Tuesday marked the beginning of a new chapter for Canadian public safety.
For the Conservative Party of Canada, starting a new chapter means ripping out all the previous pages and burning them.
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews proudly announced that not only will the government follow through on its promise to abolish the long gun registry, they will also destroy all the records gathered to date, just to make sure the $2 billion spent is well and truly wasted.
This is simply the latest slap in the face for Canada's police officers.
Courtesy of the tough-on-crime Tories, soon police will no longer know if there's a shotgun behind the door when called to a domestic disturbance. Police will no longer know if a distressed youth lives in a house with a rifle. Police will no longer be able to return a stolen long gun recovered from a criminal's cache.
The government brandished a Statistics Canada report that said almost 70 per cent of homicides with a firearm involved a handgun. It seems the 43 people who were killed with rifles and shotguns in 2009 are acceptable casualties as long as duck hunters don't have so much paperwork.
This destruction of data that taxpayers bought and paid for is appalling.
It is the Conservatives at their worst -- blind to evidence, deaf to professionals and motivated solely by unexamined ideology.
While they're at it, the Conservatives might as well start going back and destroying all of that mandatory-form census data gathered over the decades.
