The Harper government destroyed the long-gun registry last fall, but for a Toronto women’s legal clinic, the battle to reinstate it continues.

The Barbra Schilfer Clinic, which serves female victims of violence, is filing evidence in Ontario Superior Court Friday supporting its May 2012 claim that killing the registry violates women’s Charter rights to security and equality.

Legislation to eliminate the registry and prevent future collection of long-gun registration data received royal assent in April 2012.

“The safety and security of women and their equal access to justice has not been properly considered in the drafting of this law,” said the clinic’s executive director Amanda Dale.

“The point we are going to make is that women are likely going to die because of this change in law,” she added.

In their case, Dale and the clinic argue that women are more likely than men to be injured or killed as a result of domestic violence. When firearms are used, legal rifles and shot guns are usually the weapon of choice.

When the registry was in place, police responding to domestic violence calls relied on it for information about what weapons they may face. It also helped officers determine the number of guns they may need to remove. As a result, women were safer, they argue.

A spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, said the government “was proud to end the wasteful and ineffective long-gun registry,” which “did not stop a single crime or save a single life.”

“We will continue to defend our legislation against attempts to overthrow the will of Parliament and Canadians,” said Julie Carmichael in an email.

The clinic lost its bid last September to preserve the registry until its case was heard.

“Obviously it would have been good to keep the information in the registry,” said lawyer Shaun O’Brien of Cavalluzzo Hayes Shilton McIntyre & Cornish LLP, who is representing Dale and the clinic in the case.

However, Ottawa still keeps a registry for prohibited and restricted firearms that provides a framework to reinstate long-gun registration, should the case succeed, she said.

The Harper government, which was unsuccessful in its bid to quash the Schlifer clinic’s challenge last summer, has until next October to file its responding evidence. The case is scheduled to be heard in June 2014.

Among the clinic’s 100 pages of evidence is an affidavit from a Halton-area woman who benefited from the registry when police were unable to locate one of the five long-guns registered to her violent ex-husband.

With this knowledge, the woman was able to be proactive about her personal safety and move out of the marital home. Without the registry, she would not have known her ex-husband had a gun and may have put herself at risk by staying in the home, she says.

The clinic’s evidence also includes expert testimony from two university professors, a former firearms safety officer and a former head of the http://psprc-crpsp.ca/EN/Partners/Pages/CPA.aspxCanadian Police AssociationEND.

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A 2011 report on the federal firearms program showed that annual police use of the long-gun registry almost tripled under the Harper regime, which began in 2006.

The legal clinic was established in the memory of Barbra Schlifer, an Osgoode Hall law student who was sexually assaulted and murdered on the night of her call to the bar. Since the clinic opened in 1984, it has served some 44,000 women and is the only clinic in Canada that specializes in providing free legal services to women who experience violence.