Check out http://www.votepair.ca/ maybe you can trade with someone.

Don't complain when the government raises/lowers taxes and spends/cuts money.

EDIT: Also, isn't this thread a BLATANT attempt at advertising/soliciting, which is against the TOS?

Canadian would lose their freedom and right??? Last i check it was the Liberal court ruling that put law-abiding citizen in jail and letting the criminal(s) walk away scott free. Conservative wants to bring in harsher sentencing for everything else. They are the one who wanted to grant citizen arrest for all the civilian ( in the states its call stand your ground status).

Liberal also wants to slowly disarm canadians, elimanating the RIGHT to own firearm(s) for sporting purposes, where conservative wants to make it easier for those who wish to.

Sky... harsher sentencing actually doesn't solve crime problems. In fact the only thing it does is create better criminals. And until we get that through our thick skulls the criminal problems we have will never be addressed in any effective way.

Also we don't have a constitutional right to own fire arms.

You've been viewing WAY too much American media.

NOW, I agree that the current long arm registry is a buracratic nightmare and I grew up on a farm where we needed to have guns (there were friggen wolves!). I grew up around hunting and fishing. I'm not unsympathetic at all to the firearms issue. BUT I think scrapping the system entirely and replacing it with nothing is the worst option.

I would support a longer term registry so rather then having to pay and renew your license every year (which can get extremely costly if you have a couple hunting rifles), I would suggest a longer term, every 4 years at the same rate. Then we could have the advantage of having the registry for legal and police purposes (and they do use it, though typically not for the reasons you would think), while being less of a burden to responsible gun owners.

Write to your MP about it though. I did.

BUT again, and I repeat. You have no such RIGHT to bear arms. If you want that. Go move south.

How does the gun registry help when criminals almost never register their handguns? The money could be better spent somewhere else. Has the gun registry been proven to drastically lower rates of crime with handguns?

Of course the police would want it. Even if it made their job 1-2% easier, they would take it. But at what cost to the public?

The police most commonly use the gun registry when responding to calls at house holds, particularly disturbance and domestic violence calls to ascertain if there's weapons potentially in the house hold. This allows them to be prepared with non lethal interventions upon arrival.

They use this in other emergancy response situations as well. I know someone who's father was suicidal and manic and the police responded to a call at his house. Because they knew that he had a weapon in the house they were ready and tasered him when he was found waving around a rifle. Otherwise the police officer said he probably would have been shot if they hadn't had the warning.

Later they used the registry to get a list of all his firearms and make sure they were all removed from the house while he was getting treatment.

This is the shit that doesn't get on the news. But the police and other emergency services utilitize the gun registry often and generally it's to protect the gun owners and those in their households, not to harm them.

Like I said, it's not a perfect system, I think it can be made better for everyone, but I do believe it is important to have.

And I don't think the gun registry generally prevents "crime" at least not in the way you're thinking about it, as in gang violence. I think it DOES prevent deaths and accidents.

So how much does the gun registry cost the public per year?

2 billion dollars so far.

Plus PAL gets renew every 5 years not every year.

Even if they merge, they only represent < 50% of Canadians, while the Conservatives were polling as high as 41% recently.

So lets not pretend like a vote for the Libs or NDP is "democratic" as they don't represent most Canadians either.

Latest Ekos poll actually shows Cons @ 35% NDP 28% LIB 22% Grn 7% Bloc 6% (rounded off #s btw)

so ndp/libs = 50%

include the bloc that'd represent 56% of the country
http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/polls.html
http://www.ekospolitics.com/

Of course criminals don't register their hand guns, the only practical thing that will make a significant reduction in hand gun related crimes in Canada is simply banning their sale to private individuals. If hand gun sales to private individuals were banned and only gun clubs and law enforcement agencies were allowed to own them that would make progress in decreasing hand gun crime, even then, the progress would be limited considering what country we border.


2 billion dollars so far, correct, there was a significant initial investment in establishing the long gun registry. The registry costs only a few million dollars a year to maintain, eliminating it effectively throws away that investment.

It's less than 10 million a year IIRC.


The key word is as high as 41%, let's keep in mind that they generally sit around 35% support and that is a pretty small fraction of the population. If we wanted to make our system more democratic then it would need to be changed to proportional representation.

IPSOS Reid has the polls @

38% Cons
33% NDP
18% Libs
7% BQ

NDP+Libs= 51%

Whens the last day to vote for our cities?

Voting takes place on Monday May 2nd.


http://www.elections.ca/home.aspx

If what you say is true, then their system is dangerously flawed. The registry provides no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the household actually contains a firearm, and whether or not someone inside is going to use it. No cop will stroll into a grow-op because the system shows no firearms registered to the address, likewise I would find it completely unreasonable for a SWAT team to show up at grandpa joe's house because he has a world war 1 rifle registered, and he got mad and was yelling at the tv and spooked a neighbor.

I understand it's better to err on the side of caution when it comes to things like firearms, but in actuality, it's only being done because there's a stigma attached to them. Realistically a car (3000lb bullet) can inflict way more damage then any firearm can, and is practically concealable in plain sight; can often be bought for a fraction of the cost of a firearm, and driven by ANYBODY, licensed or not....should there not be stricter regulations on them? What about knives? Knives are entwined in more violence then firearms are, why are they not subject to a registry?:troll:

With the amount of money wasted on the long gun registry, Canada could've sent a man to the moon. Now that would've been something we could all admire. Absolutely nobody is amazed or impressed by our stellar gun registry here....

I promise I'm not trying to push your buttons, but we don't have a constitutional right to own a car either. Or a toaster. So the fact that it's not of our constitutional right is of little relevance imo

I'm not sure where you got this from - The current term is already at 5 yrs. I recently renewed my license and authorization to transport.... the only cost to me was getting my pretty picture taken again :D

At the end of the day I can understand where supporters of the registry are coming from (not implying you are one of them either), it just boggles my mind how much money they've dumped into such a shitty mickey mouse system. It's nothing more then a tangled web of bureaucratic shit to give the illusion of control and safety, completely at the expense of people like my convenience.

~$100M a year wasted on what should be a glorified DB.

The police use figures are very much skewed since querying the gun registry is now standard procedure for most actions. The stats that showed how often the gun registry resulted in a hit was ridiculously low, to the point where any officer has a better chance of winning the lottery than encountering a registered gun - and the lottery still doesn't pay out as much as the registry costs each year. :(

I am against the current state of the registry. If it was just a website with a DB behind it and minimal tech support to keep going I'd be fine with a couple $M wasted each year, yet ~$100M is dumb.

Ever heard of the tyranny of the majority? 51% is still very low to be deciding what every Canadian wants.

For the Conservatives to win a majority they have to be > 40% and that would just barely squeak one out. Realistically they'll need > 45% and then it'd be closer to the magic 50% you want for "democracy". :p

Oh I know we don't. I was responding to someone saying the Libs were trying to take away their right to own a fire arm (which we don't have).

We register our cars too, and renew our registration every year when we renew our insurance. We aren't allowed to use our cars if we don't have them properly insured and I'm all for taking away cars from people who use them recklessly.

But like I said, I think there's ways to still have the Database but have it streamlined to be WAY more cost effective and friendly to those who have to register their weapons. I 100% agree that the current state of it is not effective from a cost or interface perspective.

As for the term, I understood you had to renew every year, but yeah if it's changed that's great. It's been a long long long long ass time since I lived in a house with a hunting rifle in it.

I have heard of the tyranny of the majority, which is why I hope even the party I support doesn't win a majority. In my eyes a minority government is the most "democratic" arrangement, which would be the indefinite result of every federal election with proportional representation.

Are you sure on that number?

as a rough estimate, from all accounts i've seen that's pretty accurate. it started off 40mil, then went to 60mil, and has been expected to be 80-100mil now.

and yes, it's just a glorified db. the implementation is complete CRAP.

Those were initial costs. If costs around 4 million to run per year. Harper talks about cost savings buy canceling it but at the ave time wants to reduce the fee's associated in getting a gun.

A 100 mill is drop in the bucket compared to what the G8 summit cost.

no. that is YEARLY cost. as in, every year, the cost keeps going up. that's how screwed up the implementation is. if it only cost $4 mil / year people like me wouldn't give 2 shits about it. that's nothing at all.

The long gun registry does not cost $60-100 million dollars per year, the entire Canadian Firearms registry currently costs $66.4 million dollars per year, the long gun registry is a single component of that system.

Conservatives claim that the long gun registry makes up the majority of the Canadian Firearms registry expenses, so eliminating that component would save $65 million dollars per year. Liberals claim that eliminating the long gun registry would save $2-4 million dollars per year. The reality is that long guns don't make up 97.8% of the gun registries expenses like Conservatives claim, that's ridiculous, but it probably isn't as low as the Liberals claim either.