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Times Colonist (Victoria) DATE: 2006.05.18 EDITION: Final SECTION: Comment PAGE: A15 BYLINE: Lawrie McFarlane SOURCE: Special to Times Colonist WORD COUNT: 603 ILLUSTRATION: Photo: Canadian Press / Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day walks past a television set showing some of the points of the new gun registry following a news conference in Ottawa Wednesday. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gun registry poll mixes fact, fiction -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With small variations, the following headline ran in virtually every major news outlet this week: "New poll shows Canadians don't want gun registry scrapped." Readers who ventured further down the page could be forgiven for assuming a road-to-Damascus conversion had taken place in public attitudes. "Prime Minister Stephen Harper will have a tough time convincing Canadians it's time to completely scrap the country's gun registry program," intoned the National Post. Indeed, if the newspaper is to be believed, "In Alberta, 51 per cent of the people surveyed indicated the government should keep a registry system in place (while) in Ontario and Quebec 71 per cent and 76 per cent of respondents respectively said they were in favour of maintaining a gun-control system." The Ottawa Citizen went even further: "A majority of people in Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are now in favour of more gun control" (emphasis added). Truly an astonishing turnabout. Or at least it would be, if the story were true. It isn't. Here's how the polling firm summarized its findings: "A new Ipsos Reid survey ... reports that most Canadians (54 per cent) feel the gun registry is badly organized, isn't working properly, and should be scrapped -- a level of opinion essentially unchanged from what was recorded nearly four years ago." That's not a typo: What the poll actually found was that a majority of Canadians want the registry scrapped. As in finito, pushing up the daisies, dead. So why did our media tell us the exact opposite? I have to confess a vested interest: I'm a gun owner, I like to hunt. But when I read what Ipsos Reid actually found, then compared it to the media version, I felt like the guy in that Monty Python skit who's been sold a dead parrot. A further disclosure: I haven't seen the innards of the questionnaire -- it's proprietary material owned by the media firms who published (and some might say confected) this story. But anyone familiar with "push polls" knows what happened. When people were asked if the gun registry should stay or go, they gave a clear answer. Scrap it. That much we know, and that should have been the headline. But apparently the pollsters then moved from fact to fantasy. After respondents voted to nix the program, they were asked if they could live with some hypothetical, modified alternative. And being obliging souls, most Canadians allowed that sure, they could put up with that. If this counts as support for "more gun control," let it be noted there's no scheme so clueless or mischievous that "support" couldn't be generated in a similar manner. It's like when your neighbour comes to the door with a petition claiming Elvis is being held by aliens from the planet Zongo and demanding his release. You sign and go back about your business. And that's exactly what the gun-registry poll allowed people to do. It offered a consequence-free vote for an unspecified notion, after respondents had safely killed off the real program. It also afforded that most tantalizing of opportunities -- the chance to regulate someone else's life. Most Canadians don't hunt, so it's no skin off their nose if some daft bureaucrat wants to harass gun owners. It's the converse of the so-called NIMBY phenomenon -- not in my back yard. Here, it's SLAITBY -- so long as it's their back yard. Whether this manufactured uproar played a part in Harper's decision, announced yesterday, to phase down the gun registry rather than killing it outright, is unclear. I'd be very surprised, though, if the prime minister will have a "tough time" convincing voters to scrap it when the time comes. The only reason this parrot is still sitting on its perch is because it's been nailed there. Lawrie McFarlane is a retired civil servant. He writes on public policy. ----------------------------------------------- TEN YEARS OF GUN REGISTRY
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