Top court ruling a victory for Harper, gun owners
Judges uphold federal government’s right to destroy data from registry
Friday’s Supreme Court decision upholding the federal government’s right to destroy the last data from the federal long-gun registry appears to be a political victory for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and gun rights advocates.
But it also exposes fault lines on the top bench over the powers of the provinces and those of the federal government.
Harper seemed pleased as he spoke to reporters in Quebec Friday.
“We have made a commitment to the people across Canada, but particularly in rural areas — and we intend to respect our promise” to kill the entire registry and all of its records, he said.
Scrapping the registry in 2012 fulfilled a long-standing promise by the Harper government to decriminalize the non-registration of long guns. It ended what the Conservatives saw as an inefficient and costly program that violated the privacy rights of long-gun owners.
The elimination of the remaining data from the registry, now sanctioned by the court, won’t reduce public safety, Harper added.
“Yes, we’ve abolished one registry, but we have registration of all gun owners already, we have registration of all hand guns already, we have registration of all restricted weapons already,” he said.
“Our view is we simply don’t need another very expensive and not effective registry. What we have needed are severe or strong and more effective penalties for people who commit criminals acts using guns and that’s what we’ve done.”
Harper didn’t comment on the court’s dissenting opinion. Four of the court’s nine justices said explicitly denying Quebec the use of the registry records on that province’s long-gun owners will have “harmful consequences.”
Among the dissenters were the three Quebec justices: Clement Gascon, Richard Wagner and Louis LeBel. They sided with the Quebec government, which had sought access through the courts to provincial gun-registry data so it could set up its own registry.
Quebec Public Security Minis- ter Lise Theriault said her government will still proceed with its own gun registry.
The federal registry was established in 1995, largely in response to the Dec. 6, 1989 Montreal massacre at Ecole Polytechnique, in which 14 women were killed. There remains strong and emotional support for gun control in the province.
But gun control also has turned into a rural, election-year wedge issue the federal Conservatives hope to turn against the Liberals, who created the registry under Jean Chrétien.
Quebec MP Françoise Boivin, the NDP’s justice critic, suggested eliminating the registry, then ex- plicitly refusing to transfer to Quebec the Quebec data in the registry, could damage federalism there.
“I don’t think the Conservative government and especially Stephen Harper, who promised Quebecers in 2006 a new kind of federalism, should be proud today,” Boivin told reporters.
The case represents a rare recent victory for the federal government before the high court. Over the past 16 months, the court has handed down judgments in 11 major cases, with just one clear win for the federal government.
Friday’s judgment should begin to thaw what some legal experts feared was a growing Cold War between the federal government and the nation’s top court.
In its ruling, the court found the federal government doesn’t have to relinquish its gun-registry database to Quebec, affirming Parliament’s constitutional right over criminal law.
Instead, the majority ruled that the principle of co-operative federalism — collaborative intergovernmental schemes for the national good — doesn’t limit the federal government’s constitutional powers to legislate in matters of criminal law.
“Quebec has no legal right to the data,” said the majority decision, authored by Justices Thomas Cromwell and Andromache Karakatsanis.
The Conservative government’s 2012 legislation to end the federal gun registry — and destroy its database — “is a lawful exercise of Parliament’s criminal law legislative power under the Constitution.”
After the Conservative government unveiled its Ending the Long- Gun Registry Act (ELRA) — including the contentious section 29 ordering destruction of the registry’s database — the government of Quebec objected and took the federal government to court. Lower-court appeals by both sides, put three issue before Supreme Court:
■ Does the principle of co-operative federalism prevent Parliament from legislating to dispose of the data?
■ Does Quebec have the right to obtain the data?
■ Does section 29 of the ELRA exceed Parliament’s criminal law power?
The top court ruled that Quebec’s position has no foundation in Canada’s constitutional law and is contrary to previous court judgments on the issue of co-operative federalism.
“We conclude that the principle of co-operative federalism does not prevent Parliament from exercising legislative authority that it otherwise possesses to dispose of the data.”
The four dissenting judges, including Justice Rosalie Abella, countered that both the collection of the long-gun data and broader initiatives aimed at regulating the use of such guns were the result of a partnership with the provinces, including Quebec.
Legislating the destruction of the records, they concluded, “has harmful consequences for the federal government’s partners,” and is therefore unconstitutional.
What we have needed are severe or strong and more effective penalties for people who commit criminals acts using guns and that’s what we’ve done.