Quebec to monitor gun inventories

Fatal conjugal violence has dropped in province since long-gun registry began

“People should go through screening every few months. Sometimes things happen in life.”

DAWSON COLLEGE SHOOTING VICTIM’S MOTHER, LOUISE DE SOUSA

Not only has Quebec succeeded in maintaining its long-gun registry, it will also continue to keep a strict eye on store inventory and require proof of a valid permit before sales — rules that guncontrol advocates say will keep Quebecers safer than other Canadians.

Monday’s Quebec Superior Court ruling maintained the status quo in Quebec, ordering Ottawa not to destroy the province’s long-gun data, while the federal government moved ahead in the rest of Canada to scrap the 15-yearold registry.

As always, people buying a gun in a Quebec gun store must show a permit and the gun will be automatically registered with the provincial registry, which is managed by the Sûreté du Québec.

And unlike in the rest of Canada, store ledgers — which have been around since 1978 — must also be maintained, in order to keep track of inventory, and buyers must show a valid gun permit, rather than clerks just believing the person has one.

During Senate committee hearings into the amendments to the Firearms Act, or Bill C-19, in June, Rick Hanson, chief of the Calgary Police Service and the only police chief of a major city that doesn’t support the long-arm registry, said that just believing someone has a permit “is woefully inadequate.”

Heidi Rathjen, a spokeswoman for gun-control advocacy group Polysesouvient, which represents survivors of the 1989 École Polytechnique shooting of 14 women in Montreal, agrees.

“(In the rest of Canada) they’ve just created a new environment where they’re facilitating illegal sales because police have no enforcement capabilities,” she said.

Richard Henry Bain, 62, who faces 16 charges including murder and arson after the postelection shooting at the Métropolis, owned 22 guns, 21 of which were registered.

If Bain had escaped from the scene, say legal experts, police would have found him via the long-gun registry.

Quebecers may also be protected by Anastasia’s Law, which was passed in 2007 after the shooting at Dawson College and requires that doctors and other professionals in Quebec report suspicious behaviour in gun owners to police, despite patient-doctor confidentiality. There is a phone number on the Canadian Firearms Program website that people can call if they “believe a person who owns firearms could be dangerous to himself or herself or others” or if someone has a licence and shouldn’t.

But what if you don’t know someone has guns?

Louise De Sousa, mother of Anastasia De Sousa, the 18-year-old student killed in the 2006 shooting at Dawson and after whom the law is named, believes there should be some way to identify a gun owner.

“People should go through screening every few months,” she said. “Sometimes things happen in life that can make us slip, like a death or a divorce.”

Since the registry was set up, Quebec has seen a drop in the number of cases of fatal conjugal violence involving firearms.

The overall number of homicides where a longarm firearm was used has dropped 30 per cent.