Yorkton - Today, Garry Breitkreuz, Firearms Critic for the Official Opposition, made public a few more secrets from the Justice Department's leaky firearms registry. In an August, Friday the13th letter sent to the Canadian Police Association (CPA), Justice Minister Anne McLellan flatly rejected all four recommendations from her own handpicked group of firearms experts. The Minister referred to the recommendations to "address black market gun sales" as a "quick fix" in her letter. "Obviously, the Minister's User Group on Firearms is raising the same issues that we are - non-compliance and impossible deadlines," said Breitkreuz.

The recommendations made by the Minister's User Group on Firearms were:

• Permitting dealers and individuals to transfer and register firearms outside the present scheme on a temporary basis, while maintaining full CPIC and background checks, licencing verification and necessary firearms information to facilitate more timely registration, similar to the reporting process in effect before December 1998.
• Delaying the final date for licencing to December 31, 2002, to match that in effect for registration.
• Suspending the $25 transfer fee on a temporary basis to encourage compliance.
• Postponing the registration deadline for two years to relieve the reported backlog and presumed inability to achieve full capacity by the current deadline.

The Justice Minister's letter dismisses the recommendations outright and tells the CPA, "a variety of system and process improvements will address the performance concerns raised by the User Group." Breitkreuz commented, "Minister McLellan is being duped by her bureaucrats. She should crunch the numbers herself and she would see the utter futility of it all. Maybe Finance Minister Paul Martin should lend the Justice Minister and her bureaucrats a calculator that actually works."

"The government has created so much red tape and special taxes to buying a firearm legally that many responsible firearms owners are doing whatever it takes to avoid the overly expensive, totally ineffective system. Technically, they are breaking the law, but when it's done to protest a bad law and high taxes, it's called civil disobedience," observed Breitkreuz.

"Rather than admit failure, the government has chosen to spend hundreds of millions to make life more and more difficult for duck hunters instead of zeroing in on the public's real priorities - real crime and real criminals."

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Yorkton Office: (306) 782-3309

Ottawa Office: (613) 992-4394

e-mail: breitg0@parl.gc.ca