Nathalie Provost, who advocates banning guns in Canada, quit the Liberal government’s Firearms Advisory Committee (FAC) this week, then used her temper tantrum to garner national news coverage for her “plight.”
Tony Bernardo, Executive Director of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, spent almost two decades on the committee.
“We were told to check our organizational mandate at the door,” Bernardo says. “We were also told all committee deliberations were confidential. It seems Ms. Provost missed both those memos.”
Provost was shot four times by Gamil Gharbi during his 1989 murder spree at L’École Polytechnique, an engineering school in Montreal. She survived that terrible tragedy and went on to become one of the loudest voices in favour of banning guns in Canada.
When Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale appointed her co-chair of the Canadian Firearms Advisory Committee two years ago, Provost was sure she “had arrived.” She could finally push her national gun ban agenda across the finish line.
She failed to meet her objective.
An incontrovertible truth is Provost never had any desire to understand current Canadian law or the measures already in place to ensure public safety. When we and others asked Minister Goodale to make it a condition of committee membership that all members take and pass the Canadian Firearms Safety Course and the Canadian Restricted Firearms Safety Course, Provost flatly refused.
Ministerial staff said making Provost take these courses would be “too traumatic” for her.
Yet she is supposed to provide rational, reasoned advice to a Minister of the Government of Canada? You simply can’t make this stuff up.
Provost grossly misunderstood her role as a member of the Firearms Advisory Committee.
“I quickly learned the job of committee members was to provide clarity to the Minister’s deliberations, not direction,” says Bernardo. “Advancing organizational agendas was never on the table. You exist to give the Minister feedback and point out any problems and pitfalls of legislation the government might want to put forward, not dictate orders about what that legislation should include or not include.”
Provost, like a 3rd grade child, simply wanted what she wanted, no matter what. When she couldn’t get her way, she threw a hissy fit, grabbed her marbles and ran home.
Unlike those 3rd grade kids, she also cried to the press to make sure the whole world learned of her tantrum.
Unfortunately, this tantrum allows Provost to continue playing the victim instead of seeking evidence-based solutions to legitimate public safety concerns faced by Canadians.
That doesn’t help anyone.
Jack Major, a former Supreme Court justice, is no longer the chair of Goodale’s Firearms Advisory Committee either, despite the lack of a formal resignation. He used Provost’s resignation as the opportunity to pile on, claiming Goodale “didn’t really think through what the committee was supposed to do.”
The ones who didn’t think through the advisory committee’s role are Nathalie Provost and Jack Major.
On one point, however, Jack Major is correct.
The Liberal’s Firearms Advisory Committee may be useless, “but it looks pretty good on paper.”
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