OTTAWA — Political and legal faultlines separated the Harper Conservatives from the federal Liberals and Quebec on Friday after the Supreme Court of Canada ordered the destruction of the province's gun registry data.
By a 5-4 margin, the high court gave the federal government the right to order the destruction of Quebec's federal gun registry data — but all three Quebec judges on the court disagreed.
The ruling was a rare vindication of the Conservative government's agenda at the country's highest court, and it also exposed a legal divide on its bench over the powers of the provinces versus those of the federal government.
In a dramatic show of solidarity, the Quebec justices on the Supreme Court — Clement Gascon, Richard Wagner and Louis LeBel — put their names on a dissenting opinion that upheld the right of the provinces to make laws in relation to property and civil rights.
They lost to the majority, which ruled that destroying the data was a lawful exercise of Parliament's legislative power to make criminal law under the Constitution.
The Supreme Court firmly upheld the notion that as long as the government operates within the law, it is free to enact whatever policies it deems appropriate. It was a clear signal from the court that it wanted to remain above the inevitable political fire storm that erupted after the ruling.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper happened to be at an event in Quebec on Friday, where he expressed satisfaction with the ruling.
"We have permitting — in other words, we have registration — of all gun owners in Canada already. We have registration of all handguns already. We have registration of all restricted weapons already. We already have several registers," Harper said.
"Our view —and I think it's been borne out by the facts — is that we simply don't need another very expensive and not effective registry. What we have needed are severe, strong and more effective penalties for people who commit criminal acts using guns, and that's what we've done."
Quebec Public Security Minister Lise Theriault, on the other hand, rejected the court's decision.
The united opinion of the three Quebec justices reflects the views of people in the province, and the province will proceed with its own gun registry, Theriault said.
The Liberal government created the gun registry in 1998 in response to the murder of 14 women at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. They were targeted by a gunman because of their gender.
The Harper government abolished the registry for long guns in 2011 as part of a long-standing campaign promise — a controversial political move that also emphasized Canada's rural-urban divide.
Liberal MP Stephane Dion, the party's intergovernmental affairs critic, chastised the Conservatives for not allowing Quebec to keep the data.
"From a political perspective, I would agree that it's very bad federalist to not co-operate with the province in giving the data," he said. "It would not have been difficult for the Conservative government to do so."
Wendy Cukier founded the Coalition for Gun Control after the 1989 Montreal massacre, and became the country's leading firearms registration crusader.
Standing in the vast marble foyer of the Supreme Court, Cukier said she was "terribly disappointed" that a "punitive" government policy had cleared its last legal hurdle.
"The Supreme Court has made it clear that the decision to destroy the data is a political decision," she said. "You can track a package you're sending from here to anywhere in the world, and yet we will not have information on who owns guns in the province of Quebec."
The Harper government and the Supreme Court have had their differences in the past, notably over the high court's decision to reject the government's nomination of Quebec judge Marc Nadon to its ranks.
The Supreme Court also rebuked some core government policy, saying Parliament does not have the power to reform the Senate, or prevent a Vancouver safe-injection drug site from staying open to treat addicts over the objection of the tough-on-crime Conservatives.
But in this case, the high court — notwithstanding the objections of its Quebec jurists — sided firmly with the government in its long-standing policy of wanting to kill the gun registry.
"In our view, the decision to dismantle the long-gun registry and destroy the data that it contains is a policy choice that Parliament was constitutionally entitled to make," wrote Thomas Cromwell and Andromache Karakastanis for the majority, a group that included Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.
