He is not the sponsor of the government bill to end the long gun registry and doesn’t have his name on it but Saskatchewan MP Garry Breitkreuz’s fingerprints are all over it.
In many way, the veteran Yorkton- Melville MP is the godfather of Bill C-19 to scrap the registry and then destroy its 16 years of accumulated data.
The House of Commons voted to approve in principle Bill C-19, which will end the long gun registry and destroy the records collected since it was set up in 1995.
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Breitkreuz has been dogged in his pursuit of the issue for more than a decade and a half, raising countless questions in the House of Commons and helping to trigger an investigation by the federal auditor-general that uncovered huge spending overruns in the registry.
“This really has been a focus of my time in Parliament,” Breitkreuz said in an interview last week. “But I’m no gun nut. It was just bad policy.”
When he was elected in the east-central Saskatchewan constituency in 1993, defeating 25-year veteran New Democrat Lorne Nystrom, gun control was not on the political radar screen for the farmer, teacher and principal with teaching experience in Africa, the Solomon Islands and northern Saskatchewan.
That all changed one cold January night in 1994 when the newly elected MP was asked to speak at a meeting on Liberal government proposals to create a long gun registry.
The hall was packed with 1,000 people or more who had braved -39 C temperatures and who challenged him to dig deeper into justice minister Allan Rock’s proposed registry legislation.
“My first response was, ‘who could be opposed to gun control?’ ” he remembers asking the crowd.
They weren’t satisfied and told him to do his homework. He promised to do that and began a 16-year odyssey of research, Commons and committee questions, access-to-information requests, thousands of pages of files stacked in the office and brown envelopes being shoved under his office door by bureaucrats directing him toward other areas of questioning.
After years of being mocked by governing Liberals for what they saw as a gun obsession, Breitkreuz was able to bask in the spotlight last week over the end of the registry.
“It has been a long haul but in the end, through working for positive change, we have been able to make a difference,” he told the Commons Oct. 27.
