Did the Mounties defy Parliament and keep gun registry data intact even after being ordered, by law, to delete it in 2012? And did Deputy Commissioner Peter Henschel subsequently lie to a Parliamentary committee in June of 2015 by claiming registry data had been erased when, in fact, it hadn’t?

I don’t think the RCMP broke the law or that Henschel outright lied. But – how to say this? – neither was fully forthcoming with the truth.

If the force and the deputy commissioner did not violate the letter of the Ending the Long-gun Registry Act, they at least played fast-and-loose with the law’s spirit.

Why is this still an issue? Because the Trudeau government intends to pass a law before Parliament’s summer recess giving Quebec a copy of the remaining data on gun owners so that province can establish its own provincial long-gun registry.

If the RCMP had wiped clean all the registry records when it was supposed to (2012 for most of Canada, 2015 for the Quebec records), there would no longer be anything to give the Quebec government.

Still, why should this matter to anyone outside Quebec? Because it would seem one of the items the RCMP did wipe from their computers was gun owners’ locations. So it is not at all clear that what the Liberals are going to hand over to Quebec is info on Quebec gun owners only.

What is on the hard drive the Liberals intend to give the Quebec government may well include names and other records for gun owners outside Quebec, too.

To some extent, the Mounties were the ribbon dangling from the rope in between the pro- and anti- sides of the gun registry tug-o-war. The Tory government of Stephen Harper was keen to kill the registry and expunge all its records. Meanwhile, gun-control activists and federal Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault were equally determined to maintain all the records, if not the registry itself.

(Frankly, to my mind, the records and the registry are synonymous. If you preserve the records, you preserve the registry. But that is a debate for another day.)

The Mounties were, in a way, stuck in the middle of these opposing forces. And I feel sorry for them for being pressured to walk on a knife’s edge, if not for one thing – the High River, Alberta gun grab in 2013.

Following devastating spring floods in that southern Alberta community in June 2013, Mounties kicked in hundreds of doors – without warrants – searching high and low for guns. They insisted they were looking only for survivors and only took guns that were in plain sight. But it was clear they rummaged through underwear drawers and refrigerators, in locked safes and behind furnaces – places that were far too small to be harbouring flood victims.

In many cases, Mounties went directly to homes of registered gun owners, looked only for listed guns, then returned to headquarters. If they had, as ordered, destroyed all the registry data in October 2012, how could they identify owners in June 2013 unless they’d made copies or squirreled away data on other computers.

In his testimony before the Commons Finance committee two years ago, Deputy Commissioner Henschel did explain there were 27 fields of information on gun owners stored in police computers and the RCMP determined only 15 were related to the registry.

This is no doubt technically true, but much of the data in the other 12 fields was only on government databases because the registry had collected it in the first place.

It seems many senior Mounties opposed the end of the registry and did as much as they could to keep its record alive.