Gun registration price tag hits $1 billion

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Published: December 5, 2002

The federal government last week conceded its gun registration system

will cost taxpayers close to $1 billion by 2005 – 12 times the original

estimate – and hundreds of thousands of gun owners still are not

registered.

In the House of Commons and the Senate, critics, including some

Liberals, insisted the program is too costly and ineffective.

Saskatchewan Liberal senator Herb Sparrow said Nov. 27 that Ottawa’s

refusal to spend enough to support farmers has caused more suicides

than gun control has prevented.

Read Also

Robert Andjelic, who owns 248,000 acres of cropland in Canada, stands in a massive field of canola south of Whitewood, Sask. Andjelic doesn't believe that technical analysis is a useful tool for predicting farmland values | Robert Arnason photo

Land crash warning rejected

A technical analyst believes that Saskatchewan land values could be due for a correction, but land owners and FCC say supply/demand fundamentals drive land prices – not mathematical models

Saskatchewan Canadian Alliance MP Garry Breitkreuz said Nov. 28 in the

Commons that money spent on a “useless gun registry” could have been

used to buy needed medical equipment.

Justice minister Martin Cauchon insisted the government continues to

support the gun registry system and it does save lives and help the

police do their jobs.

“The program has been a bit more costly,” he said. “We are talking

about the question of some provinces having opted out. We brought some

changes as well to the program following consultation. The technology

has been more expensive but look at the result today. It is valuable to

our society and is protecting our society.”

As the Dec. 31 deadline looms for registering guns and the government

admits more than 600,000 gun owners will be unable to or unwilling to

comply by the deadline, the usefulness of the registry was debated once

again on Parliament Hill last week.

A Senate committee was studying a bill that would create a central

firearms control commissioner and make it easier for gun owners to

register.

There have been bureaucratic problems since many gun owners waited

until the end of the registration period to act and now are jamming the

system and phone lines. Critics say this could make hundreds of

thousands of Canadians into criminals on Jan. 1, 2003, if they fail to

have their guns registered.

Defenders of the system say it is a crisis created deliberately by gun

owners who waited until the last moment to subvert the system.

Last week, the government announced a six-month grace period for people

who have applied for gun registration but do not receive the official

certificates by Jan. 1.

Those who have not applied do not qualify for the grace period.

On Nov. 27, a Senate committee replayed the gun control debate of

earlier years.

Witnesses from the Canadian Police Association said gun registration is

not a panacea but a useful tool that police are happy to have. Gun

control advocates presented figures to suggest that gun-related deaths

have decreased since gun control started to be strengthened under the

last Progressive Conservative government more than a decade ago.

Gun groups insisted it has done nothing to fight crime and instead has

resulted in harassment of average rural, aboriginal and hunting

Canadians who now have bureaucracy and costs to deal with.

With misgivings by some, the Senate will send the gun control

amendments back to the Commons, possibly as early as this week, for

final approval.

explore

Stories from our other publications