I do not believe it was "deliberate" on the part of the CFO. They weren't expecting a tsunami of transfer requests prompted by the federal government "gun freeze."
The wait doesn't trouble me. I've waited a lot longer than 5 months for gunsmithing work to be done.
Yes, that's why I stated that it was due to minimal funding and staff that gun owners were deliberately treated poorly. The Ontario CFO office has historically always been slower to process transfers, etc., than any other province. That is due to the CFO office having insufficient staff and resources, which is a direct result of insufficient funding, which is a deliberate decision made by the (provincial) government (whether the province is just being cheap or not really caring about gun owners).
A case can be made that, especially at this time when many people have multiple transfers in the queue, the CFO staff could increase efficiency by "batch processing". If you have, for instance, 4 transfers in the queue, it would be far more efficient if the CFO pulled the other 3 ahead and processed them when your first one came up - streamline the process and approve them all at once. CFO staff generally are not doing this, and that could be considered deliberate as well. They may be content to stretch this out for job security, as once the last of the transfers are approved, they're largely out of work as long as the freeze is in place. I'm sure they'll all end up in other desk jobs (or maybe they'll all stay on to process ATTs).
And then there's the time that I called in to initiate a transfer, had all the buyer's info at hand, and the CFO staffer refused to start the transfer because I did not have the .000x numbers from the buyer's PAL. I told her that those numbers were irrelevant, as they only indicated how many times it had been renewed. She wouldn't budge. The next day, I had gotten those numbers from the buyer, called in to the CFO office, and ended up with a different staffer. I explained the situation to the staffer and that I had the .000x numbers this time, and he/she chuckled a bit and told me "yeah, you don't need those numbers to start a transfer". I suppose that could have just been incompetence on the part of the first staffer, or it could have been someone being deliberately difficult. I'll never know.
Regardless of all the above, any competent organization facing such a backlog would allocate resources to deal with it expediently, to serve the "customers" better. Sure, the wait doesn't really bother me that much either - I've got plenty of other guns to shoot in the meantime - but it does bother me that we've become so accustomed to such poor service that we now accept it.
