OTTAWA—Prime Minister Stephen Harper has acted to kill any attempt by a provincial or future federal government to recreate the doomed long-gun registry.In a surprise move aimed at putting a bullet in the registry for good, the Conservative government bill tabled Wednesday orders the commissioner of firearms to destroy “as soon as feasible” records related to 7.1 million long-barreled guns collected over the past 15 years.
If passed, Bill C-19 would, as promised, end the legal requirement for owners of rifles and shotguns to register their firearms under a federal gun control law inspired by the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre. It retains the requirement for long-gun owners to be screened and licensed.
But the bill declares that other federal laws that require the preservation of federal records would not apply to gun registry data.
Asked what motivated the destruction of data, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, the lead minister, said the Conservatives want to thwart the ability of any other party, such as the NDP, to reestablish it in the future.
“We won’t have these records loose and capable then of creating a new long gun registry should they ever have the opportunity to do that,” Toews said at an Ottawa Valley farm.
Supporters of strict gun control, including the federal government’s handpicked ombudsman for victims of crime, Susan O’Sullivan, were dismayed at how far the Conservatives are prepared to go.
O’Sullivan, a former Ottawa police officer, said that over the past decade, 71 per cent of spousal homicides involved rifles and shotguns. She urged the government to retain the registry.
Registry opponents like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation cheered the Conservatives’ new plan and urged it to go further to eliminate the licensing of long-gun owners, too.
Gregory Thomas, the group’s federal and Ontario director, warned against any move by provincial governments to establish a long-gun registry of their own.
The Conservative move means once the bill passes, registry information that is currently accessed more than 17,000 times a day by police across Canada will no longer be searchable, nor will its information be transferred to provinces before its elimination.
“For me, this is like payday,” rejoiced Saskatchewan Conservative MP Garry Breitkreuz.
Although there are divisions within their own ranks over the long-gun registry, the New Democrats and the Liberals denounced the new plan as wasteful, ideological and a divisive move aimed at sharpening an urban/rural split in the country.
Both parties have proposed changes that would have removed registration requirements from the criminal law and made it a simple regulatory scheme.
“The information that’s there is accurate and valuable and useful and the chiefs of police want it, and this government wants to destroy it and burn it,” said NDP justice critic Jack Harris. “A lot of taxpayers’ money has been used to collect this information under the law as it existed.”
Harris and NDP MP Françoise Boivin dismissed any suggestion the Conservatives care about privacy, saying the records can be protected and should be transferred to provinces like Quebec, which has already indicated it wishes to establish a provincial substitute.
“It’s a slap in the face for Quebec,” said Boivin, who said the Conservatives are treating the registry as if it is party property, not an asset that belongs to all Canadians.
“It’s completely stupid, it’s a waste and it’s ideological,” said Liberal MP Marc Garneau.
The Coalition for Gun Control said the Conservatives are turning back the clock “to the days when police recovered a gun and had to search store by store to see where the firearm was sold.”
Dr. Alan Drummond, of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians and an assistant coroner in Perth, said the Conservatives are “conveniently ignoring the clear scientific evidence that rural suicides with long guns are the principal issue in the tragic toll of Canadian firearms deaths. So we will now all be unwilling participants in a social experiment that will undoubtedly place Canadian lives at risk.”
The NDP scoffed at any claim the move is aimed at austerity, saying it saves only about $4 million a year — the amount the RCMP says it now costs to operate the registry.
Yet Toews and Conservatives continued Wednesday to refer to an estimate of the cumulative overall costs for the establishment of the comprehensive owner licensing and gun registration program as a “$2 billion boondoggle,” although the federal auditor general had pegged it at $1 billion over a decade.
Two Conservative cabinet ministers for Quebec, Christian Paradis and Denis Lebel, said the gun data is “useless” and “wasteful.” Paradis and Lebel predicted there would be no political price to pay in Quebec.
“No problem about that,” said Lebel.
The RCMP’s current firearms commissioner declined to comment when asked about how the destruction of data might proceed.
Origin
Source: Toronto Star
No comments:
Post a Comment