Months after a divided House of Commons voted to shoot the long-gun registry and the government vowed to erase the registry database on gun owners collected since 1995, the job is complete.
Almost.
The office of public safety minister Vic Toews has announced that the database collected in nine provinces has been erased.
Only Quebec data remains on file and stored because of a court order.
The Quebec government has taken Ottawa to court, demanding that gun registry data from the province be turned over to the provincial government, which wants to create its own registry.
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A Quebec court judge ordered that the data be preserved until the case is resolved, which could be many months.
When she was sworn in as premier late last month, Parti Québecois premier Pauline Marois made creation of a provincial gun registry one of her first promises in office.
The federal government says provinces have the right to create registries but not by using out-of-date data collected for the federal registry.
When opposition MPs and the then-Liberal Quebec government expressed outrage over government plans to destroy the data, Toews had a quick retort.
“The data is the registry,” he said.
