{jcomments on}{jcomments off}Public Safety Minister Vic Toews was the last person Primer Minister Stephen Harper should have sent to a House of Commons committee last Tuesday.
Toews sometimes talks too much and gets himself into trouble.
His appearance came as a secret report prepared and written last year by Mark Potter, one of his senior civil servants, had just become public through a freedom of information request from The Canadian Press.
It revealed how some border guards are afraid that the end of the gun registry will mean more guns smuggled across the border from the United States now that the weapons will no longer require registration.
Imagine the scene. A border guard opens the trunk of a returning car and finds a pile of rifles and shotguns. “Are those guns registered?” the guard challenges the driver.
“Don’t have to be,” the driver responds. “I’m a Canadian. We don’t register guns.”
But the guard still wants to know where the guns came from. So the driver tells him he got some of them at a yard sale, others at a pool hall, a few on the street, and a couple as gifts from friends. “And this one here I got from the old man before he passed away,”
the man says.
As Toews explained to the committee, when the gun registry goes, the government will destroy the data on seven million rifles and shotguns as well. There will be nothing left.
If you’re a cop and you want to know who owns a gun, you’ll have to guess instead of turning to the registry.
But according to Toews, the data in the report on border guards was wrong. A deputy minister is now looking into the matter.
So it’s goodbye Potter. So the data he had was wrong? But then, does the Harper government need any data rather than ideology and gut feeling?
What kind of reliance on data is there when the government discards statistics from police files showing crime is down to 1973 levels in favour of Toews’ mysterious unreported crime that the cops supposedly don’t know about?
Data? Who needs data from the long-form census? You can abolish it instead.
Then Toews tells the committee not to worry about smuggled guns. Cops can always check out gun stores for information on gun ownership.
Toews stopped suddenly. He probably realized where he’s heading. He’s talking too much again, way beyond the speaking notes they gave him.
The next thing he might say is how the cops can go to gun stores and collect data on gun owners by asking for names, addresses, telephone numbers, and descriptions of weapons bought there. That would be a disaster.
There’s only one small step between having police write the information down in their little notepads and then bringing it back to the police station to enter it into their computers.
If that isn’t a new gun registry by another name, what is? Imagine the headline the following day: “Toews to start up new gun registry.” It’s a great way to get himself fired.
In the meantime, an enterprising Radio-Canada reporter got a bright idea. She went off to Maniwaki, Que., about 110 kilometres from Ottawa and the site of some of the best hunting in the country.
The friendly gun shop owner there explained that he keeps a registry of the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of everybody who buys a gun in his shop, as well as a description of the weapon they bought.
That’s to help police when they come around. Call it civic duty, call it the law or call it smart business. It helps to have the cops on your side when you’re in the gun business.
The owner was keeping his own registry even before the federal rules became law and he’ll still be doing it after Harper destroys the official one.
The reporter seems pleased. So it seems Toews’ plan to send cops around to gun shops might work. Police would at least get some information about guns out on the streets.
But the kicker comes unexpectedly. The gun shop owner says that once the gun leaves his store, there’ll be no telling where the weapon is going to end up.
It could be sold, given away, stolen or lost. It could end up in anybody’s hands for whatever purpose. No more gun registry will mean there’s no longer a paper trail for the cops to follow.
But when Harper’s legislation passes before the end of the year, the best place to buy your guns and avoid having the cops know about them will be in the United States where they cost about half of what they do here.
Make sure you don’t get a receipt or anything else the cops can trace and slip into their own private gun registries or special notebooks that Harper hasn’t found and destroyed.
There’s more than one way for a law-abiding gun owner to avoid ending up in a police gun registry.
Richard Cleroux is a freelance reporter and columnist on Parliament Hill. His e-mail address is [email protected].
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