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A special report tabled in Parliament on Thursday reveals Legault recommended almost two months ago that charges be laid against the RCMP for its role in withholding and destroying gun registry data.

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Federal information commissioner Suzanne Legault had recommended two months ago that charges be laid against the RCMP for destroying records from the federal long-gun registry, in defiance of the access to information laws. Instead, the government introduced legislation to make the practice legal, backdated it to absolve the RCMP of any culpability, and slipped it into a mammoth budget implementation bill, in hopes that it might pass unnoticed. Legault accused the government of setting a “perilous precedent,” and rightly so — what other illegal acts could be retroactively excused in this way?

This is sadly all too typical of the way the Harper government treats Parliament and the public. Rather than confront and debate sensitive matters, it prefers to operate through stealth and subterfuge, employing artifice and deception in place of honesty and transparency.

The government’s dislike of the gun registry is no secret. It vowed to close it down, and eventually did so. It also insisted its records be destroyed, for privacy reasons and to prevent them being used in attempts to revive the registry. In a digital age, however, information often remains long after it has supposedly been purged. Legault says the RCMP destroyed the records that were being sought under the access laws, before the legislation closing the gun registry had taken effect (and despite the government’s solemn promise to hold off until then).