Quebec’s long-planned long-gun registry will finally come into effect on Monday, announced Public Safety Minister Martin Coiteux on Sunday.

Gun owners will have one year to register their arms at a new website (siaf.gouv.qc.ca). Coiteux said there would be a push to publicize the registry, including an ad campaign and dedicated information phone line.

“At the beginning, it’s a question of informing (gun owners) about their duties and giving them time to do so,” he said. “After a year, the enforcement will be strict… Any new transaction will have to be registered immediately.”

While the registry goes into effect exactly one year after a shooting in a Quebec City mosque left six people dead, Coiteux said there was no link.

“We always said it would come into force by January, 2018. We said that before the Quebec shooting,” he said. “We always said we had to be ready, that all the tests had been conducted and all the due diligence had been made, and we’re ready.”

Coiteux touted the registry as a means to crack down on domestic and gun violence, as well as suicide, within the province.

“Police services do not necessarily know if you own an arm if it’s not registered, they don’t know how many you have, they don’t know what kind, where it’s held normally. All that information will be in the Quebec registry,” he said. “When the courts put restrictions on arms owners, it’s an additional tool for the police to make sure those orders have been observed.”

Gun control activist Heidi Rathjen, one of the survivors of the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique shooting that left 10 women dead, called the registry “great news.”

“This is a measure we’ve been fighting for since the tragedy at Ecole Polytechnique over 28 years ago,” she said. “We’ve seen the effectiveness of registration at the federal level over the dozens of years the law was in effect in Canada. Gun related deaths, whether they be suicides, accidents or homicides plummeted to record low levels.”

The registry was first announced after the abolishment of the federal database in 2012. In October, a Quebec judge upheld the constitutionality of the registry after a legal challenge from a pro-gun lobby group sought to block it on the grounds that it infringed on federal jurisdiction.