Western Producer staff
It’s amazing, when you are in a position of influence, how your words can be given a sheen of legitimacy, taken at face value and then spread about the country.
It’s equally amazing, in politics, how an extreme view, stated without the usual political polishing, can harm the cause you are trying to help.
Take the recent case of British Columbia Reform MP Mike Scott, an avid opponent of Liberal gun control legislation who recently did his party’s campaign against new controls more harm than good.
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Before looking at the details of Scott’s intervention, it is useful to remember how Reform is constructing and justifying their campaign, basing it on their view of the popular sentiment, assumptions of high administrative costs and ineffectiveness in the fight against crime.
Occasionally, a Reform MP will reveal a deeper motive, such as the need for citizens to defend themselves or the role of guns in helping Canadians drive off those who would steal fuel from a farmyard fuel tank.
Officially, though, that is not party reasoning. Reform strategists figure it smacks too much of American vigilantes and the right of citizens to take the law into their own hands.
Along, then, comes Scott from Skeena riding. In a letter to a Parliament Hill newspaper in late April, he argued that Canadians need the right to bear arms as a way to keep governments in check.
“The task of those who promote good government is to find ways of keeping it from getting too big,” he wrote. “Naturally, an armed citizenry is an important part of this. Equally naturally, those who seek unlimited power for government fear a citizenry able to resist encroachments on their liberty.”
Presumably, this belief in the need for armed citizens to hold big government at bay makes sense to Scott, a 41-year-old businessman and first-term MP.
To those who suspect opponents of gun control legislation of having ulterior motives, it was manna from heaven.
Supporters of stricter controls cited the letter as a sign that this reflected real motives, stripped of their politically acceptable spin.
It was the sign of the core paranoia of the gun lobby and a reflection of a “right to bear arms” mentality that does not exist in Canadian law or tradition.
It was cited in Commons debates. Newspapers criticized the Americanization of the gun debate.
Scott’s intervention quickly became a liability for the gun-control opponents.
Enter Reform leader Preston Manning and his damage-control squad. Scott said last week he had explained to the leader that he had been speaking “from a historical and philosophical perspective” but not about the current debate.
Now, he does not think an underlying danger in the Canadian gun-control debate is government dictatorship over an unarmed citizenry.
Manning, apparently, accepted this as a logical explanation. Gun-control proponents are not as likely to let Scott and his views off the hook, thinking they have sighted the paranoid underbelly of the gun lobby.
