--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kill the gun registry

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sheila Fraser's audit of the federal gun registry, released yesterday, provides yet more proof that Canada is a better country for having booted the Liberals from power. In the auditor-general's devastating 2002 report, the federal Auditor-General revealed that costs at the Canadian Firearms Centre had skyrocketed out of control. But we now know that, even after that initial audit, the Liberals continued to mislead Parliament about the registry's true costs in order to minimize political damage.

According to Ms. Fraser, gun-registry officials have given Parliament "an incomplete picture of how well the licensing and registration activities have performed." The management cannot vouch for the accuracy of much of the information in its databanks. And it has "no formal process for following up with law enforcement on its revocations." Last year, for instance, the federal firearm centre revoked the registrations on nearly 3,000 firearms because it deemed their owners threats to public safety. But in at least two-thirds of those cases, the centre cannot say whether the dangerous owners have surrendered their guns to police.

The previous government also deliberately misled Parliament about the true cost of revamping Ottawa's gun-registry computers. Over the first four years of the registry's operation, the Liberals spent $190-million on its databank, only to have to scrap the initial system and start from scratch. So far, $90-million has been spent on a second system, a sum that is "significantly over budget." More troubling still, lessons learned from the failure of the first system were not heeded when developing the second, Ms. Fraser explained. Estimates are that the current system could wind up costing nearly $240-million, with no guarantees it will work better than the abandoned one.

In advance of Tuesday's report, the registry's supporters began spinning tales about how the registry need not be scrapped because it is now costing just $10-million a year to operate. But there is nothing in Ms. Fraser's report to support this claim, and it is impossible to tell how organizations such as the Coalition for Gun Control and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police came up with the fanciful figure. Last year, the government spent $93-million on the Canadian Firearms Centre, and this year it expects to spend at least $83-million more. Nearly half those sums ($43-million) are for contracts to fix the computer system. Another $20-million each year goes to salaries, $4-million to employees benefit plans, $4-million for travel and entertainment expenses and $2-million for "repair and maintenance."

The same organizations insisted the registry is vital because police access its records 5,000 times each day. Again, Ms. Fraser's report is silent on this claim. But it is known from the work of gun registry researchers that most of these "hits" are either made automatically -- such as when an officer searches a suspect's criminal record and a police computer, unbeknownst to the officer, also checks the firearms computers -- or are made when police are registering additional guns for owners already in the system. The daily use figures, therefore, are meaningless.

Perhaps the most damning statement in Ms. Fraser's audit came not from her staff, but from the firearms centre itself. In response to her query about the usefulness of registration, the centre replied that "there are many statistical and data problems in linking ... licensing and registration activities to public safety outcomes." So, while the Liberals promised both rhetorically and legislatively that the registry would reduce gun crime in Canada, there is no evidence that it has, despite the $1-billion or more it has cost. That is reason enough for the Conservative government to move as swiftly as possible to shut it down.