Categories: Need to know

Cost of long-gun registry is far below Tories' estimates: report

Savings would fall between $1.6 million and $4-million

by macleans.ca on Monday, November 22, 2010 2:24pm - 18 Comments

A 70-page report on proposed legislation to kill the long-gun registry found that scrapping it would save somewhere between $1.57 million and $4-million per year. The Conservative government, who was in favour of dismantling the long-gun registry, had estimated its costs in the billions. After the bill was defeated in September, Christopher McCluskey, a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, told the media that the long-gun registry cost $2-billion. Other Conservative MPs are on record saying that scrapping the registry would save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars per year. The contradictory report in question was commissioned by the RCMP in 2009 and became public today after the Globe and Mail received it through Access to Information rules. Peter Hall, the report’s author, concluded that if legislation to scrap the long-gun registry were passed, the firearms program would eliminate at most, 63 full-time positions and some IT costs, for a savings of $4,025,000 per year.

Globe and Mail

Tags: gun registry

Gary

Harper exaggerating . Can not be. I am so disillusioned with Harper and his creationist cabinet that I am surprised when they do tell the truth without any spin. No examples come to mind.

harebell

Harper exaggerating?
Really you are too kind sir.
Bald faced lying I'd call it. Just like his claim about Layton trying to overturn the democratic will of the people by forming a partnership. Repeat lies often enough and folk will believe you is his policy and has been for his entire time in office. "There will be no deficit" and Income trusts to mention two topics that this fiscal conservative, who is an economist you know, has told whoppers about just to get votes.

Amateur Hour

Right, and the RCMP never works at the direction of its minister – especially on a politically sensitive file or a budget issue.

As for the RCMP's interests, the registry is less than 10% of the NFC's budget. What the RCMP was trying to do was preserve a very effective system for controlling firearms in Canada that includes prohibited weapons, buyer/owner licensing and long-gun registration.

The Conservatives tried to bury this report.

Amateur Hour

And please note the accusation from the original commenter was that the Liberals were behind this report.
Jim tasko

Right, a very effective way of controlling firearms. I can see all the criminals lining up at police stations everywhere and overwhelmed by guilt at not registering their guns. What fantasy world do you live in?

MostlyCivil

Wait…if THOSE numbers weren't quite accurate, does that mean that the whole airport/Saudi thing might NOT have meant the loss of "literally tens of thousands of jobs"?

I'm shaken, I tell you. Shaken.

Amateur Hour

Numbers. The natural enemy of Canadian Conservatives.
Taking them down since John A.

TJCook

"But then, when exposed to facts and reality, the LibBot reflex is to spit, insult and lie, just like your hero …sorry you don't have one. "

When self-important twelve-year-olds discover blog comment boards, the results are rarely good.
MBToday

This government is focus on the MESSAGE, to contrive it, to propagate it, to spin it that if the TRUTH (or anything close to it) comes up it must be suppressed. There is so much spin with this government that the ministers, advisers and Mr. Harper himself really do not know what is real or not.
Out There

This is why the Conservatives want to eliminate the mandatory long-form census and cut off as much access as possible to accurate sources of information. Then, when a Conservative minister says that the gun registry costs one squillion jillion zillion dollars a year, there will be no accurate source of information to refute him.
fredinprinceton

When the coalition of gang bangers and home invaders throw their full support at the registry because it makes their jobs so much safer, there must be something to it all right.
Not only that, but it provides one heck of a shopping catalog for the various organized crime groups.
ConnorW

I love the liberal bias of these comments.
Jim

The same morons that said the registry would only cost 80 million are giving us new numbers 2 billion dollars later.

And the same idiots that defend the registry wonder why we can't afford a working health care stystem.

Alberta seriously needs a firewall around it's finances, if the bastions of liberal stupidity (Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto) want this idiocy, they should pay for it themselves and keep it to themselves.
Taiser

I call BS!

"SOME" IT costs? This is not a dell laptop storing this information. What about buildings, heat, hydro, taxes. 63 full time government jobs?? That's well over 4 million right there…what they don't include, benefits or OT? Who wrote this report? The Lib$ ?

Get rid of it!
LaserGuy

The computerized mess their operating right now, will soon have to be replaced. And that my friends is going to cost MILLIONS.. Dump this white elephant NOW!!
Harpers Gut

Savings would be less than a sixth of what it's going to cost to the government advertise for the voluntary census…
Robert Sciuk

In a cost benefit analysis which indicates that the savings would *ONLY* be about $6M annually, I don't see anyone jumping on the benefits. There are none. Why then should we spend even a nickel on doing what we get no return on investment from? The previous firearms regime (the Firearms Acquisition Certificate or FAC) had each and every real public safety benefit by requiring background checks, safety training, letters of reference and spousal or parental permissions upon entry to legitimate firearms ownership, and did so without need of registration. We should return to that system, and eliminate the newly minted crime of failure to register (sec 91/92 of the criminal code).
Ariadne

Did they consider programming, office expenses, salaries/wages, benefits, pensions(with yearly inflation taken into consideration)? The amount they quoted above is unrealistically very low even for moderate business size, let alone a national project. Having said, that amount compounded yearly and added to other useless projects could add up to our ballooning budget.