Canadians must be so deadened to the bureaucratic nightmare that is the federal long gun registry that any new piece of news about the program’s failures barely qualifies as news.

However, western Manitobans and other rural Canadians who understand this ill-conceived program has always been and will always be a colossal waste of time and money can only shake their heads again as the Canada Firearms Centre and the Liberal government tried to pull another fast one on us.

The Canadian Press reported Wednesday the government quietly put off several new gun regulations that were first supposed to take effect in January 2004, put off until Sept. 1 and now delayed again for another year or two.

Among the provisions is a requirement forcing police forces to register all their weapons — including those seized from criminals — with the federal agency. Rules for gun shows have been put off until next November, while regulations that require gun manufacturers to identify guns with internationally recognized markings have been delayed until the end of 2007.

A spokesman for Public Safety Minister and Edmonton MP Anne McLellan said the decision is to “ensure compliance and be responsive to the feedback” from the public on the rules.

“We’ve done similar things like this before and ultimately we’ve phased things in and done so in a way that makes it user-friendly for people,” Alex Swann says.

A couple of points here. First, Swann or anyone in McLellan’s office will probably discover that if they ask any western Manitoban — or for that matter, anyone from the Prairies who understands that forcing law-abiding rifle and shotgun owners to register their firearms makes little to no sense — that the “feedback” at this wasteful policy won’t be positive no matter what they do.

Second, there have been so many headaches, delays, false starts and confusion with this program that there is probably no way the government can make it “user-friendly,” as McLellan’s spokesman indicates.

First passed in 1995 in response to public pressure in Ontario and Quebec about escalating gun violence — including the 1989 shooting of 13 women at a polytechnical college in Montreal — the long gun registry has been a source of anger, confusion and rage among the vast majority of Canada’s gun owners.

We were first told the program would cost $2 million once the Canada Firearms Centre recouped registration fees — which always seemed like a blatant cash grab — from gun owners. When Auditor-General Sheila Fraser released her report on the mess in 2002, she estimated the true cost had grown to $1 billion. Two years later, CBC unearthed documents through the Freedom of Information Act that showed the price tag had actually doubled to $2 billion.

To its credit, the Liberal government made an after-the-fact attempt to rein in costs by capping the registry’s annual budget at $25 million and waiving the registration fees gun owners were forced to pay.

It was a needed admission of error, but at the same time it doesn’t make up for the fact the Liberals have wasted $2 billion — an amount that could have built 33 additions to the Brandon Regional Health Centre — on a program that has never lived up to its lofty expectations as a way of curbing crime. Look no further than the waves of shootings in Toronto to see that making hunters register guns does nothing to curb urban gun violence.

No change short of scrapping the registry altogether will make western Manitobans and Canadians happy about it.