How much did ending the gun registry really save?
Stephen Harper’s government is decidedly not averse to blowing its own horn.
This fall it is flooding Canadian airwaves with gauzy television ads touting the wonders of “Canada’s Economic Action Plan.” The plan referred to is the multibillion-dollar stimulus program the government mounted in response to the recession that came with the economic downturn that began in 2008.
This recession ended some time ago, and a wrap-up report on the plan was included in last spring’s budget. Yet starting in September and scheduled to run through to next spring, the ad campaign will be recycled to highlight growth and prosperity with which Canadians are being blessed thanks to the action plan.
Little actual information of practical use to Canadians is imparted by these slickly produced commercial spots, but $16.6 million in taxpayers’ money is going toward the campaign.
It is somewhat strange, then, in light of the government’s eagerness to trumpet its good works on behalf of Canadians, that it cannot manage to come up with the amount the taxpayer load has been lightened by the abolition of that great Tory bugbear, the long-gun firearm registry.
Its cost was cited by the government as one of the principal reasons for its elimination, along with inconvenience to legitimate gun owners and questionable practical utility. But seven months after the deed was done, the government has yet to come up with a figure on how much money is being saved as a result.
Could it be that it is less than the government has been spending on self-congratulatory advertising that is essentially thinly veiled Conservative party propaganda?
Information on financial savings resulting from the elimination of the gun registry would certainly be of interest to Canadians, be they supporters of the registry or not. Unfortunately, so many contradictory and imprecise numbers have been tossed about concerning the registry’s cost that the calculation of money that will be saved remains obscure.
During its campaign to abolish the registry, the Conservative government that has been in office since 2006 cited an auditor general’s report that pegged the cumulative cost from the time the registry was instituted in 1995 to 2002 at $1 billion. That would put it at more than $143 million a year, but rarely mentioned is that this included registration of restricted weapons like pistols, along with long guns.
A year ago, during the parliamentary debate on the long-gun registry, Public Service Minister Vic Toews put the government’s “best estimate” of gun-registry costs at $22 million a year. He allowed that this includes all firearms, but noted that most guns registered are non-restricted long guns.
On the other hand, an independent analysis commissioned in 2009 by the RCMP, which administers the national firearms program that includes registration and licensing, reported its cost for the previous fiscal year was $63 million. Of this, $11 million went for registration of all guns, while $51 million went for licensing, a requirement and expense that still exists despite the registry abolition. The analysis concluded that scrapping the long-gun registry would save only between $1.6 million and $4 million a year.
Meanwhile, an analysis of RCMP annual reports by The Canadian Press shows that during the first five full years of Conservative rule, registration of both long and restricted guns cost $49 million, while licensing and supporting infrastructure cost $259 million — five times more than registration.
The last year for which figures are available is 2010-11, when the cost of registration for all types of weapons was put at $7.7 million. However, the best the RCMP could do when asked what savings the abolition of the long-gun registry would produce was the 2009 analysis that pegged it as being between $1.6 million and $4 million.
This may be the case, but it also contradicts numbers the government was throwing about in its arguments against the long-gun registry, and is considerably less than the government has been spending on “Canada’s Economic Action Plan” to pat itself on the back.
It is true that the long-gun registry was an annoyance to many hard-core Conservative voters and failed to prevent some highly publicized long-gun crimes. But it was also cited almost unanimously by law-enforcement authorities as a useful crime-prevention tool and passionately supported by a legion of gun-control activists and relatives of victims of gun violence.
Given the intensity of the debate over the measure, decency suggests that the government give Canadians an accurate accounting of the savings realized as a result of the long-gun registry’s abolition, even if they are so low as to cause it embarrassment in light of other ways it has been wasting taxpayers’ money.