Go-it-alone gun registry won’t do job

BORDERS WITH PROVINCES where firearms don’t have to be registered would make it simple to bypass Quebec’s well-meaning rules

It pains me to have to write critically about the idea of a firearms registry.

In the years following the murder of 14 women at Polytechnique in 1989, I wrote more than a dozen commentaries urging successive governments in Ottawa to adopt a pan-Canadian long-gun registry, which was finally created in 1995, and the Harper government’s move this year to abolish it distresses me.

But I simply cannot see the wisdom of the Marois government’s announcement last week that it intends to make Quebec the only province with its own registry.

A go-it-alone registry would be impractical because of Quebec’s borders with Ontario and New Brunswick.

Hundreds of highways, secondary roads and lanes interlace Quebec with those provinces. Unless you establish checkpoints and border patrols, you’d be making it absurdly easy for anyone to avoid registering one’s ownership of a long gun with Quebec authorities. Smuggling wouldn’t even have to be surreptitious.

Of course, the Marois government’s plan depends upon the courts making the Harper government release its Quebec gun data. In September, Quebec Superior Court granted the province an injunction to prevent the feds from destroying information on Que- bec’s gun owners (as they are doing with other Canadians’ firearms records). The federal government is taking the case to Quebec’s Court of Appeal.

I seldom think of the police as naive, but that’s the word for the pro-registry stance of the Fédération des policiers and policières municipaux du Québec. Its president, Denis Côté, readily acknowledges that the borders with other provinces “opens the door to (gun) trafficking and other problems”; but, he says, permits for bringing guns into the province might go a long way to solving this. He even suggests that people with guns wanting to drive from Ontario to New Brunswick first obtain a permit from Quebec. Dream on. The police’s argument for the registry is that when responding to, say, to an emer- gency call on domestic violence, the computerized bank of data would let officers see if anyone in the household owns a gun. That has been a very convincing argument in favour of the coast-to-coast registry. However, it’s less persuasive for a province’s solo registry: People often would not register guns that they had acquired outside Quebec, especially if registration involved a cost. In short, as the years pass and the number of unregistered guns increases, the registry would become less and less reliable.

Montreal, as Quebec’s hub of criminal use of guns, would be the registry’s main beneficiary. But homicide with guns is hardly at a level requiring extraordinary measures. Last year, 35 people were murdered on Montreal Island, only 12 of those with firearms — part of a longterm downward trend. Many fatal shootings here are by organized crime, and no registry will ever deter professional hit men.

As for serious conjugal violence across Quebec, it, too, appears to be trending downward, according to a report by the Institut de la statistique du Québec last year.

One of the main criticisms of the national registry has been its notorious cost: A 2002 auditor-general’s report estimated the price of developing and implementing the system from its birth in 1995 to 200405 at over $1 billion. Public Security Minister Stéphane Bergeron says he has no cost estimate for a Quebec version but he stresses it would be “considerably more reasonable.”

I readily concede that point. Though it has received little publicity, those notorious billion dollars included under-publicized costs that had little to with the registry per se. (They include what the auditor-general called “combating trafficking” and “training police, customs officers, wildlife officers, prosecutors and the judiciary.” Quebec would presumably not incur such costs.)

Still, even if it were not astronomical, the price tag of a Quebec-only program would inevitably be substantial. This debt-ridden province can ill afford to create yet another bureaucracy.

But the main problem is this: We can’t change our geography. Quebec’s porous borders ensure that its registry would never do a decent job.