PUBLICATION:
GLOBE AND MAIL
DATE:
WED JAN. 08, 2003
PAGE:
A11 (ILLUS)
BYLINE:
JOHN DIXON
CLASS:
Comment
EDITION:
Metro DATELINE:
WORDS:
1089
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FIREARMS
CONTROL
A gang that couldn't shoot straight
We
now know that the government's gun-control policy is a fiscal and administrative
debacle. Its costs rival those of core services like national defence. And it
doesn't work. What is less well known is that the policy wasn't designed to
control guns. It was designed to control Kim Campbell. When Ms. Campbell was
enjoying a brief season of success in her re-election bid in the summer campaign
of 1993, Mr. Chretien was kept busy reassuring what he called the "Nervous
Nellies" in his caucus that Ms. Campbell's star would soon fall. To bring
her down, the Liberals planned to discredit her key accomplishment as minister
of justice, an ambitious gun-control package.
Those
measures -- enacted in the wake of the Montreal Massacre -- included new
requirements for the training and certification of target shooters and hunters.
We got new laws requiring: the safe storage of firearms and ammunition, which
essentially brought every gun in the country under lock and key; screening of
applicants for firearms licences; courts to actively seek information about
firearms in spousal assault cases; the prohibition of firearms that had no place
in Canada's field-and-stream tradition of firearms use.
I
was one of the department of justice officials involved in that earlier
gun-control program. When the House of Commons passed the legislation, Wendy
Cukier and Heidi Rathgen of the Coalition for Gun Control, which had been part
of the consultation process, supplied the champagne for a party at my Ottawa
home.
So
what were the Liberals to do, faced with a legislative accomplishment on this
scale?
Simple:
Pretend it hadn't happened, and promise to do something so dramatic that it
would make Ms. Campbell look soft on gun control. The obvious policy choice was
a universal firearms registry.
The
idea of requiring the registration of every firearm in the country wasn't new.
Governments love lists. Getting lists and maintaining them is a visible sign
that the government is at work. And lists are the indispensable first step to
collecting taxes and licence fees. There is no constitutional right to bear arms
in Canada, as is arguably the case in the United States.
So
why not go for a universal gun registry? The short answer, arrived at by every
study in the Department of Justice, was that universal registration would be
ruinously expensive, and could actually yield a negative public security result
(more on this in a moment). Besides, in 1992 Canada already had two systems of
gun registration: the complete registry of all restricted firearms, such as
handguns (restricted since the 1930s) and a separate registry of ordinary
firearms.
This
latter registry, which started in the early 1970s, was a feature of the firearms
acquisition certificate (or FAC) required by a person purchasing any firearm.
Every firearm purchased from a dealer had to be registered to the FAC holder by
the vendor, and the record of the purchase passed on to the RCMP in Ottawa. So
we were already building a cumulative registry of all the owners of guns in
Canada purchased since 1970.
The
FAC system was a very Canadian (i.e. sensible) approach to the registration of
ordinary hunting and target firearms. If you were a good ol' boy from Camrose,
Alta., and didn't want to get involved, you didn't have to -- as long as you
didn't buy more guns. Good ol' boys die off, so younger people in shooting
sports would eventually all be enrolled in the system.
After
the Montreal Massacre, the then-deputy minister of justice, John Tait, asked me
to review the gun-control package under development. One thing I immediately
wanted to know was how many Canadians owned Ruger Mini-14s (the gun used by the
Montreal murderer). The Mini-14 came into production about the time the FAC
system was introduced, so the FAC should have a good picture of the gun's
distribution.
But
when our team asked the RCMP for the information, we couldn't get it. Computers
were down; the information hadn't been entered yet; there weren't enough staff
to process the request; there was a full moon. After a week, I said I didn't
want excuses, I wanted the records. Then a very senior person sat me down and
told me the truth.
The
RCMP had stopped accepting FAC records, and had actually destroyed those it
already had. The FAC registry system didn't exist because the police thought it
was useless and refused to waste their limited budgets maintaining it. They also
moved to ensure that their political masters could not resurrect it.
Such
spectacular bureaucratic vandalism persuaded my deputy and his minister to
concentrate on developing com- pliance with affordable gun-control measures that
could work. A universal gun registry could only appeal to people who didn't care
about costs or results, and who didn't understand what riled up decent folks in
Camrose.
Which
is precisely why it appealed to those putting together the Liberal Red Book for
the pivotal 1993 election. If the object of the policy exercise was to appear to
be "tougher" on guns than Kim Campbell, they had to find a policy that
would provoke legitimate gun-owners to outrage. Nothing would better convince
the Liberals' urban constituency that Jean Chretien and Allan Rock were taking a
tough line on guns than the spectacle of angry old men spouting fury on
Parliament Hill.
The
supreme irony of the gun registry battle is that the policy was selected because
it would goad people who knew something about guns to public outrage. That is,
it had a purely political purpose in the special context of a hard-fought
election. The fact that it was bad policy was crucial to the specific political
effect it was supposed to deliver.
And
so we saw demonstrations by middle-aged firearm owners, family men whose first
reflex was to respect the laws of the land. This group's political alienation is
a far greater loss than the $200-million that have been wasted so far. The
creation of this new criminal class -- the ultimate triumph of negative
political alchemy -- may be the worst, and most enduring product of the gun
registry culture war.
John
Dixon is a hunter, and president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. From
1991 to 1992, he was adviser to then-deputy minister of justice John Tait.