Québec Tries to Save the Long-Gun Registry

With the angrily named Ending the Long-gun Registry Act, formerly known as Bill C-19, now law, Québec is fighting a rearguard battle to try to save “its” part of the registry. It is asking the Superior Court to declare unconstitutional s. 29 of Act, which provides for the destruction “as soon as possible” of the registry data, and to order the federal authorities to transfer to it the data relative to the firearms owned by Québec residents.

Radio-Canada has posted a copy of Québec’s lengthy application for an injunction (en français, bien entendu); it also reports that Québec has succeeded  in obtaining a safeguard order which will prevent, at least until the argument on the merits next week, the destruction of the data Québec is trying to obtain.

Very briefly, the basis for Québec’s argument is that firearms legislation has both federal and provincial aspects, so that it is constitutionally competent to create its own registry. Instead of doing so, it participated in the administration of the federal one, so long as it existed; but now, if the federal government does not want to keep its registry, Québec wants to have one of its own. The destruction of the data, which it helped amass and transferred to the federal government, would thus frustrate its legitimate legislative objective; indeed, the real purpose of s. 29 is to prevent provinces from constituting their own registries, and thus to prevent the exercise of a legitimate provincial power. S. 29 goes beyond what is justified by Parliament’s criminal law power, because it is an attempt to “cover the field” of long-gun registration regulation. Furthermore, the long-gun registry data belongs to Québec as well as to the federal government, and the latter is not entitled to destroy it. If it has no use for it, it must transfer the data to Québec, because in keeping with its obligations as a fiduciary of the data (as of any other government property).

The claim as a whole and Québec’s arguments in its support raise some very interesting constitutional questions, some of which I hope to outline in a post tomorrow.

Author: Leonid Sirota

Law nerd. I teach public law at the University of Reading, in the United Kingdom. I studied law at McGill, clerked at the Federal Court of Canada, and did graduate work at the NYU School of Law. I then taught in New Zealand before taking up my current position at Reading. View all posts by Leonid Sirota