PUBLICATION:        The Edmonton Sun 

DATE:                         2004.05.21

EDITION:                    Final 

SECTION:                  Editorial/Opinion 

PAGE:                         11 

BYLINE:                     NEIL WAUGH, EDMONTON SUN 

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ANNE'S GUN CHANGES MAKE HANCOCK ILL

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The announcement by Anne McLellan - and I should emphasize Alberta's and Edmonton's Anne McLellan - on gun control yesterday was a clear and irrefutable statement about how little she cares about the folks whom she is supposed to represent.

Her whole political purpose in life is to appease Liberals in Ontario, and Toronto specifically, who may be thinking about jumping off the Grit bandwagon in the imminent federal election. 

It was painfully clear that their Anne was wearing her deputy prime minister's cap and not her Alberta cowboy hat, when she released her so-called "comprehensive package of improvements" to the deeply flawed federal firearms legislation. When former justice minister Allan Rock introduced it and McLellan foolishly implemented it, the billion-dollar boondoggle was supposed to cost the taxpayers only a net $2 million.

But rather than making her grand gesture to inner-city Toronto voters, who are getting a little agitated about gang shoot-ups, McLellan piled on the insults by holding the big event in her Edmonton riding.

"It's an opportunity lost," sighed Alberta Justice Minister Dave Hancock, who has also been accused of coming down on the wrong side of the gun registry issue.

"It was one of the most disappointing things we could have heard from the federal government in the area of gun control."

Especially because McLellan's tinkering did nothing to correct one of the most dangerous and offensive things that an Ottawa government has ever imposed on its peaceful and law-abiding citizens.

"There are large numbers of Canadians who legitimately use long guns," Hancock pointed out. "And they ought not to be made criminals by virtue of that fact."

Certainly that's what the Alberta MLAs, including Liberals Debby Carlson and Ken Nicol, overwhelmingly signalled in a motion urging McLellan to scrap the gun registry.

"They ignored us and they ought not have," Hancock spat.

And since both Carlson and Nicol abandoned the sinking Alberta Liberal ship and are Paul Martin's candidates in the federal election, McLellan's antics present a very interesting political problem.

"This announcement cuts the legs out from under those two candidates in Alberta," Hancock concluded.

While McLellan claims that the firearms licence renewal process will be "further streamlined" (it couldn't get much slower), she also said registration and transfer fees will be eliminated.

Not to mention that the program budget will be cut from a high of $48 million two years ago to a cap of just $25 million. The math just doesn't work, Hancock pointed out.

"How do you put a cap on a program that they've showed they can't control in the first place?" he chuckled. "What do you do, just stop registering guns after you've spent $25 million?"

Or they could just fudge the books, like McLellan and the Liberals demonstrated they were quite capable of in the past, to cynically hide the enormity of their blunder.

All that stuff about cracking down on "weapons trafficking" and "tax dollars managed wisely" is aimed strictly at Ontario voters.

It is McLellan's clear intention to continue to criminalize law-abiding Albertans.

Hancock has apparently learned his lesson in the Oscar Lacombe persecution - that's when the federal prosecutor told the court she was acting as the Alberta government's "agent" in the case against the former sergeant-at-arms of the Alberta legislature.

"The registry is a federal government invention," Hancock said. "If they want to waste the resources on it, prosecutions will have to be done by them."

"They shouldn't have even bothered announcing it," he continued. "It's ill-conceived, ill-designed and ill-used."

Promising legitimate reform of the hated gun registry and then failing to deliver doesn't put McLellan and the rest of the Grit candidates in a very enviable position heading into the federal vote.