When it comes to the gun registry the province of Quebec is a paradox.

On the one hand polls indicate support for the registry is higher in Quebec than anywhere else in Canada; but it is also estimated that Quebec has the highest rate of non-compliance with the Firearms Act in the country.

That may surprise some people, but it’s true.

According to an unnoticed story in Le Devoir nearly a third of Quebec’s 700,000 gun owners are believed not to have applied for a firearms license. By comparison it’s estimated that barely 7 per cent of gun owners in Alberta didn’t comply.

Meanwhile of those Quebec gun owners who did register it’s not clear how many of them actually registered all their guns. We do know from Canadian Firearms Centre reports that at least 400,000 firearms are still unaccounted for.

And here is something else we know: the Quebec government is coming down hard on anyone who flouts the gun law. Very hard.

While most provinces declared they would not be prosecuting gun registry offences on behalf of the federal government, Quebec authorise are enthusiastically dragging people before the courts.

Indeed what’s happening in Quebec is proving exactly what opponents of the Firearms Act and its gun registry had long argued: it is turning otherwise law-abiding gun owners into criminals.

Consider the case of Jean-François Laflamme, a quiet 24 year old hunter from rural Quebec who recently got charged for violating the gun law. The firearms license needs to be renewed every five years, but he failed to realize that his was expired before going moose hunting. (At the time government had no renewal notification system in place.)

Nonetheless, Laflamme got charged for “illegal possession of a firearm” and goes to trial in November. If found guilty, this young man risks a criminal record, up to $2000 dollars in fines and 6 months in jail.

An even more outrageous case concerns Paul Grussinger, a 65 year old man with Parkinson’s disease who was charged with violating the gun registry law simply because he had three dismantled firearms in his home.

His troubles with the law began when his wife unexpectedly died last year. Grussinger went into a deep depression and family members rounded up his firearms as well as all some gun pieces they found in the house. They turned everything over to the police.

Big mistake. 

Since three functional firearms could be built out of the pieces, the ailing man got charged because they were not registered. He says he believed the pieces had been stolen years ago from his summer home. He goes to trial this summer.

How is dragging this man to court is going to improve public safety? That, after all, is the Liberals’ twisted rationale behind this shameful gun law.

As for the young hunter, well, he’s a hard working machinist but now has to pay some lawyer fees he can’t afford. Both had no criminal intent. Still, the government has needlessly disrupted their lives and it could get worse if they end up with a criminal record for a firearms offence.

Regardless of what people consider as appropriate gun control measures, implementing them by the way of the Criminal Code was a wrong way to go. The law was inevitably going to cause collateral damage because the onus is on the gun owners to prove they are legitimate, in contradiction with the basic principle of our legal system.

Furthermore, regulation of property and thus of guns was clearly a provincial jurisdiction. In a June 2000 ruling, however, the Supreme Court allowed Ottawa to legislate on gun ownership on the grounds that the “intention” of the government was to promote public safety and not regulate private property.

With that ruling the Supreme Court opened the door to any future federal encroachment of provincial jurisdictions by the way of the Criminal Code, as long as it is with the “intention” of acting in the name of public safety.

The hundreds of thousand Canadians who didn’t register any or some of their guns are no more a threat to public safety than those two unlucky souls I now know personally. Unfortunately, gun owners will keep getting caught in the Firearms Act web until a sensible government stops this madness. Let’s hope it’s very soon.