Long-gun data can be shared with provinces

[CHIMO]

Canada's privacy watchdog has shot a big hole in one of the Conservative government's main arguments for destroying the records compiled by the long-gun registry.

Jennifer Stoddart said Tuesday there's nothing in the Privacy Act that prevents the federal government from sharing the data with provincial governments. The act actually permits disclosure of personal information, provided it's done through a federal-provincial agreement for the purpose of administering or enforcing any law or carrying out a lawful investigation.

Quebec wants to use the data to create its own gun registry, but the Conservative government, which has introduced legislation to scrap the controversial national registry, has flatly refused to share the records.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews last week maintained that transferring the data to Quebec would violate the Privacy Act.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/11/01/pol-long-gun-registry-records.html
Nov 1, 2011 5:36 PM ET




A bunch of loud mouth bullies throwing their weight around because they can. They are nothing but a bunch of dried up prunes that have lost their money canvassing issue and are about to dry up in the corner.

[iverglas]

1. was that you I heard sputtering at the end there? ;)

I'm anticipating four years of sputtering myself.

I have just sent an email to the entire NDP caucus.

One of the things I directed their attention to was this article in the New Brunswick paper The Telegram, and the paper it is reporting on.

http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/search/article/703339

http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2009/Ryan-Cukier-Thomlinson-Devereaux.pdf

It's about the $2 billion lie, and more specifically, how one right-wing piece of shit managed to frame the entire issue of the firearms registry by lying and lying and lying, and having his lie repeated by all of his right-wing piece of shit chums. I refer to Garry Breitkreutz, MP, of course, and his Alliance/Reform/Conservative colleagues.

From the newspaper report:

But within four months his language had escalated into "a $2-billion boondoggle." The study says Breitkreuz "strategically created" that catch phrase. The study calls it his "fabrication."

... He said then he'd added Fraser's $1 billion figure to another $1 billion estimated cost of enforcing the legislation. The latter $1 billion came from a paper Breitkreuz asked a researcher at the non-partisan Library of Parliament to produce.

The $1-billion in that paper reflected the potential cost of 500,000 convictions over five years for violating the new firearms legislation. But it's clearly a hypothetical figure, since the Library of Parliament paper itself shows only a fraction as many firearms offences have occurred.

Wednesday, Breitkreuz said the second $1 billion did not come from the Library of Parliament study but reflected the "economic cost" of the gun registry. He said it was based on his own calculations of an estimated $200 cost for each licensed firearm owner as well as a decline in hunting and tourism that he argued could be blamed on the registry.

He's a big filthy liar. Oh, and the CBC has gleefully repeated the lie, and gets cited now as an authoritative source for it.

But Candace Hoeppner actually managed to make the lie bigger last week in the House:

http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=41&Ses=1&DocId=5207365

I think we all agree that it costs almost $2 billion to register just over seven million long guns. Right now, there are just over seven million long guns in the database, and that costs about $2 billion. We can all try to guess why. Only the Liberals would be able to tell us what was really going on during that time. We do not know. That was also during the time of some other scandals, and we are certainly concerned about where the $2 billion went.

If we start at $1 billion as a probably slightly inflated start-up cost, and even use the definitely inflated cost of $100 million a year for operation, we might get close to that particular $2 billion.

The problem is that it has paid for a lot more than "to register just over seven million long guns", hasn't it?

For starters, the existing registry, before the current one was created (it was for restricted and prohibited firearms, including handguns), cost $30 million a year in the dollars of the time to operate. And current operating costs cover, for instance, the thousands of daily queries to the registry by police.

They're just liars. I'm hoping the NDP will be saying so, in whatever parliamentary language is required. (Maybe somebody has and I've just missed it; my reading of Hansard is spotty, and I haven't paid close attention to the news.)


The firearms registry is our bulwark againt gun trafficking. When firearms are not registered, there is no disincentive for trafficking -- for someone to buy guns for resale on the black market, for someone to sell their guns to unlicensed/ineligible purchasers. And when handguns are difficult to get, registration being the big obvious reason why, long arms are not a bad substitute.

Marc Lépine used a rifle -- one that is not classified as a restricted firearm, so will be exempt from registration once the long arms registry is eliminated.
Kimveer Gill used a rifle.
James Roszko (Mayerthorpe RCMP murders) used long guns.
Louise Russo (bystander killed on a Toronto street) was killed with a rifle.
Long arms are the weapon of choice for woman-murderers ... and interestingly, murders of spouses (mostly women) by long arm have declined at twice the rate of overall murders of spouses in the last 30 years, probably partly as a result of the earlier imposition of licensing, but it would be impossible to say that the registry did not play a part.

Eliminating the long arms registry opens the doors to gun trafficking. Where criminals have recently had to rely on theft and smuggling for their guns, they will now have the whole world of straw purchases and private sales at their feet.

But hey, what do a bunch of Albertan assholes care about people getting killed in Montreal or Toronto with guns trafficked from anywhere in Canada?

[CHIMO]

2. Yep

Sputtering and trying to stir up some ideas.

Where the hell is Manitoba on the CWB?