In fact the cost overruns are a smoke-screen designed to conceal the fact that the Tories are after the Registry for purely ideological reasons, and so they may throw some red meat to their rural base. What has only gradually become clear to me is the loathsomeness and occasional near-illegality of the anti-Registry faction's tactics.
For example, they've been sending hate-mail to Miramichi, the main processing office for the CFC:
[Miramichi Mayor John] McKay said yesterday he has received dozens of letters in recent weeks from Western Canadians who feel he has no business defending the roughly 200 jobs created by the gun registry in the economically depressed region.
"It's hate mail," he said.
McKay said he always believed there was a disconnect between Western Canada and the East, but the letters he is receiving indicate a depth of hatred and disgust he never would have suspected.
Furthermore, the Tories have been instructing the CFC to ignore the legislation that governs the Registry, to ignore the law, in other words. As the CBCs Robert Sheppard writes:
But this is an issue that is not just going to fade away. Just over a month ago, the Canadian Firearms Centre sent a bulletin to the RCMP reminding them that the gun registry was the law of the land, and that it is the police's job to seek out those who have not renewed their licenses and get them to re-register or give up their weapons.
The government then promptly told the centre to "cease and desist" this tactic, according to Conservative MP Gerry Ritz. He told the Lloydminster Meridian Booster that there is "a tremendous fight" going on now between the government and the CFC, adding metaphorically, of course: "I think we're going to have to hunt a few of these CFC folks down and show them how serious we are. We're in control now."
One certainly hopes that Mr. Ritz comments were intended metaphorically.
Update 1:15 pm Best Blog post this morning on the issue is Red Tory's here.
6 comments:
Ha ha, it just goes to show what I've been saying all along-Conservatives are utterly out of touch with Canadians. As you said, their run at it is meant to appease their rural base who are generally Albertans...indignant, self-righteous Albertans.
its not the money problems . its the fact the registry doesn't work. When 36% of the datbse records are considered corrupted - that is a failed system. And teh AG reports syas they have no idea how much it would cost to fix the problem.
Since the registry was set up in the first place as a red meat throw for the Liberal base in Toronto and Montreal, nuking it now is really just a case of ending thecomplete waste of money, regardless of how much, that is being spent to operate a broken system that does no good for society. It only buys a few votes in a couple of cities for the LPC.
GILBERT YARD, RETIRED RCMP SUPERINTENDENT: I am appalled at just how much has been spent to date on the firearms registration process. But perhaps even more disturbing is the misplaced focus on legal firearms. Like many reasonable Canadians, I support programs that address the structural and social situations that give rise to crime. Our first objective should be to promote law-abiding, non-destructive behaviour in as many members of society as possible. There comes a point, however, where punishment and protection of the public must be the focus. In these cases, illegal acts and violent behaviour should be treated with appropriate penalties. From reading my views on gun control and firearms legislation, I suspect that many might feel that I am a "gun nut" with pro-American feelings regarding gun possession. This is just not so. Growing up, my family had limited contact with firearms but we were raised to believe that a gun was a serious tool to be used in appropriate circumstances only. I can understand people who emotionally react to guns as all bad but I am convinced that such emotion can mask the true problem of illegal gun possession and/or usage. During my 37 years of policing I carried a handgun as a tool of my profession. I was also exposed to a wide cross-section of collectors and target shooters who used, stored and transported their weapons in a legal and responsible manner. They are not the problem. The misdirection of time, effort and funding is unforgivable. I believe that Canadians are much too astute to believe that either Bill C-68 or the proposed handgun legislation is anything other than a waste of time, effort and money. Wasting public funds that could really make a difference in acute justice issues, in my view, borders on criminal activity.
SOURCE: THE NORTH SHORE NEWS, “Gun legislation an election issue” published January 11, 2006
http://www.theinfozone.net/SALW/Canada.html
Wendy Cukier -- Works to Save Program -- Gun Control's Half Million Dollar Supporter
A new Ipso-Reid survey for CanWest/Global News reports that most Canadians (54%) feel the “gun registry is badly organized, isn’t working properly, and should be scrapped” – a level of opinion essentially unchanged from what was recorded nearly four years, and two Prime Ministers ago (53% expressed this opinion in a December 2002 Ipsos Reid survey).
Professor Gary Mauser, from Simon Fraser University is not surprised by the results. "The expected Auditor General's report will probably peg the cost of the firearms registry at over two billion dollars," stated Mauser. "This cost is exorbitant but that is not the worst problem with the registry. The Liberal government hid the true costs from Parliament, so the public could not discover the the real cost."
"Even worse, the registry did nothing to improve public safety and may even have made Canadians less safe. Since 1998, when the registry was introduced, homicide rates have increased, while both violent crime rates and suicide rates have remained stubbornly stable. The worst is that the registry vacuumed money from other programs -- like hiring more police officers and putting violent criminals in jail longer -- that might actually have done some good," concluded Mauser.
While the Canadian Professional Police Association has remained supportive of the gun registry, individual police officers and chiefs of police have been far less supportive. Gilbert Yard, a retired RCMP superintendent commented in January, "I am appalled at just how much has been spent to date on the firearms registration process. But perhaps even more disturbing is the misplaced focus on legal firearms. Like many reasonable Canadians, I support programs that address the structural and social situations that give rise to crime. Our first objective should be to promote law-abiding, non-destructive behaviour in as many members of society as possible. There comes a point, however, where punishment and protection of the public must be the focus. In these cases, illegal acts and violent behaviour should be treated with appropriate penalties. From reading my views on gun control and firearms legislation, I suspect that many might feel that I am a "gun nut" with pro-American feelings regarding gun possession. This is just not so. Growing up, my family had limited contact with firearms but we were raised to believe that a gun was a serious tool to be used in appropriate circumstances only. I can understand people who emotionally react to guns as all bad but I am convinced that such emotion can mask the true problem of illegal gun possession and/or usage. During my 37 years of policing I carried a handgun as a tool of my profession. I was also exposed to a wide cross-section of collectors and target shooters who used, stored and transported their weapons in a legal and responsible manner. They are not the problem. The misdirection of time, effort and funding is unforgivable. I believe that Canadians are much too astute to believe that either Bill C-68 or the proposed handgun legislation is anything other than a waste of time, effort and money. Wasting public funds that could really make a difference in acute justice issues, in my view, borders on criminal activity."
Wendy Cukier
The gun registry's biggest supporter remains Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, an advocacy group which received grants totalling over $451,000 from the former Liberal government.
Cukier claims, "The gun lobby has been actively pressuring the government to do so - the powerful National Rifle Association was in Canada during the last election. Leaks from Government officials regarding the Auditor General’s report and plans for gun control along with information from the gun lobby indicate a well-orchestrated campaign is underway. The continued focus on the system’s costs has obscured its benefits. The money on the current system has been spent, and the system is working. Most gun owners are licensed and most guns have been registered. The ongoing costs are modest. Dismantling the system now, after all the money has been spent, makes no sense. It is not about safety. It is not even about money."
Cukier claims that the cost of running the registry is only $10 million annually. However, in the Conservative Budget, in the Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness estimates, the line reads:
"Canadian Firearms Centre (under authorities to be voted) $79,391,000 (under previous authorities statutory) $4,204,000.
Total : $83,595,000
Canada's Lobbyist Registry does not show any gun lobby groups having registered to lobby the government.
Last November, when then Prime Minister Paul Martin and the Chief of Police in Toronto commented on the number of guns smuggled into Canada, the Infozone tracked the quote back to a comment made by Cukier in a United Nations study. "Half the handguns recovered in crime in Canada are illegally imported and efforts to reduce illicit trafficking worldwide will pay off back home".
Where did you get the 36% figure? It doesn't appear to be in the AGs report.
Yoking wishfulness to vast expenditure
May 16 2006
The gun registry and the Kyoto Protocol are, at least in one respect, twins. They both illustrate the uselessness of piety pretending to be policy, of half thought mixed with full-bore emotion substituting for a rational response to a perceived public problem.
Kyoto is a great empty house of wishful thinking. Some countries that have signed on have done less than those that did not. Canada has done less than the U.S., for example, though the U.S. Congress universally voted it down during the Clinton years, while Canada touted its signature on the accord as being in itself a great Boy Scout badge of international and environmental do-good-ism.
And then there's the gun registry. Whatever the gun registry was supposed to do, beyond raising a cloud of vague righteousness that something was being done, what has it specifically done for places like Toronto, say, with its year of the gun?
Where real gun crime exists, it almost always is handguns, stolen, smuggled, and unregistered, that are causing havoc.
Where's the registry in that picture? And today Sheila Fraser pounded a few dozen more 9-inch nails into the coffin of the gun registry. That other response to a problem which over the five years of its life has been an epic catalogue of unimaginable expense, was going to cost $2 million net and cost $1 billion instead.
She told us of computer systems whose costs ballooned, amounts in the tens of millions not recorded, and even more damning, added that the information these wonderful systems so expensively collected can either be (a) incorrect or (b) incomplete, and at a press conference that the data cannot be relied on. So it can't be relied on; its information is incomplete or incorrect, and it costs more than the tar sands.
Well, not the tar sands.
In the early days of this program, it was all so simple. We had then Justice Minister Allan Rock standing to tell the country, "All that we're asking of firearms owners is to fill out two cards and mail them in."
A few postcards and a postage stamp. And we get a billion dollars?
Who was the mailman? Wile E. Coyote?
The gun registry accomplished negatives, however, by the bucket load. A cost overrun that yet will make "Ripley's Believe It or Not", antagonized whole swatches of harmless citizens, from duck hunters to farmers, who found themselves hectored and harassed to fill in its unreliable forms, pay its useless fees, or wind up listed as criminals if they did not.
Now, Kyoto is not a registry, but it has the same impulse at its centre, vagueness of intention surrounding an amorphous good cause. The science is contentious, regardless of what the propagandists of global warning will tell you. It is advocacy-driven and as much a lobby as General Motors.
As Kyoto is globally, the gun registry is for us nationally, a perfect parable of yoking wishfulness to vast expenditure to appease wistful public sentiment. Whatever that sentiment, it urges politicians to just do something. In both cases, they did. Kyoto eight years on is a hollow piety, and the gun registry is a compound of excess, uselessness, annoyance, and the most highly capitalized piece of policy pointlessness since the Newfoundland government 20 years ago spent $27 million to fund a science fiction dream of growing cucumbers out of the East Coast granite.
Keep the gun registry? Only if they open a museum for monumental illustrations of how to waste public money. And in that museum, the registry will occupy the same place in public policy that the private sector has long ago given the Edsel. For "The National", I'm Rex Murphy.
The gun registry is nothing but a billion dollar porkbarrel project, benefiting the likes of Liberal-connected corporations like Honeywell. Why was it that urban gand violence was virtually unheard of before the last two decades? The politically-incorrect fact is that a mass influx of foreign-born (Caribbean, South and East Asian, Middle Eastern and North African) gangsters has been admitted to Canada. CSIS estimates that only about 10% of LEGAL immigrants submit to background checks. Our ridiculous refugee system actually allows criminality as a valid reason for admission (e.g., "I'm wanted for murder and extortion in my home country--they'll EXECUTE me!"). People like David Miller--who shamelessly courts the Jane & Finch vote--also won't place the blame on Criminals of Colour, preferring to shake down elderly, war vet gun owners and legal shooting ranges. (I wonder, did the Crips and/or Bloods help fund his campaign?) Really, I'm surprised that small-l liberals don't make a bigger issue about unchecked immigration, since it's also the single, preventable cause of urban sprawl. But that's another matter entirely...
BTW, gun control Big Fat Mama Wendy Cukier is currently under investigation by the RCMP, for improprieties related to grants given to the Coalition for Gun Control during the liberal era.
Adam C. Sieracki
Post a Comment