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LETTERS: And now the rest of the long gun registry story

I was always led to believe that leopards can’t change their spots.

I read, with interest, Ms. Denesiuk’s recent letter (Under the gun in the Western News, Jan. 14) re: Justin Trudeau and Long-Gun Registry.  It would appear that there are some issues that she may have missed or possibly overlooked.

The federal long-gun registry was first created by the Liberal Party in 1995, in the wake of the 1989 massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, where a gunman shot and killed 14 women, mostly engineering students.

The “$2-billion boondoggle” registry was loathed by much of rural Canada and opposed by the Conservatives, who after several attempts finally abolished it in April after passing Bill C-19, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act, in a final vote of 159-130. That Trudeau voted against the abolition of the federal long-gun registry is a matter of public record. The Quebec government went to court to preserve its share of long-gun data and in September, a Quebec Superior Court judge sided with the province.

While the federal government has destroyed millions of records of registered long guns, it is in the process of appealing the Quebec court ruling blocking it from destroying the data from Quebec’s portion of the federal long-gun registry.

Why is the federal representative to Ottawa from Quebec, who is now supposedly anti-long gun registry, not working to bring his home province into line with the rest of Canada?

Is he really anti-gun registry? I was always led to believe that leopards can’t change their spots.

Ron Barillaro                                                                                                           Penticton