The Supreme Court has ruled the federal government is allowed to destroy the long-gun registry data pertaining to Quebec, so the province is going to spend tens of millions of dollars to create its own from scratch.
Quebec Public Security Minister Lise Theriault reacted with dismay on Friday to the Supreme Court's decision that the federal government can flush the data it has on long gun owners in the province. She says Quebec had no choice but to create its own database to keep track of weapons.
"Our first order for the registry of firearms is the safety of citizens and police officers, not to criminalize hunters," said Theriault.
“We want to offer this essential database for police officers. It’s used by police on average 900 times a day.”
Theriault said the preliminary cost to create the database would be $30 milion, and that it would be in place within months.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper reiterated Friday his long-held view the gun registry was obsolete.
"Our view --and I think it's been borne out by the facts -- is that we simply don't need another very expensive and not effective registry.
"What we have needed are severe, strong and more effective penalties for people who commit criminal acts using guns, and that's what we've done."
A spokesman for Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney told The Canadian Press in an email "the data will be deleted in the very near future."
Quebec loses in federal court
A divided Supreme Court of Canada says the federal government has the right to order the destruction of Quebec's federal gun registry data -- but all three Quebec judges on the court disagreed.
By a 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court upheld an earlier Quebec Court of Appeal ruling that sided with the government on its controversial decision to abolish the federal registry for long guns in 2011.
The ruling is a win for the Conservative government, and it also exposes a legal divide over the powers of the provinces versus those of the federal government on the country's highest court.
In a dramatic show of solidarity, all three Quebec judges on the Supreme Court -- Clement Gascon, Richard Wagner and Louis LeBel -- put their names on a dissenting opinion.
With Ontario's Rosalie Abella concurring, the minority of four upheld the legal right of the provinces to make laws in relation to property and civil rights.
They lost to the majority, which ruled that the order to destroy the data was a lawful exercise of Parliament's legislative power to make criminal law under the Constitution.
"In our view, the decision to dismantle the long-gun registry and destroy the data that it contains is a policy choice that Parliament was constitutionally entitled to make," wrote Thomas Cromwell and Andromache Karakastanis for the majority, a group that included Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.
The Harper government and the Supreme Court have clashed recently, notably over the high court's decision to reject the government's nomination of Quebec judge Marc Nadon to its ranks.
The Supreme Court also rebuked some core government policy, saying Parliament does not have the power to reform the Senate, or prevent a Vancouver safe-injection drug site from staying open to treat addicts over the objection of the tough-on-crime Conservatives.
But in this case, the high court -- notwithstanding the objections of its Quebec jurists -- sided firmly with the government in its long-standing policy of wanting to kill the gun registry.
It upheld the notion that as long as the government operates within the law, it is free to enact whatever policies it deems appropriate.
The Harper government abolished the registry for long guns in 2011 as part of a long-standing campaign promise -- a controversial political move that also emphasized Canada's rural-urban divide.
The Liberal government created the gun registry in 1998 in response to the murder of 14 women at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. They were targeted by a gunman for being women. Alberta opposed the federal government's right to create a gun registry, but the Supreme Court dismissed that argument in a 2000 ruling.
The federal government ordered the provinces to destroy all the data they collected for the registry, something the Quebec government challenged in the courts, forcing Ottawa to keep Quebec's data until now.
Liberal MP Stephane Dion, the party's intergovernmental affairs critic, chastised the Conservatives for not allowing Quebec to keep its gun-registry data.
"The court spoke, so we'll respect the decision," he said.
"From a political perspective, I would agree that it's very bad federalist to not co-operate with the province in giving the data. It would not have been difficult for the Conservative government to do so."
The issue of firearm registration is a political hot potato for the Harper Conservatives, who see rural long-gun gun owners as a core political base.
Harper recently created a stir when he said guns provide "a certain level of security" to rural residents who live far from police stations.
The Conservative government has always said that the registry was wasteful and intrusive.
On the legal issue at play in this case, the high court justified the destruction of its data, saying it was no longer useful and would be harmful to public safety.
The Supreme Court said it was not its job to weigh in on such debates.
"We add this; to some, Parliament's choice to destroy this data will undermine public safety and waste enormous amounts of public money. To others, it will seem to be the dismantling of an ill-advised regime and the overdue restoration of the privacy rights of law-abiding gun owners," the majority ruling stated.
"As has been said many times, the courts are not to question the wisdom of legislation but only to rule on its legality."
The court also rejected the Quebec's argument that the destruction of the data amounted a violation of the principle of "co-operative federalism" -- a concept that describes the network of federal, provincial and regional government co-operation on a myriad of issues.
Quebec's argument was based on the fact that the registry was a co-operative effort between the federal government and the provinces.
The dissenting judges said a "co-operative scheme" between the provinces and Ottawa can't be "dismantled unilaterally" by one of the parties.
Dismayed by the decision
The Montreal police union says working without a registry for the time-being will be difficult.
“It will complicate our investigations because when we will find a weapon it was very easy with the [registry] to know where the weapon was coming from,” said union president Yves Francoeur.
Meaghan Hennegan says she can still see the Dawson College shooter coming toward her in her mind’s eye. She says doing the simplest things with her arm can be painful nearly nine years after she was shot in the incident. She says the 5-4 court ruling is a huge disappointment.
“To have it go by one is a) really painful and b) really frustrating because I don't understand why nobody would think ‘Giving us the data about our citizens is not our business,’” she said.
With files from The Canadian Press
