Garry Breitkreuz, MP – November 29, 2002

Just this week we have seen a headline in the Globe and Mail saying: “Gun registry to cost around $1-billion,” an editorial in the National Post titled, “Time to ditch the gun registry,” and the Edmonton Sun reported, “Firearms centre won’t work: City Cop.”  We hate to say we told you so.

Back in 1995, when Bill C-68, the Firearms Act, was being debated in the House of Commons, twenty Reform MPs took that opportunity to warn the government that it would cost a billion dollars to register all the guns in Canada.  Then Justice Minister Allan Rock pooh-poohed our projections saying: “We have provided our estimate of the cost of implementing universal registration over the next five years. We say that it will cost $85 million.  We encourage the members opposite to examine our estimates. We are confident we will demonstrate that the figures are realistic and accurate.” (Hansard Page 9709 – February 16, 1995).

After seven years, all Canadians now know who was right; unfortunately, the Liberal’s still don’t get it.  On November 28, 2002, Justice Minister Martin Cauchon was still claiming in the House of Commons that the gun registry is, “...worth proceeding with such a fantastic value as protecting our society.”

On Tuesday, December 3, 2002, the Auditor General of Canada, Mrs. Sheila Fraser will present her report to Parliament documenting what she uncovered in her year-long financial audit of the gun registry.  She has confirmed with my office that her audit only examined the costs and did, “not examine the efficiency and performance of the program.”

The Auditor General’s report won’t tell you, so I’ll try to give you a snapshot of what taxpayers got for their billion-dollar “investment” in the Liberals’ gun registration scheme.  The most important question now is, will the Liberals waste another billion before they actually admit the complete and utter failure of their gun registry to do anything to reduce the criminal use of firearms?

(1) Taxpayers got a gun registry that concentrates almost exclusively on law-abiding, responsible hunters and sport shooters instead of criminals, gangs, smugglers and terrorists;

(2) taxpayers got a gun registry that has so infuriated the provincial and territorial governments that eight of them have opted out of the administration of the gun registry and the Western provinces refuse to enforce it;

(3) taxpayers got a gun registry that doesn’t keep track of the current addresses of the 131,000 persons prohibited from owning firearms and fails to check if their guns have been removed from their possession;

(4) taxpayers got a new gun registry based on the failed 68-year-old legally-owned handgun registry that has seen a steady increase in firearms homicides committed with handguns from 27% in 1974 to 58% in 2000.  Statistics Canada also reported that between 1997 and 2001, 74% of the handguns recovered from the scenes of 143 homicides were NOT registered;

(5) taxpayers got a gun registry that is attempting to register all the legally-owned long guns in Canada while Statistics Canada tables show that firearms homicides with rifles and shotguns that have never been registered dropped steadily over the last 27 years, from 64% to 31%;

(6) taxpayers got a gun registry that has licenced only 2 million of Canada’s 3.3 million gun owners and as of February 27, 2002, had already lost track of 38,000 of them;

(7) taxpayers got a gun registry that has only registered 5 million of the estimated 16.5 million guns in Canada;

(8) taxpayers got a gun registry that has a firearms licence refusal and revocation rate that is one half the results achieved with the 23-year-old Firearms Acquisition Certificate program;

      (9) taxpayers got a gun registry that issued 5 million registration certificates that don’t even have the gun            owners’ name on them.  Eighteen million vehicle registrations have the owners’ names;

 (10)  taxpayers got a gun registry with 3.2 million registration certificates with blank and unknown entries – three-quarters of a million with no serial numbers;

 (11)  taxpayers got a gun registry that admits to issuing 15,381 firearms licences to persons with no proof of having passed a firearms safety course;

 (12)  taxpayers got a registry that admits to issuing 26,800 duplicate Firearms Registration Certificates, issuing 832 duplicate firearms licences and issuing 259 firearms licences with the wrong photograph;

 (13)  taxpayers got a gun registry that prohibited more than 568,000 legally owned and registered firearms, but left police without the resources necessary to combat the criminal use of illegally-owned firearms in our major cities;

 (14)  taxpayers got a gun registry that has increased red tape and the regulatory cost of buying a hunting rifle to $279.00 which in turn has driven hundreds of thousands of hunters out of their sport and cost our economy many millions;

 (15)  taxpayers got a gun registry that hands out boxes of ammunition to Aboriginal people who do NOT hold a valid firearms licence; and finally,

 (16)  taxpayers got a gun registry that will never do what the government promised - namely, tell police where the guns are.

In closing, I would like to challenge taxpayers to ask themselves the next question: Where would they have liked this wasted billion dollars to have been spent – health care, defence, more police on the street, etc?  Here are a couple of examples.  According to the Solicitor General of Ontario, we could have put more than 10,000 police officers on our streets and highways.  A billion dollars would have bought, installed and operated 238 MRIs for a year.  How much pain, suffering and worry would have been alleviated and how many lives would have been saved?  What a sad, sad choice the Liberal MPs and our government have made for Canadians.

Garry Breitkreuz is the Member of Parliament for Yorkton-Melville, Saskatchewan, and the Official Opposition Critic for Firearms and Property Rights.