The Auditor’s next report could be a bombshell, says the Winnipeg Sun’s Maria McClintock this morning.
Critics of the gun registry are eagerly awaiting Auditor General Sheila Fraser’s “Canadian Firearms Program” audit which is scheduled to be released in February—if we’re not in the midst of a federal election campaign.
Fraser isn’t doing interviews about the audit, which has been underway for months.
The last time her office attempted to look into gun registry spending was 2002 and the results were explosive. In fact, her team was forced to abandon its attempts to follow the spending on the gun registry because of the absence of records.
“The information on cost recovery provided to the government changed as the program developed,” Fraser wrote at the time.
Originally expected to be self-financing by 1999-2000, Fraser and her auditors discovered the target for the firearms program to break even was pushed to 2013—an assumption that the program collect $419 million in fees in 2002-03 and about $828 million by 2007-08.
Deputy Conservative Leader Peter MacKay predicts years from now it will be discovered that the gun registry will be an “even bigger fraud on the public purse than the sponsorship scandal.”
“It will be like dime-store shoplifting when one starts to compare the money that was involved in this gun registry that’s unaccounted for,” MacKay told Sun Media.
MacKay expects Fraser’s next audit to continue to highlight mismanagement—despite assurances by the government that it’s under control and the accounting is more transparent than ever.
Worse than that, he added, it doesn’t work.
“No one has ever connected it to public safety. If you put the equivalent money or resources into front-line policing, into training, public awareness and general policing resources that, to me, would be a far more effective means of addressing firearms-related violence,” MacKay said.
“The Hells Angels don’t line up at a kiosk and register their shotguns.”
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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