Shots in the Dark

If you spent $1,000 per day, every day, it would take you nearly three years to spend a million dollars. If you spent $1,000 per day, every day, it would take you over 2700 years to spend $998 million. This is not chump change.

What did Canadians forego for this gun registry expenditure? $998 million buys a lot of things, for example:

• those helicopters the Canadian Forces have been waiting for: $998 million would have purchased just shy of 19 of them • worried about terrorism? We could have paid for 25,808 new C.S.I.S. intelligence officers • the average tuition debt load for medical students is $140,000. We could have had 7,128 new men and women in lab coats or hired 24,477 nurses to relieve some of our most understaffed hospitals • the feds could have tossed the provinces enough cash to hire nearly 27,000 new public school teachers • ironically, the firearms registry budget overrun could have put 30,929 new RCMP officers out protecting our streets from illegal firearms

It is simply inconceivable - to those not in the budget business - such a gargantuan error in projection could be made. Where else might vast accounting errors have seen tax dollars flushed down the raw government waste pipes?

What's the real kicker to this gross financial faux pas? After all that money - it still doesn't work.

The original plan for the gun registry called for all gun owners to be registered by January 1, 2001 and for all firearms to be registered by January 1, 2003. By the end of December 2002, so many applications for firearm registration had yet to be processed the government had to extend its billion-dollar deadline by six months. Just send in a letter stating the intention to register your firearm and that will be fine for now.

The road to Ottawa is paved with multi-million dollar intentions.

At the end of 2002, Canadians had spent hundreds of millions of dollars for a system that has failed to register hundreds of thousands of firearms. Given the budget history of this project there is little reason to believe that reaching $1 billion will even complete the job.

Mistakes happen. We cannot expect the government to be 100% accurate in their budgeting forecasts.

We ought to expect, however, that when the feds bring in new programs, their projections be within firing distance of the actual cost.

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