Vote may not settle Canada’s gun debate
Canada’s hot-button crisis this past summer was a big fuss about making the long-form census voluntary. (And hence useless, according to those who favored keeping it mandatory.)
Watching the fallout, National Post columnist John Ivison quoted an unnamed senior Conservative thusly: “We do pick small hills to die on sometimes.”
Well, the size of any issue depends on one’s point of view, but the latest ‘hill battle’ came Wednesday when Canada’s controversial long gun registry survived a close vote that would have scraped the program.
(And here it would be useful to direct readers to an unbiased, up-to-date site that explains the registry, but I’m afraid I can’t find one. The best I can offer at the moment is this Wikipedia entry.)
Late Wednesday afternoon, the private member’s bill to end the registry was defeated by a vote of 153 to 151. With Liberals and the Bloc voting against the Conservatives, the balance of power lay with the New Democratic Party.
That created a grand pre-vote quandary for party leader Jack Layton. His support for the registry had to be balanced against his own party’s long-standing tradition that MPs may vote as they see fit on private member bills. In the end, 6 NDP voted with the Conservatives, which was not enough for Harper’s side to prevail.
A victory for gun control supporters? Maybe. More likely Harper now has a galvanizing issue he’ll use, seeking an elusive majority in the next election
In this Montreal Gazette article, pollster Darrell Bricker calls the loss a win for conservative election hopes:
…the Tories are now better positioned to tell voters in rural Canada that they are the only party that gives voice to their concerns.
“The gun registry isn’t really just about guns. It’s about what the Canadian way of life is. It’s really about the old Canada versus the new Canada . . . the new Canada being very multicultural, very urban people who wouldn’t be into hunting.”
The debate leading up to the vote has been loud and heated. It even included charges of media bias, over CBC’s reporting the National Rifle Association was trying to influence the outcome, a charge Conservatives deny.
And it’s quite a challenge to even get simple facts straight: how much does the darned thing cost? Has it saved lives? Columnist Dan Gardner suggests that this is one of those issues where facts are pesky, and possibly irrelevant thanks to preselected positions.
One distressing aspect of the controversy is the increasingly partisan acrimony. It’s true urban dwellers and their rural counterparts have a hard time agreeing on the role of guns. And it’s also a sad truth that civility is an increasingly rare quality on Parliament Hill.
But where, oh where, is the famed Canadian ability to compromise?
On this issue, at present, it is strangely – or intentionally – absent.
There was a time when I thought I might live in Canada, mainly because I like the cold and the wilderness.
But over the years Canada has a really wimpy, goody-two-shoes place.
“a really wimpy, goody-two-shoes place” As opposed to what? A really macho, bad boy place?