Canada’s national long gun registry was initiated in 1995 in an attempt to prevent mass shootings. It quickly became an embarrassment to the government, with ballooning costs that were estimated at $2 billion in 2004 and no recorded effect on crime. It was finally scrapped in 2012 under a Conservative government, with current Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying at the time that the registry had been a failure he was not interested in perpetuating.
The one major holdout in 2012 was the provincial government of Quebec, which petitioned to prevent the destruction of registry data and was overruled by the country’s Supreme Court in 2015. Now the Quebec government has announced the creation of its own gun registry, which it says will cost between 15 million and 20 million dollars. With politicians on both sides of the aisle freely admitting that the federal gun registry did nothing but waste taxpayer money, why would anyone be eager to replicate it?
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