Canada's gun registry: The PR stunt that flopped Ezra Levant--National Post--December 28,2000 At midnight on New Year's Eve, one in four Canadian households will legally become a crime scene. That is when new provisions of the Firearms Act take effect, making the unlicensed possession of shotguns and rifles -- including antiques, collectors items and even many air guns -- a crime punishable by up to five years in jail. According to the Canadian Firearms Centre's latest report, only 648,122 Canadians have the required licence. It was the CFC's job to get everyone licensed, and they certainly spared no expense: Upwards of $500-million has been spent or budgeted so far, and 1,500 bureaucrats -- including hundreds of RCMP officers seconded from their regular police duties -- have plowed the paperwork for two years. Now, 648,122 licences sounds like a lot, but it is not -- in fact, since the CFC was formed, it has processed fewer than one per bureaucrat per day. The CFC admits it now has applications from another 1,065,850 gun owners on backlog. At its current rate, its inbox will not be cleared until August, 2005. But even that 1.7-million total is a fraction of the number of Canadian gun owners. Nobody knows the exact figure, but an Angus Reid poll estimated there were 3.2-million gun owners back in 1991; the RCMP puts the number as high as 3.8 million; a Department of Justice memo reveals that some Chief Provincial Firearms Officers -- the people in charge of registering guns -- warn there are well in excess of 5 million gun owners in Canada. That is what the gun registry's advocates say; its opponents, including firearms owners groups, peg the number at 7 million. Seven million gun owners minus 648,122 licenses equals about 6.3 million unlicensed gun owners running around. You can hardly blame these people for their lack of enthusiasm for the registry. A PricewaterhouseCoopers audit found the CFC to be ridiculously user-unfriendly: The average time to process a firearms transfer was three hours; licence applications filled out by staff had error rates over 90%. The Department of Justice's User Group on Firearms warns that frustration with this red tape is leading to "unchecked growth" in the black market. Frustrated gun owners are not alone: Nine provinces and territories have opposed the registry, too. The three Prairie provinces and Ontario have notified Ottawa that their police and prosecutors will not enforce the law -- 6.3 million middle-aged farmers and duck hunters are not their top crime-fighting priority. The 648,122 licence holders are in the clear. But what about the one million people who filled out their licence applications on time, but have yet to receive their licences from the CFC? The government has taken out ads claiming these people "have already complied with the licensing requirement of the Firearms Act." But that is not true. The law requires gun owners to actually "hold" a licence, not just to apply for one. Because of the CFC's sloth, even these people will become criminals on Jan. 1. Faced with this embarrassment, Anne McLellan, the Minister of Justice, has asked police not to charge people who are waiting for their licences, who can prove that they applied on time. But the only proof of applying on time is another government document, a "temporary licence," also issued by the CFC. But there is a backlog for temporary licences, too. To top it off, this grace period expires in six months -- an impossibly short time for the original buildup to be cleared. Even when these temporary licences arrive, they do not permit the purchase of guns -- even for people who have filled out acquisition licence forms. In other words, the gun registry has effectively been turned into a gun ban, not by a parliamentary act, but by the CFC's inaction. There is no reason to believe this new shotgun and rifle registry will be any more effective at fighting crime than Canada's handgun registry has been since it was established in 1934. But this never was about fighting crime; criminals do not tend to register their guns, no matter how many ads the government runs. And as far as crime prevention goes, aboriginal Canadians -- statistically the most common gun criminals and gun victims -- have been granted special exemptions from the law. This registry is not about crime. It is about making peaceful, rural Canadians the scapegoats for violence in the inner cities and Indian reserves. It is about a government more interested in public relations than public safety. And it is about Ms. McLellan, a minister who, a half-billion dollars into this morass, is too proud to admit failure.