PUBLICATION:            WINNIPEG FREE PRESS 

DATE :                        THU JUL.10,2003 

PAGE :                        A10 

CLASS :                      Focus 

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EDITORIAL - Inuit firearms

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Editorial Staff

Canadians opposed to the federal government's gun control registry have had little success in fighting it through the courts but this week Canada's Inuit people succeeded where other Canadians have failed. A group arguing that the gun registry violates the rights of the Inuit under pending land claims won not just one, but two victories in court.

In a ruling delivered on Tuesday, Justice Robert Kirkpatrick of the Nunavut Court of Justice rejected an appeal by the federal government of an earlier injunction forbidding Ottawa from requiring Inuit to register their guns pending the result of a court challenge; Justice Kirkpatrick also rejected Ottawa's demand that the Inuit's case be thrown out of court entirely.

The Inuit base their case on two arguments: First that their land claim exempts them from the provisions of the gun registry; and second that Ottawa's incompetence in administering the law made it almost impossible for Inuit gun owners to comply with legislation even with the best of intentions.

Although this ruling may attract the interest of other native groups in Canada, it does not offer much hope for gun owners in general. Even as the case was going through the courts in Nunavut, gun registry bureaucrats in Ottawa were warning Canadian farmers, hunters and collectors with unregistered guns to act quickly to comply with the law or face heavy fines and long prison sentences. 

To see the federal government embarrassed yet again over the gun registry may be cold comfort to these people, but it is the only comfort they are likely to get in the short term. In the longer term, there is some solace in the thought that the constitutionality of a law is only as valid as the sympathy it attracts from the justices of the Supreme Court, and over time those justices do change. In the meantime, we are left with a law that is punitive out of all proportion, has been expensive and ineffective and, as the Nunavut ruling makes obvious, does not now apply equally to all Canadians. If there were a better recipe for bringing law into disrepute, it is hard to imagine what it might be.