On bad investments

Throughout the campaign and indeed into this week, the Cons claimed that one of the major problems with the gun registry was its cost, and that by "doing away with the registry" and diverting the money elsewhere, it would be possible to fund other law-enforcement priorities.

Now CTV reports on the actual Con plan - and the grand strategy appears to be to make the existing registry even less cost-effective:

The Conservative government plans to gut the gun registry by granting an amnesty to rifle and shotgun owners, CTV News had learned.

As a result, the registry would only apply to handguns and automatic weapons.

The government is also expected to waive a $60 fee that more than 1.5 million Canadians must pay this year to renew their firearms registrations.

To sum up what the plan appears to entail: the same registry will still exist in substantially the same form - except that it will hold less data than expected (and indeed lose the data on long guns that police want to see kept), and it will bring in $90 million less in processing fees than it would have otherwise.

Needless to say, there's no reason at all to think the result will be any less cost to the Canadian taxpayer - and it's clear that Canadians will get less for their investment in the registry. And if promoting such inefficiency is the top priority for the newly-elected Cons, one shudders to think of how much more waste is in store.