OTTAWA — Justice minister Allan Rock says he has no intention of backing down from vows to tighten rules governing hand gun ownership.
However, he said last week he is willing to consider pleas for special treatment by workers who say they need them, including prospectors, trappers and bank messengers.
And he will be considering a compensation package if the government decides to ban hand guns and to confiscate those already in circulation.
“The object of any such measures would not be to make life more difficult for those who have legitimate reasons connected with their occupation to carry firearms,” Rock said under questioning in the Commons May 4.
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The object would be to react to the fact that hand guns increasingly are used in murders, he said.
Since he first mused about the possibility of tougher gun control, the rookie MP and justice minister has been bombarded by complaints from the gun lobby, some rural Canadians and their MPs.
Last week, it was Swift Current-Maple Creek-Assiniboia, Sask. Reform MP Lee Morrison who raised the spectre of “Big Brother” confiscating guns without compensation. He said the value of the more than one million hand guns registered in Canada is more than $300 million.
Rock said he would take that into consideration when dealing with cabinet and the Liberal caucus on the issue.
Since the rural backlash first surfaced, he has suggested there may have to be different, more lenient rules for rural residents and farmers who may use firearms for critter control or protection.
But his conciliatory words ended when Morrison told him that as a geologist in the British Columbia mountains, he had owned a hand gun.
“I rarely carried it but as a free man, as a Canadian, I had the right to make that personal decision myself,” he said.
Rock begged to differ.
“There is no right to bear arms in this country,” he said to applause from Liberal MPs. “The ownership of firearms is a privilege which is accorded by government under certain strict circumstances.”
The United States constitution includes the right to bear arms. Canada’s Charter of Rights does not.
