To appear in the Edmonton Journal Thursday 20 May 1999
To describe Ottawa's firearms registry as being in free fall is to give it too much credit. People in free fall at least know in which direction they are headed.
Saskatchewan Reform MP Garry Breitkreuz will today make public the results of a Library of Parliament investigation on the number of civil servants devoted to registering all of Canada's lawful firearms. The results are staggering and reinforce the belief that nothing this government says about its firearms registry, from Justice Minister Anne McLellan on down, can be trusted to be the truth.
Where Canadians had been assured there were only 200 civil servants, there are in truth (there's that word, again) between 600 and 800 working full-time to protect us from Cousin Harold's gopher rifle and Neighbour Al's duck gun.
The RCMP admit they have no clue how many legal or illegal guns are entering Canada from abroad each year, nor any idea of the whereabouts of nearly 70,000 guns stolen from homes and shops in the past two decades. These guns pose a vastly greater danger to Canadians' safety than all the millions of shotguns and rifles owned by law-abiding citizens, but if the federal government has even 200 employees devoted full-time to stopping gun smuggling and black marketeering, I would be stunned. Instead, it has upwards of 800 employees scurrying to make computer records of the .22 your grandfather gave you.
And even that total is incomplete. Only those civil servants engaged in gun registration on behalf of the RCMP and the departments of Justice and Human Resources could be counted with reasonable accuracy. At least four other departments - Solicitor General, Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Treasury Board - are involved to lesser degrees, but their participation is so hazy as to defy public scrutiny. An estimate of 1,000 or more civil servants would seem reasonable.
Nor does it end there. Breitkreuz's tenacious and clever assistant, Dennis Young, a former Mountie, determined last week that only the guns of English Canadians are being registered at the Canadian Firearms Centre in Miramichi, New Brunswick. The firearms of Quebecers are being registered at a separate, Quebec-only registry in Montreal. While this second centre is run by Province of Quebec bureaucrats, it is being paid for entirely by Ottawa. It's annual operating costs appear set to rise to about $33 million in the next two years, a sum not included in the $50 to $60 million a year the Liberals publicly confess registration will consume.
But "appears" and "about" are as precise as one can get. Just as the Liberals have hidden many of their gun registry bureaucrats on the staff lists of departments only tangentially involved, they have buried the registry's costs in a dozen budgets. Young discovered the figures for the Montreal registry among transfers to the provinces for health, education and welfare.
Nearly $200 million in expenditures to date have been officially disclosed, but a truer total might be $400 to $500 million. There's simply no way to know. The Department of Justice has yet to reply to an access to information request for an honest accounting filed by Young months ago.
Through a separate access request, Breitkreuz and Young have further determined that despite this brigade of bureaucrats and shipload of tax dollars, Ottawa managed to register just 48,685 firearms between the commencement of registration last December 1 and April 23, and nearly 86 per cent of those (41,673) are antiques owned by museums, guns owned by municipal police forces and the inventories of gun dealers. In nearly five full months of operation, the Canadian Firearms Centre has registered just 7,012 private firearms and licensed a scant 5,137 gun owners.
Based on the Liberals' own ridiculously low estimates of 6 million guns owned by 2.2 million Canadians (the more likely totals are 14 to 16 million guns owned by 5 or 6 million people), this means just 1/10th of one per cent of guns and fewer than 2/10ths of a per cent of owners have been registered so far. In a report marked "secret," prepared by PriceWaterhouseCoopers last November, federal registry officials predicted 504,000 gun owners would register 1.3 million private guns before May 30.
The coming week at the registry is going to be very busy, apparently.
Another mark of how disastrously inefficient the registry has been is the more than 200,000 gun sales it appears to have approved since December compared to the fewer than 50,000 guns it has registered. There seem to be three registrations backlogged for every one completed.
Anyone who thinks this monumental failure will make Canada safer is foolish.