Long time coming

The last day you had to register your guns (Dec 31-2003 I think?) a friend submitted a registration online for a .22 rifle. He waited and waited, and just sort of forgot about it for a bit, since the rifle was sitting in a gun safe locked up in my closet and he wasn't shooting anymore... He kept a copy of the confirmation that the registration had been completed.

After a year or so buddy starts to get a little worried about the whole thing. He's got this rifle sitting around, and hadn't heard anything from the CFC. Tried calling them a few times, but was never able to get through. Sent an email, which was never heard back on either. At this point he was debating the wisdom of following up on this thing too aggressively. He was getting pretty nervous so he destroyed the gun. He was going to toss the whole thing when it was chopped up but decided to keep the cut up receiver with the serial number on it, just in case.

Friend gets back into shooting, registered a few guns and what arrives in the mail one day but a registration certificate for the .22... 4 years and 11 months after originally submitted the registration form online. Now that's government efficiency. So now he's got a little piece of metal with a serial # sitting in a box in the safe with a registration form attached to it, and a lot of questions about why, if the CFC had this gun sitting in their records for all this time, they'd never tried to track him down, or you know, call or anything. This is proof to me that the registry... Sort of works? I guess? Eventually sometimes? Personally if I spent billions on something I'd expect better. Must be nice to work for the government.
-- themarauder (CGN)

The federal law is not applied equally province to province, and artificial holds are applied as penalties by the whims of various provincial CFOs for no good reason. DISCRETIONALY POWER gives CFOs the ability to play God.
e.g. AR15 registrations take 3 to 6 months in Quebec, as opposed to 2-3 days elsewhere in Canada.
(an irrelevant licencing example: A request to change to "Collectors Status" has been going on for 8 MONTHS now, as opposed to a week max in other provinces.)