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24 Const. F. 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/consfo24 and id is 1 raw text is: The Supreme Court of Canada Long-Gun Registry Decision: The Constitutional Question Behind an Intergovernmental Relations Failure Ian Peach* Introduction In 2012, Parliament repealed the federal law that had established a mandatory long-gun registry. The law to repeal the long-gun registry also pro- vided for the destruction of the data contained therein. Quebec, however, expressed its inten- tion to establish its own gun-control scheme and asked the federal government for its data on long-guns owned by residents of Quebec.' When the federal government refused to turn over the data from the long-gun registry, despite the fact that Quebec government officials had access to the data while the long-gun registry was in oper- ation, Quebec challenged the constitutionality of the federal law providing for the destruction of the data and sought an order requiring the fed- eral government to turn over the data to Quebec. The federal government's refusal to participate in an act of intergovernmental cooperation began a three-year round of constitutional litigation that concluded in March of 2015 with a split decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. At first, the decision of the majority of the Supreme Court of Canada would seem to be fairly straightforward; a government that has the constitutional jurisdiction to enact a law should, naturally, have the jurisdiction to repeal that law. Further, given that data on Canadians was gath- ered under that law as part of its administration, a government ought to be able to dispose of the data it has gathered as it deems appropriate. The dissenting judgment, though, complicates the constitutional question of whether the federal government had the jurisdiction to destroy the data, rather than turn it over to the Quebec gov- ernment. The issue is not so straightforward. The judicial history of the challenge In 2012, the Quebec Superior Court decided that the Canadian Firearms Registry (CFR) was the result of an exercise in cooperative federal- ism between the different orders of government and that, in pith and substance the purpose of destroying the data in the long-gun registry was to prevent provincial governments from exer- cising their jurisdiction when using the prod- ucts of this partnership for their own purposes.3 Having determined that cooperative federalism was a principle of Canadian constitutional law, the Superior Court determined that the federal government's action in destroying the data in the long-gun registry was a violation of the principle and therefore ultra vires the federal government's jurisdiction over criminal law.4 The Quebec Court of Appeal, however, reversed the decision of the Quebec Superior Court, concluding that Parliament has the jurisdiction to destroy the data in the CFR, as a consequence of it having Constitutional Forum constitutionnel

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