NEWS RELEASE

March 24, 2003                                                                                                       For Immediate Release

ENFORCING THE FIREARMS ACT COULD EASILY COST ANOTHER BILLION DOLLARS!

“Is this why the government wouldn’t tell the Auditor General what the enforcement costs would be?”

Ottawa – Today, Garry Breitkreuz, Official Opposition Critic for Firearms and Property Rights, released a Library of Parliament research paper that estimates the cost of enforcing the Firearms Act could easily cost taxpayers another billion dollars.  “The government failed to report any enforcement costs to the Auditor General or to Parliament, even though the Justice Department’s own reports show 1.1 million gun owners aren’t yet in full compliance with the law,” reported Breitkreuz.  “The list of examples of Liberal mismanagement of the gun registry gets longer and longer.  Add to this list of poor planning: the costs of enforcement and how to pay for them.  Either they are intentionally keeping Parliament and the public in the dark, or they are totally incompetent.”

The research paper estimates that the average cost of a conviction for a non-criminal code incident under the Firearms Act is $3,107.  The average cost of a conviction for the most serious offence under the Firearms Act would be $9,828.  Therefore the Total Net Costs of 100,000 convictions would range between $310 million and $982 million.  “If the Liberals plan to enforce the Firearms Act, tell Parliament what it’s going to cost taxpayers.  If they aren’t going to enforce it, then they must scrap it,” declared Breitkreuz.

“Using the Justice Department’s own surveys, there are more than 500,000 gun owners in Canada who failed to obtain a firearms licence and cannot register their guns without one,” explained Breitkreuz.  “A response to one of my Access to Information Act requests also showed that as of February 12, 2003, there were more than 600,000 individuals that still had to register or re-register their firearms before the end of June.  On March 19, 2003, Justice Department officials admitted they had received only 53,000 letters from people indicating they intended to register their guns.  “Liberals love to have bureaucrats shuffle paper and have law-abiding citizens fill out forms and label it improving public safety.  But when responsible firearm owners don’t do the Liberal paperwork precisely as they dictate, or by some completely arbitrary political deadline, they end up with a criminal record or worse yet in jail,” said Breitkreuz.

In her December 2002 report, Mrs. Sheila Fraser, the Auditor General of Canada, calculated that the gun registry would cost a billion dollars by 2005, but she noted that her estimate was incomplete for a number of reasons including the fact that the government had failed to report the costs of enforcement and the costs of compliance.  “I asked the Library of Parliament to prepare these estimates because the government neglected to calculate and include these very significant costs in their past and future cost estimates for Parliament,” explained Breitkreuz. 

“It is simply inexcusable that the Prime Minister is using the threat of expulsion from the Liberal Party to force his backbenchers to vote for this now multibillion-dollar boondoggle.  How can anybody with any concern for the public purse vote another $172 million for this program when the government won’t tell Parliament what the total cost of the firearms program is so far, and when they’ve grossly underestimated the future costs of implementing the legislation and enforcing the law?” asked Breitkreuz.  “It boggles the mind.”

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