If Stephen Harper had his way - which he will when the Conservatives kill Canada's long-gun registry next week - Saanich Police wouldn't have been able to solve their big weapons case so quickly.

Seems odd then that just as police were showing off the 159 guns seized from a Saanich home, Green party leader Elizabeth May was rising in the House of Commons this week to fight a desperate rearguard action to save the registry.

Alas for Saanich-Gulf Islands MP May and the police who see the registry as a public safety issue, the data bank is about to be collapsed, its gun-ownership records shredded.

But it's not as though putting a bullet in the gun registry is an HST-type surprise sprung upon an unsuspecting public.

Getting rid of it was a Conservative election promise, a popular one at that.

Heaven knows the registry, brought to you by the same Liberal government that somehow managed to even turn the sale of medical marijuana into a money-losing proposition, offered a big, fat political target.

It was supposed to cost a mere $1 million when introduced 17 years ago, but ballooned into a $2 billion boondoggle, with critics complaining about ordinary hunters and ranchers being snagged in a bureaucratic net that was meant to catch trigger-happy Toronto gang bangers.

May herself isn't a big fan. "I've got a lot of constituents who are gun users and they hate the registry," she said Wednesday from Ottawa. Farmers and sport shooters feel the law treats them like criminals.

But rather than ditching the system altogether, it should be tweaked to meet the needs of both police and ordinary gun owners, May says. The $2 billion has already been poured down the toilet; the registry now costs a relatively inexpensive $4 million a year. It's crazy to shred the gun-ownership records now that we have already overpaid for them.

Makes you wonder if the Conservatives' opposition is rooted less in a desire to eliminate waste than in libertarian ideology, as reflected in the tenor of this week's Commons debate.

May detected a certain Charlton Hestonesque National Rifle Association flavour to the proceedings, with one confused Conservative even invoking Canada's non-existent constitutional right to bear arms.

The hyperbole peaked Tuesday with another Conservative MP, Larry Miller, comparing the Liberals' "social re-engineering of Canadians" to the beliefs of Adolf Hitler - a breach of politics' unwritten nevercompareanyonetotheNazis rule for which he later apologized (though, with the precedent now set, May might feel free to drag in Göring or Himmler when debating, say, the Heritage Lighthouses Preservation Act).

Dialling down the rhetoric, it's worth noting how the long-gun registry works in real life.

When Saanich Police seized 159 firearms when they searched the home of a local man last week, they were able to compare the guns registered in his name against those they actually found.

The registry also allowed police to quickly match the seized weapons with their registered owners.

Police like the registry for other reasons, too. When dispatchers send officers wading into a volatile domestic dispute, one of the first things they do is check the registry to see if there's a gun attached to the address.

May raised the Saanich example in the House of Commons on Wednesday. She was backed up by Randall Garrison, the New Democrat MP from the neighbouring EsquimaltJuan de Fuca riding, who told the House: "What she has to say certainly confirms my experience . . . as a police board member and then as a city councillor, where I very often heard from police forces that they used the gun registry for very good effect."

No matter. The final vote on the long-gun registry might not happen until next Wednesday, but this debate was over years ago.

The Conservatives don't want to hear that the police find the registry useful. It is the very symbol of everything they despise about Liberal, big-city, big-government Canada, and they promised to dump it, not fix it.

jknox@timescolonist.com