September 26, 2000

The Editor

The Ottawa Citizen

1 Page sent via fax to: (613) 596-8458

 

Dear Editor:

MISSING: A FEW FACTS ABOUT IMPLEMENTATION OF THE FIREARMS ACT

While there was some important new information in the Southam News article you ran in Saturday’s paper, the article was missing a few facts about the faltering implementation of the Firearms Act ("Government spending $2M on gun-regulation mailout," The Ottawa Citizen, Page A5, Byline: Norm Ovenden, September 23, 2000).
  1. The article quite correctly pointed out the penalty for failing to have a firearms licence by the end of this year is "punishable by jail terms." However, the article failed to point out that the Department of Justice’s multi-million dollar television ads are grossly misleading because the ads say the only consequence for unlicenced gun owners will be that they won’t be able to buy ammunition.
  2. The article also noted that the deadline for licencing millions of gun owners was only three months away. However, the article failed to point out that as of September 2nd, 2000, the Department of Justice had only issued 286,233 firearms licences in the last 21 months (13,630 per month) and that 339,663 licence applications were in processing or in backlog. The article failed to point out that it would take the Dept. of Justice more than 25 months to get rid of this backlog and 12 more years to process the licences from the remaining 2 million gun owners (the government’s estimate) who haven’t yet applied.
  3. The article quite rightly pointed out that one of the main issues for the Canadian Police Association is "cost." However, the article failed to point out that the Minister of Justice promised Parliament and the public that the firearms registry would cost only $85 million to implement and run a deficit of only $2.2 million over five years. The actual cost over five years was $325 million and the deficit $310 million – demonstrating more Liberal broken promises, and more Liberal bad management. The article also failed to mention that sources close to Justice Minister Anne McLellan have reported that the firearms registry budget for this fiscal year alone has already exceeded $260 million and will top $300 million before the end of March 2001. The article also failed to mention that the Justice Minister promised that user-fees would cover the entire cost of the program but that as of August 11, 2000 the government had collected only $17,139,993 in user fees and owed refunds of "approximately" $1,234,520.
    4.
  4. The article sounded like a government propaganda brochure spouting statistics about firearms licences refused and revoked and legal gun sales blocked. The article failed to mention that these results have been achieved because of better background checks and information management – nothing to do with the registration of guns. The article also failed to mention the following key points: (a) the government has had the means to achieve these kind of results for the last twenty years with the old FAC (Firearms Acquisition Certificate) program; (b) there was no need to create a half-billion dollar gun registry for rifles and shotguns to achieve these results; and (c) all these hundreds of millions have blocked only the legal sale of firearms - absolutely, nothing has been done to stop anyone from buying firearms on the black-market – where the real problem is.
  5. The article concluded with the innocent sounding tidbit that "40,000 police officers are being provided with a separate information handbook about enforcement measures and benefits of the program." The article failed to point out that this was in addition to the tens of thousands of Police Officer Field Handbooks that have already been sent to these same officers and the hundreds of Firearms Officer Desk Manuals that have been sent to every police station in the country.
  6. Finally, the article failed to point out that this most recent mailing of government propaganda to 40,000 police officers is nothing more than taxpayers paying to try and help the Canadian Police Association executive out of their political dilemma for supporting the Liberal’s gun registry – a highly controversial position that runs directly counter to the views of the rank-and-file police officers they are supposed to represent.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

 

Garry Breitkreuz, MP

Yorkton-Melville