PUBLICATION:        Times Colonist (Victoria)

DATE:                         2004.05.21

EDITION:                    Final

SECTION:                  Comment

PAGE:                         A12

SOURCE:                   Times Colonist

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A bad idea gets tweaked

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The federal government has given the gun registry a pre-election makeover in hopes of cooling public anger. A portion of the costs, amounting to $25 million out of about $150 million, are being capped. Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan says the Liberals will also toughen gun crime provisions and increase penalties for weapons trafficking.

Other suggestions from an internal review group have been dropped. Gun-owners will still be required to license firearms, and failure to do so will remain a criminal offence. A proposal to increase the licence period to 10 years from five appears to have been dumped as well.

The patchwork nature of this fix-up is evident. Setting a cap on expenditures will have no effect on runaway costs unless real changes are made. None has been announced. Moreover, much of the public's outrage has been directed at the huge losses incurred by the registry. These losses will mount, rather than diminish, if fees are no longer charged.

This is a classic attempt to square a political circle. Hunters and ranchers in the West are to be quieted by the cancellation of fees, while anti-gun campaigners down east get tougher penalties for gun-related crimes.

Would it be too much to ask for a policy based on science rather than politics? There is a problem with handgun crimes in Toronto and other urban centres, as crime statistics show. So let's have a program designed to combat illegal ownership and use of handguns.

There is not a problem with the use of shotguns and rifles for hunting, as crime statistics also show. Fatalities involving these weapons have remained essentially unchanged in 40 years. So let's remove these from the registry and quit making criminals out of duck-hunters.

Tweaking the program, as the government has done, will have no effect on the basic issue. A huge bureaucracy has been erected, at enormous cost, to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Worse than that, by playing politics with the issue, rather than using an evidence-based approach, the government is alienating millions of Canadians whose support on other law-enforcement issues it needs.