PUBLICATION:
National Post
DATE: 2004.10.23
EDITION:
Toronto
SECTION:
Canada
PAGE:
A4
BYLINE:
Adrian Humphreys, Scott Stinson and Jacques Bourbeau
SOURCE: National Post and CanWest News Service
ILLUSTRATION:
Black & White Photo: Allen Mcinnis, Canwest News Service /Of the 1.3 million
people registered with a "Possession Only Licence," 770,000 of them
will get a break on the application.
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Gun
registry loses $46M to backlog: 'Avoids a big crunch': Ottawa renews licences
for free to reduce paperwork
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The cash-strapped federal gun registry will miss out on more than $46-million in fees from gun owners this year by giving away 770,000 free licence renewals so that bureaucrats can catch up on their paperwork. Those firearms owners who were randomly chosen by the Canada Firearms Centre for the free extensions of up to four years should receive their notices in the mail next week.
The
unusual move is to head off an expected deluge of applications to renew licences
-- which are normally valid for five years -- as the fifth anniversary of the
original Jan. 1, 2001, firearms registration deadline approaches. "In order
to comply with that specific deadline under the new firearms act there was, of
course, a flood of applications close to the deadline," said Thomas Vares,
a spokesman for the firearms centre. "We're now in the window of that
expiry date for maturation of licences," he said.
The
gun registry faced a rotating feast-or-famine cycle every five years unless
something was done to level out the load, Mr. Vares said. "To ensure that
we are able to process these applications in an orderly fashion and offer
service to Canadians by being able to settle with them in a timely manner, at
random we set up a system that extends certain people's licences for an
additional maximum of four years. "It
sort of avoids a big crunch and backlog."
But Garry Breitkreuz, a Saskatchewan Conservative MP and one of the gun registry's harshest critics, said the decision to confer free licence renewals "is another example of poor planning by the Liberal government," which should have anticipated the renewal glut. "Did no one in the Liberal braintrust ask themselves what they were going to do when all these firearms licences came up for renewal in five years?"
David Tomlinson, a member of the National Firearms Association's executive committee, said he suspects the automatic renewals are part of an effort to reduce costs in the short term so that the CFC does not have to ask the government for millions of dollars to cover its ongoing expenses. "Every spring, they ask the government for $115-million to pour down the black hole of badly run gun control, so this year they will be able to ask for a number that's a little smaller," he said in a telephone interview from Edmonton. "This had nothing to do with reducing a workload, and everything to do with lowering operating costs. They painted themselves into one hell of a corner."
The
free renewals, which normally costs $60, will affect the majority of registered
possession-only gun owners. Of the 1.3 million people registered with a
"Possession Only Licence," 770,000 of them will get a break on the
application. The 700,000 people registered with a "Possession and
Acquisition Licence" will not be affected and will have to apply for a
renewal as regularly scheduled. There
are about seven million guns registered in Canada.
Gun
owners in British Columbia, Alberta, Northwest Territories and the Yukon who are
receiving free renewals had their notices and stickers mailed out this week.
Those in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Nunavut will be sent their free
stickers early next month and those in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces will be
sent notices in late November and early December. The firearms centre will send
out notices as regularly scheduled -- about three months before the date of
expiry -- to those gun owners not being granted a waiver.
The gun registry has been a source of frequent criticism for the government after its costs swelled from less than $10-million to an estimated $1-billion. Mr. Breitkreuz said the renewal issue is indicative of larger problems with the registry and its bloated costs. "It is totally focused on tracking millions of law-abiding gun owners instead of individuals who have proven themselves to be too dangerous to have guns."
Mr.
Tomlinson echoed those concerns. "All this thing does is track the honest
citizens. Does the government really think that Uncle George from East Elbow,
Sasktachewan, is going to be dissuaded from murdering someone because he
registered his duck gun?"
In
May, the government announced the costs of running the program were being capped
at $25-million. The annual cost of the registry itself is "already down to
$33-million from a high of $48 million in [fiscal year] 2001-02," the
government said at the time in a news release. "Recognizing that
enhancements can be made to improve the firearms program for law-abiding
citizens, the government intends to further streamline firearms licence renewal
processes," the release from May said.
The
firearms registry spokesman in the office of Anne McLellan, Minister of Public
Safety and Emergency Preparedness, and a spokeswoman from the office of Irwin
Cotler, Minister of Justice, did not return telephone calls yesterday afternoon.
A spokeswoman for Reg Alcock, president of the Treasury Board, referred calls to
the firearms centre.
(Global
National)