The cloudy weather system that has descended over Ottawa shows no signs of clearing up during the next fortnight with the transition of power from Jean Chrétien to Paul Martin.

Parliament's procedural winds have toppled the influential pre-budget consultation report from the House of Commons Finance Committee. Usually released in early December and widely seen as a window on the following spring's budget, due to the prorogation of Parliament on November 12th, this report will not be produced this year.

This was recently confirmed in a November 18th letter from Finance Committee Chairwoman and backbench Liberal MP Sue Barnes. It was sent to the 560 individuals and organizations that met with the Finance Committee during its spring and fall pre-budget consultations in Ottawa and during the committee's hearings held across the country.

Translation: Hey folks thanks for meeting with us, traveling to see us and devoting countless hours and no doubt thousands of your precious dollars to tell us what is important in terms of budget priorities for Budget 2004. But hey, that Chrétien guy is retiring and we government members of the committee are too busy jockeying to curry some favour with Paul Martin and maybe get into his Cabinet complete with the chauffeur and driver and fatter paycheque, so, thanks for coming out.

At the very least, Ms. Barnes could have prepared an executive summary - say a couple of pages - to highlight the consensus and divergent recommendation themes presented to her committee. And opposition members of this committee should have demanded as much and screamed for it from the rooftops.

Oh sure, the reports are on the parliamentary website if somebody really wants to see them, but the symbolism of this snub of the committee process on the eve of Paul Martin's ascendancy to the Prime Minister's Office is galling. Nothing like furthering the democratic deficit and neutering Parliament just before the so-called slayer of the democratic deficit assumes power. In one sense, the pre-budget consultations were an exercise in futility.

So while groups from across the political spectrum and from industry and other sectors of society representing millions of Canadians were muted in this pre-budget procedural snafu, on another front the profligate waste of our precious tax dollars continues uninterrupted.

New numbers produced in Ottawa this week show that the federal gun registry will likely reach its billion dollar cost target by 2004, one full year earlier than suggested by the Auditor General. Back in 1995 we were told that the registry spawned by Bill C-68 would cost just under $120 million and would net out to a mere $2 million once fee collections were factored in. In actual fact, the gun registry will be 430 times over budget when it tops the $1 billion mark next year.

Even though the Chief of Police in Canada's largest city has denounced this registry and most observers agree that it would have been better to put this money into front-line policing and stiffening federal legislation, the gun registry is now about political face saving as opposed to saving lives. The government's stubborn refusal to pull the plug on this failed registry is beyond comprehension.

CTF figures released last year that the cost of the gun registry will jump to $2 billion by 2012. However, these new estimates mean that this $2 billion waste target will be eclipsed by 2010. FYI, $1 billion could have been used to devote $1.8 million dollars to solving every homicide that occurred in Canada in 2002. The gun registry is an exercise in futility, a very costly exercise indeed.