Cost of long-gun registry is far below Tories’ estimates: report

A 70-page report on proposed legislation to kill the long-gun registry found that scrapping it would save somewhere between $1.57 million and $4-million per year. The Conservative government, who was in favour of dismantling the long-gun registry, had estimated its costs in the billions. After the bill was defeated in September, Christopher McCluskey, a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, told the media that the long-gun registry cost $2-billion. Other Conservative MPs are on record saying that scrapping the registry would save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars per year. The contradictory report in question was commissioned by the RCMP in 2009 and became public today after the Globe and Mail received it through Access to Information rules. Peter Hall, the report’s author, concluded that if legislation to scrap the long-gun registry were passed, the firearms program would eliminate at most, 63 full-time positions and some IT costs, for a savings of $4,025,000 per year.

Globe and Mail