Over Budget by $998M [PDF]

After Marc Lepine's 1989 shooting spree of women at the University of Montreal, law enforcement and the government realized that they didn't have a clue who owned guns out there, or what their criminal history was. From the outset, the gun lobby opposed any list of gun owners -- outright -- after all, they weren't criminals. Garry Breitkreuz, the Charlton Heston of the North, wants the whole scrapped. The passage of new firearms act in 1995 gave the government instructions to not only increase penalties for firearm offenses, but also to create a gun registry -- a huge database that could be accessed by law enforcement across the country. The problem however, was that law enforcement agencies around the country were not integrated, reported to different authorities, had conflicting interests -- and some provinces, just didn't want to have the registry period. You can guess who those cowboys are. The result: a $2M project is now estimated to have cost taxpayers $1B.