The theory behind gun registration is to make Canadians safer by helping police keep closer track of the millions of guns in people's homes. It is anyone's guess whether we will wind up safer, but, as Auditor-General Sheila Fraser reported yesterday, we are sure to wind up poorer.

In paragraph after paragraph, she details the mismanagement and incorrect assumptions that fuelled the meteoric rise in the cost of the Canadian Firearms Centre's gun registry. In 1994, the Justice Department estimated the cost of licensing people to own guns and then registering each gun at $2-million -- the difference between $119-million in expenses and $117-million in projected fees paid by gun owners. By 2001-02, the department had spent $688-million and collected only $59-million in net revenues. Latest word is the program will cost more than $1-billion by 2004-05, to be reduced by only $140-million in fees.

Ms. Fraser's chief concern is that the Justice Department hid the cost overruns from Parliament, but she notes that the "astronomical" overruns are serious in themselves. Indeed they are. Her findings vindicate those critics who predicted from the start that the official cost forecasts were unrealistically low. The Fraser Institute, for one, predicted in 1995 that the registry would cost $1-billion once enforcement and operational costs were factored in.

Why the cost explosion? You name it. The department delayed proclamation of the law for three years because the regulations were so complicated. Several provinces refused to co-operate. Alberta, backed by a few others, challenged the constitutionality of the registry. (They lost their case, in Alberta and in the Supreme Court of Canada.) Instead of keeping its promise to concentrate on high-risk cases, the Justice Department focused on "excessive regulation and enforcement of controls over all owners and their firearms."

So few people had applied by 1999 that the department feared a last-minute rush that would take years to process; so it reduced or waived fees to encourage early filings, forfeiting millions of dollars. The government couldn't even be certain how many gun owners there were, and therefore what the compliance rate was. The original estimate of 3.3 million was scaled back to 2.5 million.

Oh, and the department couldn't handle its computer system. It has hired an outside contractor who proposes to replace the system's software "with existing private-sector approaches." (Omi- nous line: "The eventual cost of the solution is still to be determined by the Department.") But outsourcing raises privacy concerns of the sort voiced seven years ago by opponents who didn't want all sorts of people knowing which guns they did or didn't have at home.

The Justice Department has told the Auditor-General it will do better, but adds: "It is worth noting that under the new program, 50 times more licence revocations from potentially dangerous individuals have occurred as compared to the last five years of the old program."

That sounds encouraging until one reads the RCMP's own 2001 assessment of the information used to deny licences to unfit gun owners. Some of the people are on the list by mistake and may wrongly be denied a licence. And "some persons who should be in the database are not, and these individuals could be issued licences and subsequently use firearms to commit a violent offence."

The system could survive being expensive if it could be shown to be effective. There are anywhere from seven million firearms (the official estimate) to between 20 million and 25 million firearms (the National Firearms Association's number) in Canada. Criminals aren't about to register their guns, but a top-notch registry could help police keep tabs on all the other guns in Canada. Those are the ones owned by heretofore law-abiding citizens: the firearms that spouses use against spouses, that children fatally play with, that suicides use and that thieves steal for use or resale.

But if even that purpose is being thwarted -- see the RCMP's self-assessment -- the country is spending a fortune on a burgeoning bureaucracy to little practical effect. Now that the Auditor-General has listed the failures on the cost-accounting side, will someone in government offer a clear, honest picture -- beyond lofty platitudes -- of how effective or ineffective the registry is proving to be at the very job it was designed for: making this country safer?