The federal government has the right to destroy data collected on long-gun owners in Quebec, the Supreme Court has ruled.
In a split 5-4 decision, the top court found the government's law requiring the destruction of gun certificate information is lawful under the Constitution, and the province of Quebec has no right to the data.
The decision marks a victory for the Conservative government on a key hot-button issue on which it has campaigned for years.
The judges went out of their way to say it was not ruling on the policy merits of a long-gun registry or its destruction, only on the legality of the government's latest law.
The majority wrote, "to some Parliament's choice to destroy this data will undermine public safety and waste enormous amounts of public money" but "to others it will seem to be the dismantling of an ill-advised regime and the overdue restoration of the privacy rights of law-abiding gun owners. But these competing views about the merits of Parliament's policy choice are not at issue here."
Quebec had argued the database was a joint effort by both federal and provincial authorities, and therefore Quebec had the right to the information in the spirit "cooperative federalism," a legal concept that ensures flexibility in the separation of powers.
But the majority opinion written by Justices Thomas Cromwell and Andromache Karakatsanis found that principle was not applicable, and the constitutional division of powers authorizes Ottawa to take unilateral action in matters of criminal law.
In a dissenting opinion, Justices Louis LeBel, Richard Wagner, and Clement Gascon wrote that the federal decision to destroy the data was intended to harm the other level of government, namely the province of Quebec.
The ruling applies to the certificate system for long-gun owners in Quebec, which was created by the then-Liberal government in 1998. The Quebec records comprise certificate information for some 500,000 gun owners in that province. All other certificate data on gun owners in the other provinces and territories was destroyed when the Conservative government dismantled the registry three years ago.
The Supreme Court ruled Friday on Quebec's right to preserve and use the federal long-gun registry data it helped collect. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)
The provinces still control information on gun licences.
Quebec won its case to obtain the data in Quebec Superior Court in 2012, but that decision was overturned by the Quebec Court of Appeal in 2013.
Today's ruling is expected to anger gun-control advocates and please rural long-gun owners.
The long-gun registry was created partly in response to the mass shootings of female engineering students at Montreal's École Polytechnique in 1989.
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