A law that (re)makes history
On March 27, 2012, days before the Ending the Long-gun Registry Act (ELRA) came into force, someone filed an access-to-information request for all releasable data from the registry. Not only was the request not honoured in full, but Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault alleges the RMCP illegally destroyed relevant data in full “knowledge that they related to the outstanding access request as well as [her] ongoing investigation,” and despite her having specifically advised them of such. The Ontario Provincial Police have launched an investigation into the matter.
The intent of the law was always for the data to be destroyed. The ELRA compelled the Commissioner of Firearms to “ensure the destruction as soon as feasible of all records”; and it exempted itself from document retention requirements contained in both the Privacy Act and the Library and Archives of Canada Act. Indeed the data in question, pertaining to legally owned non-restricted weapons, are no great loss to Canadians — particularly since the registry was hopelessly out of date at the time of its abandonment.
But the ELRA exempted nothing from the Access to Information Act. So, the government has a problem on its hands. Well, it did.
Behold the solution: on page 135 of Bill C-59, which is the budget bill of all things, the ELRA is amended to exempt long-gun registry data from the Access to Information Act — retroactively, that is, and not just to the date of royal assent but to to Oct. 25, 2011, which is the day it was first introduced in Parliament. Not only that, it indemnifies the Crown, any government institution or the head thereof, any firearms officer “or any person acting on behalf of or under the direction of any of them” from any “administrative, civil or criminal proceedings” arising from any “act or omission” pertaining to the destruction of the registry data or compliance with the Access to Information Act while it still applied to the ELRA.
The immediate consequences of this should offend any right-thinking Canadian: Parliament proposes to legislate a criminal investigation out of existence! You don’t need a particularly fevered imagination to see where that precedent could lead. And this isn’t just something proponents of the long-gun registry or gun control, or even mainly them, who ought to be worried.
“This probably means that no one will be able to request information about whether the RCMP has really deleted his or her information from the registry, or about how much the destruction of the registry cost Canadian taxpayers,” Legualt argued at the Senate’s finance committee. And that’s a huge red flag for gun owners in High River, Alta., who are still seething at the RCMP’s decision, during the floods of 2013, to break into dozens of homes and seize their properly stored firearms. Many suspect the RCMP used long-gun registry data on the sly. Now they may never know.
Over the years, the Conservatives have buried many novel and ingenious things in the mammoth omnibus bills of which they are so very fond, but this really does take the biscuit. And neither opposition party seems particularly interested in taking the Tories to task on this issue — perhaps because they’d rather let the long-gun registry rest in peace, at least for now. Indeed, the people who should really be up in arms are the Conservatives themselves, on behalf not just of the rule of law but the rights of the gun owners they have always claimed to hold dear. Alas, it seems history can be rewritten as well.
Is the long-gun registry data really gone? Thanks to the Conservatives’ budget bill, we may never know