(CNSNews.com) - In an annual report on federal spending, Canada's auditor general said the country's controversial gun control program will likely cost taxpayers more than $1 billion by 2005, when the program is expected to be fully up and running. That's more more than 10 times the amount the liberal Chretien government originally planned to spend on it.
Auditor General Sheila Fraser was quoted as calling the $1 billion estimate an "astronomical cost overrun" from the original price tag.
When the gun registration law was passed in 1995, the government estimated that the program would cost $119 million. Gun registration fees were expected to bring in $117 million, with taxpayers picking up $2 million.
The latest estimates say that by 2005, the costs associated with gun registration will actually cost $1 billion and that registration fees will raise only $140 million of that amount. That means the program will end up costing taxpayers $860 million, according to the auditor-general's report.
Fraser said while the overrun is serious, the fact that Canada's Parliament was not informed of it is "far worse."
Canada's Justice Ministry, according Fraser, acknowledged that the gun control system posed "a significant logistical, technical, and management challenge."
It blamed the ballooning costs on changes to the initial program. For example, a number of provinces, including Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and the Inuit homeland of Nunavut, refused to administer the program, shifting their portion of the financial burden to the federal government. Noncompliance may also be an issue, as outraged gun owners refused to pony up the registration costs, preferring civil disobedience instead.
Canada's Minister of Justice Martin Cauchon said the government accepts responsibility for the cost overruns but is now more interested in making the program work.
Cauchon denied that the government deliberately concealed figures that would make the controversial program look bad. He said there was no wrongdoing and he noted that the cost overrun had been reported internally. But he promised to provide those kinds of numbers to Parliament in the future.
Fraser, in her report, recommended that the Justice Department clean up its act by providing complete and accurate information on the program to Parliament annually.
Even Fraser's auditing staff couldn't penetrate the incomplete and confusing data the Justice Department supplied about the gun registry, Fraser said. "I question why the department continued to watch the costs escalate without informing Parliament and without considering the alternatives," Fraser wrote.
Gun registration was introduced by then-Justice Department Minister Allan Rock in 1995 to help stem gun violence. It was passed partly in response to the 1989 murder of 14 young women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. The law expanded Canada's gun controls to include rifles and shotguns, all of which must be registered with the Canadian government by Jan. 1, 2003. Handgun ownership already is restricted in Canada.
Saskatchewan Parliament Member Garry Breitkreuz said the Canadian government should scrap the registry program. "How long are you going to pour money down this black hole?" he asked. "We could have bought 238 MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging machines) for the cost of what we spent on this."
Even Wendy Cukier, the president of Canada's Coalition for Gun Control, did not defend the high costs of the program, but nevertheless, she insisted that gun registration is still needed. "Given that we are located next to a country with almost as many guns as people and no effective gun control, we must continue to focus on measures to counter the global illicit trade," she said.
But the pro-gun group called "Law-abiding Unregistered Firearms Association" has launched a campaign called "Operation Overload" that urges Canadian gun owners to protest the gun registration program by tying up phone, fax and email lines at the Canadian Firearms Center, which is in charge of registering guns.
"Registration of long rifles and shotguns and the licensing of law-abiding firearm owners will do nothing to enhance the safety of any Canadian citizens," the group said in a statement on its website.
"These concerned, law-abiding Canadians know it is a catastrophic waste of tax dollars that could, with only a little common-sense, be better spent in other areas. The Chretien government refuses to truthfully inform all Canadians of the costs related to this unworkable system."
In addition, it seems that a number of provinces refused to comply with the feds, so the feds had to carry the burdern. At least this program is battling the healthcare system for money. Maybe they could take all the money that needs to go into guncontrol, scrap the program, and direct it towards healthcare because we must insure we have a good public healthcare system and it could use another billion dollars 
