Quebec’s happy defeat on guns
Ottawa’s registry is bad enough that it’s not worth having
Quebec’s efforts to create a provincial gun registry have suffered a setback. But they won’t quit yet.
On Thursday, the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled that the federal government “owned” the data contained within the now essentially scrapped long-gun registry. After the Tories decided to shut down the registry last year, Quebec claimed it had a right to all records pertaining to Quebec. The province planned to use these records to create a provincial version of the doomed federal firearms tracking database, and went to court to prevent the Tories from deleting the records (as was rapidly accomplished for all other jurisdictions).
Quebec’s legal argument was … intriguing.
The long-gun registry was, from start to finish, a federal program. But Quebec argued that it had a right to the data contained within it, anyway, because Quebec pays part of Ottawa’s tab for everything. In effect, Quebec was arguing that nothing is ever truly exclusively in the federal government’s hands, because the provinces help pay for programs and provincial officials help implement them. Quebec should be able to access the records of Quebecers with long guns, the argument went, because all Quebecers paid to collect that information.
The argument convinced a lower court judge, who sided with Quebec last fall. But despite the superficial logic behind the move, it was simply too cute. If every taxpayer owns everything, and therefore has a stake in everything, no one really controls anything. you can only spread responsibility out in so many directions before it becomes invisible.
On Friday, the Quebec Court of Appeal sided with the federal government. Five judges unanimously concluded that the lower court judge erred in finding the decision to scrap the registry and delete its data unconstitutional.
The program was, the judges agreed, a federal program conducted within federal jurisdiction. The individual provinces do not have a right to its data. deleting the records, in other words, is not unconstitutional.
That’s a slam-dunk win for the federal government, but it shouldn’t celebrate just yet. The judges also stayed their ruling for two weeks, forbidding the federal government from deleting the records during that period.
This gives Quebec time to appeal to the Supreme Court, which it has said it intends to do. The records will again be frozen, preserved in digital amber, until the Supreme Court can rule — assuming it chooses to hear the case, of course, which is likely.
The effect of all this will be to preserve, for now, the status quo — the long-gun registry remains in purgatory in one province while being an evermore distant memory in nine others, and three territories, to boot.
Overall, whatever the outcome, the stakes are low. Quebec is fighting for useless, obsolete data.
The long-gun registry, if it had worked as designed (not that it did) was supposed to track a firearm, by its serial number, as it changed hands between licence holders. Licence holders could be gun stores, police forces, private companies or simply qualified citizens. each time a gun was bought, sold or traded, the transaction would theoretically be recorded. If the police ever needed to trace the ownership of a particular gun, they could. If they ever had concerns about a particular citizen, on
It never worked that well; it was always riddled with data-input errors
the other hand, there was a record of how many guns that individual owned.
But it never worked that well; it was always riddled with datainput errors. Virtually everyone who ever dealt with the program has stories to tell of polite, wellmeaning registry employees who clearly had no idea what they were doing.
Furthermore, before they were able to scrap the registry last year, the Tories had declared several amnesties for non-compliance. That poisoned the well, so to speak — every gun that changed hands without being tracked rendered the registry’s accumulated data that much more out of date. If Quebec really wants a gun registry, it should create one, from scratch, using the lessons learned through the painful, needlessly complex experience of the late federal version. That’s the only way to build a registry that will be of any use to police.
until then, it’s just indulging in yet another silly jurisdictional spat with Ottawa, where the “prize” is data too old and corrupted to be of much use anyway.