PUBLICATION WINNIPEG FREE PRESS 

DATE :  WED DEC.18,2002 

PAGE :  A14 

CLASS :  Focus 

EDITION :  

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Editorial - What's a billion?

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Editorial Staff

A succession of justice ministers has tried unconvincingly to explain how the federal gun registry got so far out of control. Allan Rock has blamed his successors in the portfolio, gun owners themselves and unco-operative provincial governments. Anne McLellan, now health minister but who succeeded Mr. Rock as justice minister, this week laid the blame on the hopelessly inadequate technology that Mr. Rock hoped to use to implement his registry: "I hadn't anticipated rebuilding the system, but that's basically what had to happen," Ms McLellan said in an attempt to explain how the cost of the program rose so that the registry will have cost more than $1 billion by 2004.

The minister of justice of the moment, Martin Cauchon, along with Mr. Rock and Ms McLellan, argues that whatever the gun registry costs, it's worth it. Having been unable to extract another $72 million from Parliament to keep the runaway registry running, Mr. Cauchon found the money within his own department. Funnelling those millions to gun control, he says, will not affect any other of the department's existing programs. Perhaps the gun registry is not the only program in Mr. Cauchon's department that needs to be audited.

All of this misses the point. Mr. Rock blames those pesky gun owners for owning guns in the first place, and pesky provincial governments that told him from the beginning they would not co-operate; Ms McLellan says she had to create a whole new system to implement Mr. Rock's pesky program; Mr. Cauchon apparently has tens of millions of dollars pesking to be spent in his desk drawers to continue that program. This is no time for finger-pointing, Prime Minister Jean Chretien says in defence of the gun registry. That leaves Canadians with a choice. They can defy that advice and point fingers at a prime minister and three successive justice ministers; or they can just shrug their shoulders and say "What's a billion?'