PUBLICATION: The Ottawa Sun

DATE: 2002.12.10

EDITION: Final

SECTION: Comment

PAGE: 14

SOURCE: BY MARK BONOKOSKI, OTTAWA SUN

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HE SHOOTS, HE SCORES

CANADIAN ALLIANCE MP GARRY BREITKREUZ IS THE GUN REGISTRY'S MOST PERSISTENT FOE, AND HIS CRITICISMS OF THE LIBERAL'S LATEST SPENDING DISASTER ARE AS PERTINENT AS EVER

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The case has been bungled, the defence has been torn apart, yet the Liberals are proceeding with their gun registry legislation as if their incompetent handling of it can be turned around on a dime.

And this is after 10 billion dimes have already been spent on a disaster so unmitigated that it is now 500% over budget, and climbing.

But it all seems not to matter.

Despite the overtness of the cockup as laid out last week in the House of Commons, upwards of a half-million Canadians will nonetheless become instant criminals at the stroke of midnight New Year's Eve.

The majority, of course, are salt of the earth people, law- abiding until the second hand of the clock sweeps into 2003; hard-working, taxpaying citizens who, from any vantage point, would be looked upon as pillars of their communities.

But that will soon carry no weight.

They will become the hunted.

Their crime, as laid out in Bill C-68, will be their failure or outright refusal to register their long guns before the Jan. 1 deadline that the Liberals imposed, promising Canadians in 1995 that the program would only cost taxpayers $2.5 million.

In recent weeks, the streets of Toronto have witnessed a rash of brutal murders -- blacks killing blacks, gangs banging gangs -- as gun play took on the aura of being the norm rather than the exception.

But they were handguns, not rifles.

Since 1934, it has been the law in this country that handguns be registered, but five will get you 10 that the guns that killed Kevin and Jermaine Ebanks -- and Heavy D as well -- never appeared in any registry.

Odds are they were smuggled in from the United States, passing from one criminal hand to another.

So much, therefore, for Canada's 68-year-old law demanding all handguns be registered.

According to Canadian Alliance MP Garry Breitkreuz, whose tenacious opposition to Bill C-68 has since been validated by the auditor general's report, the failure of the handgun law should have been enough evidence to indicate that this legislation was also predestined to fail.

At this very moment, for example, police have no idea of the whereabouts of over 130,000 individuals who are so dangerous that courts have already prohibited them from ever possessing a firearm. And the reason police have no idea where they are is because the government does not require these criminals to report a change in address.

Going no further than into the Statistics Canada database, Breitkreuz came up with some pretty interesting numbers to back his position that the government is wrong to zero in on law-abiding gun owners.

When it comes to murder in this country, for instance, 65% of those accused of homicide already have a criminal record, and 58% of them had been previously convicted of a violent crime.

"Once again, Statistics Canada has proven that the Liberals are way off target by forcing completely innocent people to register their firearms," said the Saskatchewan MP. "The real targets are the known criminals, gangsters or the mentally disturbed -- not farmers, hunters, target shooters and collectors."

Since the passing of Bill C-68, more than one million Canadians have registered approximately 4.8 million long-barrel firearms. According to government numbers, that leaves upwards of 500,000 Canadians under the gun to register by New Year's Eve.

What are the odds of that happening now?

About a week ago, in anticipation of a flood that might never come, Justice Minister Martin Cauchon announced that firearm owners would be given a six-month "grace period" to receive their gun-registration papers -- if, and only if, they had submitted their documentation by the New Year's Eve deadline.

To Breitkreuz, this grace period is little more than the Liberals gasping for air as many of their own backbench MPs begin siding with the opposition's prosecutorial stance that this billion dollars would have been better spent on health care, or national defence, or more police on the streets.

"We could have put more than 10,000 police officers on our streets and highways," Breitkreuz said. "A billion dollars could have bought, installed and operated 238 MRIs for a year.

"How much pain, suffering and worry would have been alleviated, and how many lives saved?"