PUBLICATION:          National Post

DATE:                         2003.03.25

EDITION:                    National

SECTION:                  Editorials

PAGE:                         A17

SOURCE:                   National Post Canada 

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$59-million more down the hole

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For most working Canadians, wasting millions of their bosses' dollars would undoubtedly be a firing offence. Not so in the Liberal Cabinet, where three successive justice ministers -- Allan Rock, Anne McLellan and Martin Cauchon -- will soon have racked up a cumulative $1-billion on the disastrous federal gun registry. Each has survived with their career intact, with Ms. McLellan and Mr. Rock both maintaining senior portfolios, and Mr. Cauchon still running the Justice department.

But the Liberals, it seems, do have their standards. Wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars on a misguided program that probably won't save a single Canadian life is one thing. But voting against directing millions more into the same bottomless pit is quite another. According to Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister, today's vote to contribute another $59-million to the troubled gun registry will be considered a matter of confidence; as such, any Liberal backbenchers who vote against it, as several have threatened to do, risk expulsion from caucus.

In defence of this blatant attempt to bully MPs into betraying their convictions, Marlene Catterall, the Liberal Whip, preposterously invoked their responsibility to constituents. "I think that when Canadians elect a Liberal government, they expect us to fulfill the policies on which we ran," she said last week, "and that means that those people who ran on those policies and supported the gun registry in two elections are expected to support it."

Ms. Catterall's argument is shaky to begin with, since most Liberal MPs were hardly elected on the strength of the gun registry. (Indeed, many were elected in spite of it.) But it is all the more absurd because the program's ludicrously inflated price tag was only revealed by Sheila Fraser, the Auditor-General, two years after Canadians last went to the polls. Originally, Canadians were told the net cost of the registry would be about $2-million. Turns out the real price tag will be 500 times that number. Had the Liberal Cabinet not deliberately misled the public as to the true cost, opposition would have mounted well before the 2000 election. 

In December, the government tried a similar tactic to bully MPs into backing a $72-million request for the program. But when opposition from the Liberal caucus proved too strong, Messrs. Chretien and Cauchon backed off. Faced with a similar response this time around, we suspect they would do likewise rather than risk a humiliating defeat. But barring an unexpected uprising today, backbenchers will instead be complicit in this shameful use of public funds -- an unsatisfying result that undoes much of their good work of three months ago.