Via The Globe and Mail:
Brushing off attacks from Quebec and the opposition, Mr. Harper and his ministers said they will not wait for the court ruling to fulfill a campaign promise to get rid of the registry and its unreliable data.
[...]
The Quebec government, along with all political parties in the province and the majority of Quebeckers, have been strongly opposed to abolishing the gun registry. Quebec insisted that it needs the data to set up its own registry. Mr. Dutil said it would be too costly for the province to reconstitute the data in the registry once it was destroyed.
The long gun registry is demonstrably effective in reducing domestic murders, and the public continues to empathize with the victims of the Montreal Massacre, and nobody’s taken into account how much it will cost in not only increased gun injuries, suicides, and the possibilities of trafficking, but also for the actual destruction of the database. There are no upsides except to give the tinfoil-hatted gun owners a present and woo them to vote Conservative who think registering their gun is tantamount to providing criminals with a shopping list (like criminals have access to it any more than they do to a car registry as a shopping list!), or providing law enforcement with reasons for sudden search-and-seizure (which doesn’t bloody happen — find a case where it did!). Nobody’s done a real and honest cost-benefit analysis, outside the RCMP, who comes down nearly uniformly on the side of keeping the registry. The abolition of the long gun registry means there is absolutely no way to enforce that only licensed users purchase firearms, and no way of telling who owns what except on the honour system. This is universally a bad move. And yet the spammer trolls will keep coming. Probably asking the exact same questions and getting the exact same answers. Let’s see if they come up with anything novel on this one.
The only light at the end of this dark tunnel that Harper wants Canada to plunge headlong into, is the light from a firearm muzzle. Hopefully the courts agree that the registry should be retained and that Harper’s government, in destroying it prematurely, acted in contempt of court. Wanna place odds on that actually happening, though?