Canadian gun registry based on phoney statistics
by Lorne Gunter
Edmonton Journal
15 March 1998
Always based on flimsy logic, it now appears the national registry of firearms was also founded on fudged crime statistics.
During the debate over Bill C-68 in 1995, the federal justice department’s Firearms Control Task Group prepared a report for the House of Commons’ justice committee that claimed the RCMP had investigated more than 600 violent crimes in which a firearm had been used in 1993. And that figure, it appeared, didn’t include local and provincial police numbers. The committee was left with the impression the true national total was much higher.
Many fence-sitting MPs were persuaded. Maybe there really was a gun-crime problem. Maybe the registration of all firearms would make the country safer. C-68 became law.
Except the justice department’s figure was overstated, by ninefold.
In 1993, the RCMP investigated no more than 73 violent crimes committed with a gun. Throughout the vast tracts of Canada policed by the Mounties, there had been just 73 firearms murders, attempted murders, muggings, assaults and hold-ups.
Each was a tragedy for its victims. But together, they hardly justified curtailing the rights of millions of law-abiding Canadians, or the hundreds of millions of tax dollars registration will consume. The justice department had misled Parliament.
Was the misleading deliberate? There is no way to tell. Did Justice knowingly supply MPs with false figures, or merely allow its ideological zeal to compromise its ability to sum columns of numbers provided by the RCMP?
What is obvious is, with the national registry set to commence October 1, the justice department is unprepared to correct its false statistics, perhaps out of fear the truth would prompt ordinary Canadians to join with gun owners in opposing the registry.
In a letter sent last July to Deputy Justice Minister George Thomson by RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray, recently obtained by Saskatchewan Reform MP Garry Breitkreuz under the Access to Information Act, Murray claims that numerous attempts by the RCMP to get the Canadian Firearms Centre (the successor to the Firearms Control Task Group) to stop using the false numbers have been rebuffed. Indeed, Murray charges, “CFC staff were unwilling to meet to confirm where the problem occurred with the interpretation of the 1993 RCMP data.” And as recently as last spring, the CFC was still circulating the RCMP numbers in reports, although it was by then lumping them in with statistics from other major Canadian police forces.
“The difference between 623 violent firearm crimes credited to the RCMP, compared to the actual number of 73 is significant,” Murray wrote. “It is of particular concern that the Minister of Justice and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police relied on these statistics while Bill C-68 was being processed in Parliament.”
Murray goes on to explain that of the 333 murders and attempted murders investigated by the RCMP in 1993, “only six of these offences (1.8 per cent) involved the use of firearms...Furthermore, the RCMP investigated 88,162 actual violent crimes during 1993.” The 73 involving firearms represent just eight one-hundredths of one per cent.
About 10 to 12 per cent of gun crimes in Canada are committed by the legal owner of the gun used. The remainder are committed by criminals who stole the gun they used, or smuggled it in from the U.S., or purchased it on the black market.
Smugglers and thieves can be relied upon not to register their guns. Meaning the new national registry, even if successful, would contain information useful in solving seven to nine crimes nationwide each year.
It is probably critical to Justice that it preserve the phantom figure of 600+ crimes. Just as it is likely necessary for the department to keep insisting the registry will cost around $85 million dollars in total by 2001.
During the drafting and debate of C-68, Justice commissioned extensive polling and held several focus groups to gauge public support for tight controls. And I suspect Canadians told them intruding on gun owners’ rights was unjustified if it prevented fewer than 600 crimes annually, or cost more than $85 million to set up.
C-68 became law in part because Justice was able to get non-gun-owning Canadians and police officers to align against gun owners. It got non-owners to go along by promising dramatically lower crime for very little cost. And it brought the police onside with assurances the registry would contain enough information to identify where dangerous gun owners lived, reducing the chance officers would get shot carrying out their duty.
But police support, including the support of the RCMP, was put in jeopardy last fall. In order to keep costs within publicly acceptable levels, the federal government decided it would permit self-registration of firearms rather than requiring police to certify each gun.
If the vail of statistical misinformation is lifted, too, public support might also crumble and Justice’s expensive, useless house of cards with it.
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