The Liberal government will require gun dealers to begin compiling a 20-year database on millions of rifle and shotgun owners starting May 18..Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino on Wednesday denied it was a de facto gun registry that the federal government had promised never to reintroduce..“This is not a registry,” Mendicino told reporters, instead calling it “a sensible tool” with amendments to Firearms Act regulations..“Those records will be kept by the businesses, not the government, and the purpose of this particular requirement is to ensure guns don’t get into the wrong hands,” Mendicino said..According to Blacklock's Reporter, the public safety department counted 7.9 million rifles and shotguns nationwide. Regulations require that gun dealers compile records on customers’ names and addresses, dates of sale, make and model of firearms and details of gun shipments by courier..Records must be retained for 20 years and made available to police on request. “These records can help law enforcement trace firearms if they become crime guns,” staff wrote in a Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement..Mendicino yesterday denied regulations created a privatized version of a rifle and shotgun registry disbanded in 2012. “I want to make clear the records will be held by businesses not government and the police will need reasonable grounds to get access to those records,” Mendicino said..“Will police need a warrant?” asked a reporter..“They will be able to approach businesses on reasonable grounds,” Mendicino replied..“Without a judicial warrant?” asked a reporter..“In plain language that means they need a good reason but informed by the evidence and the information they collect, yes,” Mendicino said..Parliament in 2012 passed Bill C-19 An Act To Amend The Criminal Code that repealed a rifle and shotgun registry dating from 1998. The registry was originally budgeted at $119 million. Auditors put costs at $1.2 billion, which later rose to an estimated $2 billion..Conservative MP Raquel Dancho (Kildonan-St. Paul, Man.), opposition public safety critic, yesterday called the revived records requirement a “20-year long gun registry boondoggle.”.“The reality is the vast majority of gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained firearms,” Dancho said in a statement..When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was a backbench MP in 2012, he opposed any rifle registry. “The long gun registry as it was, was a failure and I’m not going to resuscitate that,” Trudeau said at the time, adding: “There are better ways of keeping us safe than that registry which has been removed.”.“They broke that promise,” the advocacy group Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights said yesterday in a statement..“Liberals have now gone a step further by allowing law enforcement the ability to determine their own ‘reasonable circumstances’ to access these highly sensitive and personal records. There will be no warrant needed to obtain these records.”
