PUBLICATION:        The Ottawa Citizen

DATE:                         2003.02.27

EDITION:                    Final

SECTION:                  Editorial

PAGE:                         A14

SOURCE:                   The Ottawa Citizen

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Passing the buck(s): A transfer from Justice won't fix the gun registry's problems

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They're one billion dollars and eight years late, but Justice Minister Martin Cauchon and his senior officials have finally admitted the government botched the national gun registry program. But that hasn't stopped the minister asking for even more money to keep the program going.

When the registry was introduced in 1995, the government said it would cost about $119 million, while raising $117 million in licensing revenues, for a net cost to taxpayers of $2 million. Instead, as Auditor General Sheila Fraser revealed in December, the gun registry will likely drain more than

$1 billion from the public treasury by 2005. Indeed, Mr. Cauchon pushed the tab higher this week when he asked Parliament for another $170 million for the program, a request made just days after he conceded the Liberals had badly miscalculated the registry's cost.

"In retrospect, it seems quite obvious that it was impossible to deliver the program for such a small amount," Mr. Cauchon admitted. Likewise, his deputy minister basically conceded that, as far back as 1998, the Justice Department was less than forthright with Parliament about the program's ballooning costs. "In hindsight, could we have reported more information?" Morris Rosenberg asked rhetorically. "Perhaps we should have. Hindsight is 20-20."

How convenient: If only we had hindsight, if only we'd known beforehand, we might have done something about it. But the government did have plenty of warning that it was walking lock-step into a billion-dollar fiasco. In 1995, Gary Mauser, a professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University, appeared before a parliamentary committee to warn that the gun registry would cost more than $1 billion. Then-minister Allan Rock ridiculed him in the House of Commons. As Mr. Mauser later recounted: "He (Mr. Rock) said on the floor of the House that it would never cost that much, that I was just talking through my hat. At that point, he figured it might cost $85 million."

Mr. Mauser was not alone in his warnings of the fiasco to come, of course. As the auditor general told the committee this week, "Explanations for ballooning costs were given to ministers and to central agencies, but Parliament was provided information only piecemeal."

The government, however, seemed more interested in promoting its own political agenda than in serving the best interests of the country as a whole. The result, as many predicted, was the billion-dollar boondoggle, and, as a corollary, further eroding of the public's respect for the law.

This week's committee confessions are probably as close as taxpayers will get to an admission by the government that it has been shamefully cavalier with public money. Now Mr. Cauchon plans to transfer responsibility for the firearms program to the Solicitor General's department, supposedly as part of some "action plan" to improve the registry.

Taxpayers will be understandably skeptical. Ministers normally fight tooth-and-nail to keep their "empire" intact. Thus, it's difficult not to regard this transfer of the gun registry program as a shell game designed to give the appearance of taking action, while allowing the basic problems to remain.

Don't they ever learn? It's this attitude that led to the fiasco in the first place. This transfer requires more explanation and better justification. Otherwise, taxpayers are right to see it as nothing more than a cosmetic change.