Quebec mulls gun registry cost
As both sides of the debate dig in, new bill reveals concern over the price tag
MONTREAL— Wanted: effective gun control, minimal cost. As Quebec lawmakers started studying a bill this week to recreate the divisive federal gun registry on a provincial level, two things came sharply into focus, right from the first gavel strike at the committee hearing.
First, arguments for and against the mandatory registration of long guns haven’t changed a whole lot since Stephen Harper sat in the opposition benches of the House of Commons, railing against what his political colleagues famously tagged the “billiondollar boondoggle.”
Proponents of the new Quebec registry still argue the public-safety benefits of tighter controls on gun ownership, while critics are still complaining that it criminalizes hunters and farmers.
But most striking is that even those advocating most strongly for the provincial initiative are sensitive to the costs even before a single penny has been spent.
It may not be an accident that Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard recently shuffled Martin Coiteux, a former Bank of Canada economist, into the role of public safety minister, tasked with bringing the Quebec gun registry into being.
In his previous cabinet role, Coiteux was treasury board minister, the slasher-in-chief of provincial program spending so as to eliminate the deficit, a goal that was achieved earlier this month.
“I think people perceive me as someone who is preoccupied with controlling costs,” he told the legislative committee this week.
“I would like to say to them that in this domain, as in other domains where I’ve been responsible for controlling costs . . . that I will be particularly vigilant because I know that it’s an important element of its social acceptability.”
Despite the assurances, the Nation- al Firearms Association (NFA), which represents some 7,000 Canadian gun owners, says exploding costs are a certainty.
“To do what they claim they want to do it will be terribly expensive,” said NFA president Sheldon Clare.
“I think there are a couple of things that will be particularly onerous and one of them is to verify if the information is accurate. That was the cost-killer in the federal program. If you put garbage in, you get garbage out.”
The NFA was the first of nearly 30 groups set to testify on Bill 64, as the gun registry legislation is known, between now and mid-April.
In a written submission that set out to counter the “myths” put forward by gun-control proponents, it estimated Quebec will incur a minimal cost of about $350 million, if it moves ahead.
That would seem to be a prohibitively expensive price tag at a time when the province has just finished slashing education budgets and started charging parents more for daycare, putting an end to its universal $7-a-day program.
The NFA’s calculation is based on the federal experience, in which a registry was promised in 1995 at a cost of $119 million, but ended up costing $1 billion by 2002.
Quebec’s costs could run even higher given that the province has no previous experience in gun registration unlike the RCMP, which was already dealing with handgun registration when the federal firearms program was launched, the NFA said.
Pierre Veilleux, president of l’Association des policières et policiers provinciaux du Québec, a group that represents members of the Sûreté du Québec, said that with an adequate computer system that may be valued at several million dollars, “I think we can have this at a reasonable cost.”
But he is supporting the Quebec registry based on a tougher-to-calculate equation that deals with the safety of front-line police officers.
“I can tell you that for the first responders on the road like the patrollers who get a call at 3:30 in the morning and are capable with one click to have a list of weapons it’s a precious tool,” Veilleux said.
He could not point to any particular incidents where the presence of the gun registry helped head off trouble or where the absence of the gun registry has resulted in injury or death.
But proponents of the registry have a number of mass-shooting incidents in Quebec going back three decades that they have used to solidify public and political support.
They include: Former Canadian soldier Denis Lortie’s 1984 shooting in Quebec’s National Assembly that killed three people; Marc Lépine’s 1989 shooting rampage at Montreal’s École Polytechnique that left 14 women dead; a1992 shooting at Concordia University in which a professor, Valery Fabrikant, gunned down four colleagues; the 2006 Dawson College shooting in which student Kimveer Gill killed one and wounded 19 others before taking his own life; and the 2012 attack on a Montreal nightclub at which Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois was celebrating her election victory. They may not compare in number or devastation to those that have occurred in the United States, but each has left its mark on the psyche of a great number of Quebecers.
Despite the emotional toll, the NFA and other groups opposed to registration say their position is rooted in facts and unlikely to shift.
“You would have to . . . demonstrate that the harms that would result (from the registry) are not excessive,” the group’s lawyer, Guy Laverne, told the committee hearing. “Presently I would say that they are.”
Rather, he said the government should focus all its efforts on improving mental-health care — the one common element tying together each mass-shooting incident that has marked Quebec’s consciousness.
“On Dec. 6,1989, when Marc Lépine opened fire at Polytechnique, what would it have changed if his guns had been registered?” Laverne said. “That guy didn’t need a registration number. He needed serious mentalhealth care and an environment that would have taken care of him before he took action.”