As the Tory government tries to wave through the new omnibus crime bill, it is becoming apparent that the full financial and social impacts have not been thought through. Already the province of Quebec anticipates that it will cost between $294 to 545 million to create the infrastructure to support the bill, as well as an additional $74 million a year to service it. The federal government says that it will pay $78.6 million dollars of the bill’s estimated cost. From this perspective, the crime bill seems to run at odds with the Tory government’s initial proposal to end the long-gun registry earlier this year. The gun bill was scrapped because it was considered expensive and inefficient, and did not seem to be correlated with the decrease in crime.

To cap it off, the new crime bill will most likely target young offenders:  according to Statistics Canada, young offenders are three times as likely to commit property crime than violent crime. As the federal government pursues the introduction of the new crime bill, the issue doesn’t seem to be the cost of law enforcement, but rather what kind of law enforcement is implemented.

The most disturbing aspect of scrapping the long-gun registration is that all records of long-gun ownership will be destroyed. The federal government is refusing to release the registry to the Quebec provincial government so that the province can continue its own long-gun registration. Although the province knows that the bill will be passed, Quebec is still the strongest long-gun registration advocate because of its history with the bill.

The long-gun bill was developed after the massacres at École Polytechnique, when Marc Lépine used a long gun to shoot and kill 14 women enrolled in the engineering program. The long-gun registration has its roots in the fight against violence against women, and in light of the financial situation of the new crime bill, the move to erase the bill has deeper significance.

The fight against gendered violence emphasizes the need for open communication, and that silence will only continue the violence against women. The École Polytechnique was an extreme example of gendered violence, however, it is important to remember that violence against women often goes unrecognized, is written off, or not reported. Identifying violence against women and taking a visible stand against these crimes is crucial to establishing women’s rights.

Erasing the registration therefore has symbolic repercussions. It is not creating transparency; erasing the registration is just sweeping the fact that long-guns can be a weapon under the rug. There is little reason for the government to refuse to give Quebec its own gun registration information. The fact of the matter is that marginalized groups are the ones to pay for cuts to social services.

Although there is no solid evidence that the long-gun bill makes it easier to reduce crime, the federal government has inadvertently said that this risk is not important enough to monitor. It is, according to them, a non-issue. Discarding the history of gun registration is to disregard the tragedy of Dec. 6 on which the long-gun registry was formed.

It would seem that many Canadians are in agreement. At the ceremony for the École Polytechnique in Montreal, many members of the audience held placards that appealed to the federal government to keep the long-gun bill. Former Governor General Michaëlle Jean spoke at the ceremony about the need to protect women’s right to saftey. Although Jean did not specifically mention the long-gun bill, it should be noted that no Tory MP’s were asked to participate in the ceremony.

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