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.)<\/p>\n
Watching the fallout, <\/a>National Post columnist John Ivison quoted an unnamed senior Conservative thusly: \u201cWe do pick small hills to die on sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n (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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/p>\n In this Montreal Gazette article<\/a>, pollster Darrell Bricker calls the loss a win for conservative election hopes:<\/p>\n …the Tories are now better positioned to tell voters in rural Canada that they are the only party that gives voice to their concerns.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The debate leading up to the vote has been loud and heated. It even included charges of media bias<\/a>, over CBC’s reporting the National Rifle Association was <\/a>trying to influence the outcome<\/a>, a charge Conservatives deny<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> thanks to preselected positions.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But where, oh where, is the famed Canadian ability to compromise?<\/p>\n On this issue, at present, it is strangely – or intentionally – absent.<\/p>\n