Parliamentary hearings on a bill aimed at ending the long gun registry ended in Ottawa last week with a final acrimonious flurry of conflicting evidence about its effectiveness and cost.Now, the Commons committee on public safety and national security will go through the bill clause-by-clause and the opposition majority is expected to propose amendments that would keep the registry but make its bureaucracy less onerous.That could lead to a Conservative challenge to speaker Peter Milliken, arguing that once a bill is approved in principle by the House of Commons, a committee cannot change the intention of the bill.When the Commons votes again on Bill C-391, a private member’s bill proposed by Manitoba Conservative Candice Hoeppner and supported last November by 20 mainly rural Liberal and New Democratic Party MPs who broke party ranks in a free vote, all eyes will be on the 12 New Democrats who voted with the Conservatives.Liberal dissident MPs have been ordered to vote against the bill by leader Michael Ignatieff.NDP leader Jack Layton, who opposes the bill, has not yet said if his anti-registry MPs will be forced to reverse themselves.On May 27, auditor general Sheila Fraser told MPs on the committee that she has not looked at the registry’s costs since 2006 but that review produced few red flags. It was an audit in 2002 by Fraser’s office that reported vast cost overruns in the registry and gave impetus to opponents.By 2006, she said many of the problems had been fixed.“We found that they had made good progress assessing the costs,” she said. “So we were satisfied at that point.”Fraser said there are no plans to do another audit on the registry.Supporters of the registry lined up over weeks of testimony to argue that it has saved lives and costs have been brought under control. Police, women’s groups, unions and the province of Quebec urged MPs to defeat the bill.The three prairie provinces and Yukon’s government wrote letters to support the legislation.And Kevin Gaudet, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, urged MPs to support the bill.He said the police’s stance against the end of the registry is suspect because RCMP leaders issued “an outrageous memo … ordering the commanders and all their employees to keep their opinions to themselves and their mouths shut.”He said even though operating costs have been reduced, total costs are not known.
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