A private member’s bill that would potentially abolish the national long-gun registry is slowly making its way through Parliament, opening up a volatile Canadian debate.

The bill, tabled by Portage-Lisgar MP Candice Hoeppner, would eliminate the registry for rifles and shotguns. The registry requires gun owners to submit the serial numbers for firearms into a national database.

Many have claimed that the long-gun portion of the registry, which costs over $3 million a year, is a needless hassle for law-abiding hunters and farmers and an excessive federal expense.

Jay Wolfe runs a Winnipeg drywall company and is an avid hunter of deer and game birds. Many of Wolfe’s friends decided to give up on hunting because of the registry, he said.

“They haven’t proven to me that the registry is effective for anything other than giving jobs to bureaucrats,” said Wolfe. “The way it is now, you need to be an avid sportsman to even want to go through the hoops.”

Among the major criticisms of a registry system is that gun owners who do not register their firearms are pinned down with a criminal record. Also, older guns are difficult to register because the serial numbers are often unavailable or not evident.

“For us, it just gets crammed down our throats and that’s the way it is,” said Wolfe. “But to my father’s generation, it was more of a right than a privilege ... and that attitude persists.”

The bill is being split along rural and urban lines because it was given the free vote granted private members’ bills in the Commons, which gave MPs the ability to break with party discipline.

The bill passed its second reading through Parliament by a vote of 164 to 137 and will now go to committee. From committee, it will have to go through Parliament on third reading and, if passed, make its way to the Liberal-dominated Senate.

“The bill will potentially have a rough ride through committee,” said Jim Maloway, MP for Elmwood-Transcona. “And the chances of it making its way through the Senate are very poor.”

Maloway was one of 18 opposition MPs that voted for the Conservative bill.

“The federal NDP has been on record as against the registry,” he said. “Urban [NDP] members are generally more supportive of the registry because it is sold as a gun-control measure when it really isn’t.”

The registry was passed in 1995 as a response to the 1989 Montreal massacre at École Polytechnique, where student Marc Lepine killed 14 women using a legally obtained semi-automatic rifle.

Published in Volume 64, Number 12 of The Uniter (November 19, 2009)