Gun Registry and Data Destruction

My holidays have been delayed, much to my frustration! But on the plus side, I was at my desk for the Quebec Court of Appeal's decision in the gun registry appeal: Canada (Procureur général) c. Québec (Procureur général), 2013 QCCA 1138.

I criticized the decision in an oped for the Montreal Gazette yesterday. Here is a taste:

The court of appeal’s neglect of “cooperative federalism” led it to these two errors. Despite its admonition that the principle is an important “interpretive tool,” it did not use it. Properly applied, the principle would have pointed toward a narrower interpretation of the scope of the power to repeal legislation and of the power to destroy data in the original Firearms Act. The legal course consistent with this principle would have been to delete the records in the registry gradually, rather than in one fell swoop, or even better, to send them to the provinces.

These errors of law should be corrected by the Supreme Court. Permission to appeal will be sought by Quebec, and the country’s highest court ought to grant it in order to rectify the flaws in the reasoning of the appeal court.

My previous posts on the case (in reverse order) are collected below:

 

http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2013/03/some-thoughts-on-oral-argument-long-gun.html

http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2013/03/more-on-unconstitutionality-of.html

 

http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2012/09/data-destruction-and-public-law-part-ii.html

 

http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2012/09/data-destruction-and-public-law-part-i.html

http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2012/05/why-abolishing-long-gun-registry-is.html

Data Destruction and Public Law: Part II

You may be baffled by the gun registry decision, even having read my earlier explanatory post. You might think along the following lines: the federal government set this registry up in the first place, using its power to enact criminal laws, by making it an offence not to register certain weapons. If that is so, the federal government is surely entitled to subsequently decide to close the registry and destroy the data. They made it, so they can unmake it, right? You can't just leave all that data lying around!

Data Destruction and Public Law: Part I

Major kudos must go to the Québec government's team of lawyers, who masterminded the challenge which resulted yesterday in the grant of a permanent injunction against the destruction of the long-gun registry data by the federal authorities.

Why Destroying the Long-Gun Registry Data is Unconstitutional

The literature on the establishment and operation of administrative agencies is voluminous. Even the destruction of agencies – deregulation – has inspired eloquent words. Less ink has been spilled about the consequences of deregulation. The impending argument over the abolition of the Long-Gun Registry is an example of destruction and deregulation giving rise to litigation.

In this post, I argue that the means chosen by the federal government for destroying the data contained in the Long-Gun Registry is unconstitutional; Québec should, in my view, prevail in its constitutional challenge. It has already prevailed in winning an injunction preventing the destruction of the data, and the substance of its challenge will be heard shortly in the Superior Court. An appeal by the losing party to the Court of Appeal and thence the Supreme Court of Canada is inevitable, unless the federal government and Québec reach some sort of agreement in the meantime.