PUBLICATION: GLOBE AND MAIL
DATE:
FRI MAY.21,2004
PAGE:
A4
BYLINE:
JOHN IBBITSON
CLASS:
Column
EDITION:
Metro DATELINE:
WORDS:
668
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Liberals
might have been better off letting this dog lie
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The
Liberals' late, lame efforts to fix the gun registry have infuriated some
members of the party's caucus, none more than Sarnia-Lambton MP Roger Gallaway.
"This is beyond disingenuous. This is deceitful in the worst way," he
fumed yesterday. "And it's all driven by a bunch of zealots." This
can't be the reaction election HQ had been banking on. Anne McLellan, the
Minister of Public Safety (they really need to change that Robespierrian name),
has revealed the government's latest effort to make the gun registry disappear
as an election issue.
The
plan is so timid and contradictory, you have to wonder if the Liberals wouldn't
have been better off -- far better off -- letting this snarling dog lie.
The
proposals, based on four months of consultations by Minister of Civil
Preparedness Albina Guarnieri, try to plug the holes in Ottawa's gun-control
policy in the worst possible way. Claiming that 90 per cent of gun owners have
registered their weapons, the government now plans to woo the remainder by
eliminating registration fees, thus rewarding people for breaking the law and
punishing those who complied.
Hoping
to lower costs to $25-million annually, the government promises, among other
things, to enhance telephone answering services. Message to government:
Improving answering services is expensive; that's why we're always on hold. This
is the kind of thinking that took the gun registry's cost from $2-million to
$1-billion.
Most
of the so-called initiatives are larded with such fatal phrases as
"providing ongoing funding," or "continuing to consult." For
all such mendacities, substitute the words: "doing nothing new."
That,
apparently, was the whole point of the exercise: to do nothing while promising
to do something. The Paul Martin Liberals felt they had to take action on Jean
Chretien's gun registry, which had become so expensive, intrusive and
ineffectual that MPs from rural ridings feared their seats were in jeopardy.
Ms.
McLellan, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, was particularly vulnerable, since
she had once overseen the program as minister of justice, and since her grasp on
her Edmonton riding is always tenuous at best.
But
many urban, leftish and often female MPs inside caucus -- the
"zealots" Mr. Gallaway referred to -- fiercely support the registry,
and see it as a crucial part of the government's gun-control program. So the
challenge was to rein in the program without scrapping it entirely.
It
failed that challenge by concocting a series of cosmetic changes that fooled and
satisfied no one. Worse, by slipping this new program in without allowing
Parliament to vote freely on whether funding for the registry should continue,
the Liberals deepened the democratic deficit that Paul Martin had promised to
eliminate.
Mr.
Gallaway, who is parliamentary secretary for democratic reform, is particularly
incensed that caucus has been kept from expressing its will through a
parliamentary vote. He believes that a large minority, "or perhaps even a
majority," of Liberal MPs would have opposed funding the registry. Along
with support from the Conservatives, he is certain it would have died.
Instead,
the government is offering up these half-baked measures, which simply served to
remind voters who might have forgotten about the mess. "For some of the
rural members, it would have been better to just let it be," Mr. Gallaway
believes.
Pundits,
including this one, predicted in both 1997 and 2000 that the Liberals would lose
rural seats in Ontario, citing the gun registry as a defining issue. We were
wrong; rural voters electorally have more in common with their urban
counterparts than many observers suspect.
This
time out, however, the gun registry comes wrapped up in a bundle of issues --
including Liberal support for same-sex marriage and decriminalizing marijuana
possession -- that could test the tolerance of voters in that central Ontario
belt from Lake Huron to the Ottawa River. If they go, they'll take the Liberal
hopes for a majority government with them.