Worse than Adscam?

That's what Peter MacKay saying about the gun registry:

Critics of the gun registry are eagerly awaiting Auditor General Sheila Fraser's "Canadian Firearms Program" audit which is scheduled to be released in February -- if we're not in the midst of a federal election campaign.

Fraser isn't doing interviews about the audit, which has been underway for months.

The last time her office attempted to look into gun registry spending was 2002 and the results were explosive. In fact, her team was forced to abandon its attempts to follow the spending on the gun registry because of the absence of records.

"The information on cost recovery provided to the government changed as the program developed," Fraser wrote at the time.

Originally expected to be self-financing by 1999-2000, Fraser and her auditors discovered the target for the firearms program to break even was pushed to 2013 -- an assumption that the program collect $419 million in fees in 2002-03 and about $828 million by 2007-08.

Deputy Conservative Leader Peter MacKay predicts years from now it will be discovered that the gun registry will be an "even bigger fraud on the public purse than the sponsorship scandal."

"It will be like dime-store shoplifting when one starts to compare the money that was involved in this gun registry that's unaccounted for," MacKay told Sun Media.

My problem with the firearms registry is not so much about philosophical objections to gun control or registration, but about a simple analysis of what we've been getting for our money. With the untold millions of dollars spent on gun registration, how many police officers could have been hired, how many more prisons could have been built, and how many more improvements could have been made to an overburdened court system? And what would have done more to reduce violent crime?

Posted by damian at September 25, 2005 11:08 PM | TrackBack