PUBLICATION:
DATE:
2004.12.09
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
BusinessBC
PAGE:
D3
COLUMN:
Michael Campbell
BYLINE:
Michael Campbell
SOURCE:
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Gun
registry waste is in a league of its own
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For
nearly 48 hours there was a brief glimmer of hope that arguably the most inept
and possibly corrupt program of the last generation was going to be pulled off
life support.
On
Monday, Liberal backbencher Roger Gallaway declared that he would call for a
separate vote on the $80 million earmarked for operating that National Firearms
Registry (better known as the "gun registry") for the remainder of the
year when the spending estimates came before the House of Commons today.
To
put it bluntly, the Liberal power elite went nuts at the prospect. Justice
Minister Anne McLellan denounced the call, while party insider Warren Kinsella
threatened Gallaway with sure defeat at his riding's nomination meeting. The
pressure seems to have worked. On Wednesday, Gallaway said he would not put
forward his motion.
Keep
in mind the Liberals, with the help of the NDP and Bloc, are circling the wagons
over a program that federal gun control adviser William Stenning declared was in
a league of its own in terms of incompetence. As he said in referring to the
findings of the government's own audit team, "They've seen lots of terrible
things, but they've never seen anything like this."
Many
Canadians are versed with the fact that taxpayers were promised that total costs
for the registry would be no more than $85 million -- when in fact the numbers
are fast approaching $1.4 billion. Put another way, if the average Canadian
taxpayer sends
Speaking
of police officers, it is not lost on our front-line workers that, while the
total number of RCMP officers has declined 10 per cent on a per-capita basis
since 1975, we now have about 1,800 bureaucrats working on the registry. They
know that while sufficient funding is not available to fight organized crime, we
have a registry that continues to suck much-needed tax dollars away from other
policing programs. Auditor-General Sheila Fraser estimates that an additional
10,000 officers could have been hired with the money that went to the registry.
Actually,
the financial mismanagement is worse than that. The overruns are so great that
many question whether mismanagement alone can explain the costs. I have yet to
find a technology expert who can offer any explanation as to how the cost of
creating the registry's computer system has gone from the original estimate of
$1 million to $750 million.
Even
if you factor in overruns at 10 times the original estimate, the cost overrun is
the equivalent of planning to have two children and ending up with 163. The
point is -- it's impossible. No amount of incompetence gets you from $1 million
to $750 million.
The
gun registry's shortcomings go beyond profound financial mismanagement. As Simon
Fraser professor Gary Mauser summed up in studying the relationship between gun
registries and violent crime: "There is no evidence that merely increasing
the difficulty of obtaining a firearm through stricter gun laws has any
important effect on crime rates."
Is
it any wonder why taxpayers are cynical? While other important public safety
issues go underfunded, our MPs stand ready to defend a program that has been
grossly mismanaged and provides little public benefit other than reflecting the
"depth of our concern" about violent crime.
Michael
Campbell's Money Talk radio show can be heard on CKNW 980 weekdays from 6 to 7
p.m. and Saturdays from 8:30 to 10 a.m.