Senator Vern White backs Toews on long-gun registry

POSTMEDIA NEWS

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews defended the government’s decision to end the long-gun registry on Wednesday, telling a group of skeptical senators that the end of the registry wouldn’t make the job police do any more dangerous.

Opposition Liberals on the Senate legal affairs committee questioned Toews about the details of the legislation to end the registry, Bill C-19.

He received the backing of one of the newest senators, Sen. Vern White, who said Toews was right that every police officer approaches a home as if a gun is inside — no matter what the registry may have said.

“After 31 years of police training, every home has a gun. That is the training,” said White, a former RCMP officer in Nunavut and chief of police for Ottawa. “Having worked in northern Canada for 19 years, had I waited to enter because there was a firearm in the house, I would still be outside the first house.”

The Senate is the last procedural hurdle for Bill C-19, which, once passed through the Red Chamber, will only require the signature of the Governor General to officially begin the destruction of all personal information about registered gun owners in RCMP databases.

Hearings are scheduled for Thursday when the federal ombudsman for victims of crime will be among the witnesses testifying before the Senate committee. But on Wednesday, it was Toews who, for the second time in as many months, sat before the legal affairs committee to explain government legislation.