Vic Toews, Canada's Public Safety Minister, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, May 29, 2012. (QMI Agency/CHRIS ROUSSAKIS)

OTTAWA - Pro and anti-gun forces moseyed into the Senate corral on Thursday for a show-down over the back-door long gun registry.

Senators are examining the regulation introduced by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to close a loophole that allowed provincial chief firearms officers to force gun sellers to keep paper registries with the names, addresses and types of rifles and shot guns bought by law-abiding licenced owners.

"If the Province of Ontario wished to create a provincial long-gun registry, despite the outrageous cost of such a system, the ledgers in question, which are the property of the CFO who answers to the commissioner of the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police), who in turn answers to the minister of public safety and correctional services, could be used to provide the data on which such a system could be based," Greg Farrant, spokesman for the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, told the legal and constitutional affairs committee.

"Given the calls for such a registry by some Toronto city councillors and pressure by a variety of groups that opposed the abolition of the long-gun registry in the first place, it is not beyond the realm of reason to suggest that such an eventuality could occur.

"Remember, if you will, that the premier who has repeatedly stated that he will not create a provincial long-gun registry is the same person who pledged not to raise taxes and then did so as his first act in office," Farrant warned.

Some want gun control tightened even further in Canada so firearms can be traced around the world, saying that removing the back door registry will make tracking tougher to do.

"The UN International Tracing Instrument (ITI) was agreed by the UN General Assembly in 2005. ITI provisions emphasize record-keeping and co-operation in tracing with regard to all small arms and light weapons under each state's jurisdiction," Project Ploughshares spokesman Kenneth Epps said. "The proposed regulations will hamper Canada's ability to participate in international co-operation on firearms tracing."

The federal long gun registry was put in place by the Liberals in 1995. It was a centralized computer database that was searchable anywhere in the country. It kept the names, addresses, phone numbers, types and numbers of shotguns and rifles owned by the citizen, and assigned a registry number to each firearm.

The costs ran more than a billion dollars over budget. It was loathed in most of rural Canada where farmers and hunters and acreage owners were suddenly force to pay to register their rifles, and many reported instances where authorities would send SWAT teams to the homes, thinking they were armed and dangerous, whenever there was a disturbance in the area.

The back door registry issue cropped up shortly after the Conservatives ended the long gun registry on April 5 of this year. The Ontario chief firearms officer sent letters to gun stores, forcing them to keep records, despite the new federal law to stop the registration of shot guns and rifles.