| NOTE:
Linda Williamson's column was also published in the Ottawa Sun
and Calgary Sun.
PUBLICATION: The Toronto
Sun -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IT BORDERS ON INSANITY
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have a question for all those politicians and other do-gooders who lament that more than half the guns used in crime in this country have been smuggled in from the U.S. If they're being smuggled across our border, past our customs officers and into our cities, doesn't that make it our problem? So why was Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty (among others) so keen to pressure U.S. ambassador David Wilkins last week about the proliferation of guns on Canadian streets? As the plain-talking South Carolinian told reporters in Banff, "I've heard more than one Canadian official say it's mostly Canadians bringing the guns across." Well, sho'nuff. And it's Canadian youths who are shooting Canadians on Canadian streets. What the heck is the U.S. ambassador supposed to do about that? "Dalton, get a grip!" That was Sen. Colin Kenny's reaction last week when I asked him if the premier's effort would do much for our safety and security. Kenny knows whereof he speaks. Not only is he well-versed in the failings of our border security after spending the past three years researching it as head of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence -- he's also a Liberal, a Torontonian and a gun owner (a rare combination). "The problem does not appear to be U.S. entrepreneurs coming up to Canada," Kenny says, citing a case his committee heard involving a Scarborough gang. "When they ran out of gangs, they sent three vehicles to the U.S. and brought some back." It's just "dumb" to say this is an American problem, he adds. The real problem, says Kenny, is a basic one for our border staff: Lack of resources, intelligence and, well, firepower. As his committee's latest report outlined just a few weeks ago, our border guards are woefully understaffed and underequipped, and in many cases function more as glorified tax collectors than as front-line security, which is what we need them to be. Incredibly, at 62 border points, their computers aren't even hooked up to a government mainframe, so if a carload of gangsters with long criminal records comes through (never mind suspected terrorists), the officers would never know, because they can't properly screen them. They aren't armed, either, which obviously puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to stopping suspected gun traffickers. That's not to say they don't catch bad guys -- they do. We've all heard the statistic that they stopped 5,446 firearms coming in from the U.S. from 2000-2004. Impressive, although it begs the question of how many thousands more got through. (What's more, Kenny notes, a number of guns are surrendered voluntarily by Americans who arrive at our border unaware of the rules.) Aside from beefing up security (which Wilkins and McGuinty did pledge to work on, in the vaguest of terms), Kenny says we also need to start doing "outbound" inspections; i.e., making people check in with customs when they leave the country as well. He notes the U.S. is already planning to do just that, "so we're halfway there." Canada needs to catch up. Usually when we talk about border security, it's with visions of an Ahmed Ressam, al-Qaeda's would-be "millennium bomber" from Quebec, headed across the line with a trunkful of explosives. But terrorism and the kind of crime now terrorizing Toronto are part of the same continuum, as is the vigilance required to stop it. The bad guys bringing handguns back from the U.S. are far more common than al-Qaeda, and their victims wind up equally dead (in Toronto alone this year, shooting victims already outnumber the Canadians killed on 9/11). Of course both countries need to discuss what makes it so easy to get a lethal weapon and -- more importantly -- what makes using it so attractive. But first things first. Let's get the guns. |