NEWS RELEASE

  June 6, 2001                                                                                                              For Immediate Release

  NEW AUDITOR GENERA L ASKED TO PUT BILL C-68 OUT OF ITS MISERY

“After six years and the waste of $600 million, the failures of the gun registry are very clear.”

  Ottawa – This week, Garry Breitkreuz, MP for Yorkton-Melville asked the newly appointed Auditor General, Mrs. Sheila Fraser, to take a fresh look at the long list of failures that the government has produced in their attempt to implement their six-year-old gun registration scheme.  “This has become the biggest, most expensive garbage collection system ever,” said Breitkreuz.  “It’s time somebody held the government accountable for this waste of tax dollars and human resources.  The Auditor General seems to be the only one the government will listen to.”

  On Tuesday, Breitkreuz sent a four-page letter to the new Auditor General providing a brief explanation of 20 failures attributable to bad public policy decisions and poor legislative drafting by the Liberal government when they used closure to ram Bill C-68 through Parliament in 1995.  Here is Breitkreuz’s list of those failures:

 C-68 has failed because it has already cost one life

C-68 has failed to receive the support and cooperation of the majority of provinces

C-68 has failed to meet cost estimates as promised to Parliament

C-68 has failed to meet the cost-recovery plan as promised to Parliament

C-68 has likely cost more than $300 million in fiscal year 2000/2001 alone

C-68 will cost the economy far more than it will cost to implement the program

C-68 has failed to enlist the support and cooperation of responsible firearm owners

C-68 has failed because non-compliance will lead to an increase in black-market firearms trade

C-68 has failed to convince Aboriginal persons to participate in the program

C-68 has failed to collect accurate data on guns

C-68 has failed to collect accurate data on firearm owners

C-68 has failed to gain the support of front-line police officers

C-68 has failed because it has driven a wedge between law-abiding citizens and the police

C-68 has failed because police are now counseling citizens to break the law

C-68 has failed because the government had to introduce 22 pages of amendments to it

C-68 has failed because it has violated the privacy rights of millions of law-abiding citizens

C-68 has failed every evaluation conducted so far

C-68 has failed so badly the government has had to fabricate statistics to make it look like they succeeded

C-68 has failed so badly they had to establish “Oversight Committees” at Treasury Board

C-68 has even failed to gain the support of the general public

  “The outcomes are already so clear, that any common sense analysis can only conclude that Bill C-68 has been a complete and utter failure and will never succeed no matter how many hundreds of millions the government spends, no matter how many bureaucrats the government employs, and no matter how long you wait to do your audit,” Breitkreuz wrote.  “The longer we wait to do an audit, the more money and human resources will be wasted – money and resources that could be better spent and deployed on real law enforcement and public safety priorities.”

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Please see the accompanying THE OUTCOMES OF C-68