RCMP can’t or won’t say how much repeal of gun registry will save taxpayers

OTTAWA – The Conservative government that championed the end of what it calls the “wasteful and ineffective” long gun registry can’t say exactly how much the registry’s repeal will save taxpayers.

More than seven months after the registry was officially ended in every province and territory except Quebec, the RCMP suggests the registry’s repeal will save somewhere between $1.5 million and $4 million a year.

It bases those numbers on a 2008 report.

Yet the registry cost $7.7 million to operate in 2010-11, the last full year for which information is available.

The Conservatives have for years claimed that the gun registry costs billions of dollars.

But an examination by The Canadian Press shows more than 80 per cent of the Canada Firearms Centre’s budget went to firearms licensing, which still exists now that the registry has been closed.

Neither the RCMP nor the public safety minister’s office will explain why taxpayers can’t expect to save the full cost of the registry program now that it’s been killed off.

Nor is the RCMP able to provide any cost estimate of destroying the gun registry data, saying only that it will be absorbed within the national police force’s budget.