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Oh, the tangled web Liberals wove

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In 2002, Auditor General Sheila Fraser called the Liberal's gun registry the worst case of cost overrun she had ever seen. She even withdrew her financial ferrets from the Department of Justice because its books were so poorly kept her staff could make neither hide nor hair of them.

Stung by Fraser's revelations that the registry was going to cost $1 billion, rather than the $2 million they had originally promised taxpayers, the Liberals quickly pledged to Parliament that they would contain costs in 2003-04 to well under $100 million. However, near the end of the fiscal year that closed in March 2004, the Liberals found themselves about $22 million over their promised limit.

To spend that extra money and stay within the Financial Administration Act, the Liberals would have had to go back to Parliament and hold a vote to authorize the amount. They had a majority at the time. They could easily have forced the spending through. But they would have to have admitted that despite Fraser's audit -- plus two much-ballyhooed external consultants reports on how to fix the registry and a major management shakeup -- they had still failed to control spiralling costs. And they weren't about to admit any such thing.

At around the same -- February or March of 2004 -- Fraser had released her utterly devastating report into the sponsorship scandal. Prime Minister Paul Martin was jetting about the country on his national mea culpa tour, trying to limit Adscam's damage for his party. And there was a federal election in the offing. The last thing the Liberals wanted was another controversy.

So senior bureaucrats and, most likely, cabinet ministers conspired to deceive Parliament about the full extent of registry spending. With the acquiescence of the Treasury Board, some or all of the $39 million spent on the registry's first failed computer system in 2003-04 was set over to 2004-05 and beyond.

Get Adscam behind them. Get the election safely over. Then the Liberals would deal with the overspending in the registry -- quietly, over years, a bit added to a budget here, a dash added there another year.

Government accountants told those involved that what they were proposing violated public-sector accounting rules. So they ignored the accountants.

Then, apparently, government lawyers told them there were no escapes clauses in the law that permitted what was being proposed. So, they ignored the lawyers' advice, too, and seemingly bulled ahead simultaneously with both the unauthorized spending and their plan to cover it up. Those involved also seem to have suspected from the start that what they were trying to do was at the very least highly unethical and at worst, illegal.

Fraser could not uncover who was behind this scam because no one kept any records. No agendas were sent out. No one marked the meetings in their calendars. No attendance was taken nor minutes kept.

Short of brown envelopes full of cash left on restaurant tables and kickbacks to the Liberal party itself, the former government's behaviour in concealing the registry's true costs were every bit as deceitful as their behaviour in the sponsorship scandal.

For this reason alone, the Conservatives are justified in shutting this rats' nest down -- or at least neutering it until they can get a majority and pass legislation repealing it once and for all.

But there are plenty of other reasons contained in Fraser's second audit of the registry, released Tuesday.

After at least $190 million was wasted on the Canadian Firearms Centre's first computer system, outside experts recommended it be scrapped and a new system devised from the ground up. So far, $90 million has been spent on this second system -- a sum Fraser says is "significantly over budget" -- on the way to as much as $240 million, and still the computers produce an alarming error rate.

In two-thirds of cases where gun owners have been ordered to surrender their guns to police because they are considered threats to society, the centre cannot tell whether those surrenders have occurred. At least one-fifth of all records in the firearms databank contain errors that render the entire file meaningless, and the details of over 80 per cent of the guns registered have not been verified and likely never will be.

Police chiefs and some police associations may claim the registry is a useful tool in fighting crime (although there is no proof of this, just police assertions). Yet given how buggy and incomplete the data is, it is hard to see how this could be true.

Some supporters of the registry also like to cite the "fact" that police across Canada use the registry 5,000 times a day. But this is misleading.

Most of these "hits" are either clerical (they involve police officers registering new guns for existing owners, for instance) or occur without the enquiring officer's knowledge. Many police forces have their computers set up to automatically search the firearms computer, too, whenever an officer searches the national database of criminal suspects.

No matter what its defenders say, the registry is useless and wasteful, and was deceitfully propped up by the last government.

It is well past time it was dismantled.

lgunter@shaw.ca