Like the future of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, the fate of the long gun registry is an issue that sucks up more political oxygen than seems warranted.
This week as MPs returned to Parliament Hill after more than three months away, representing a country where hundreds of thousands remain unemployed, debt-swamped Canadians worry about rising interest rates, a multi-billion dollar catastrophe is developing in the Prairie farm heartland and close to one billion people worldwide don’t have enough food.
And guess which issue dominated discussion the first day back? Why, the long gun registry, of course.
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With some deft leadership moves by New Democratic Party chief and gun registry supporter Jack Layton, and heavy-handed leadership moves by Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff to force rural Liberals to oppose the registry, it appears a Sept. 22 vote will stop the Conservative drive to kill the registry. Just temporarily, of course.
The Conservatives vow to plow on, milking the issue as a way to keep their rural anti-registry base happy and to keep rural opposition members on edge.
Don’t be surprised if the next federal budget includes a paragraph that announces an end to funding for the registry bureaucracy.
It will force opposition MPs to defeat the government and force an election or allow the budget through (as they have twice before while denouncing the Conservatives as an unworthy, dangerous government) while exposing their registry support as urban vote-trolling fraudulence.
Since the Reform party first came on the scene in 1988, the gun registry has been an issue that will not die, whatever the merits of the competing arguments and the fact it is not an issue that decides votes.
Or is it?
Prince Edward Island rural Liberal Wayne Easter insists the Conservatives don’t really want the registry to die. It gives them an issue and a powerful fund-raising tool.
The Conservatives say it will be an issue that defeats many of the 20 opposition MPs who voted in principle last year to end the registry and now have changed their votes to support it, albeit with changes.
Easter will be one of those political canaries in a coalmine when the next election is held.
He insists it is not an issue that will defeat him after 17 years in Parliament but the Conservatives have targeted him and came within 950 votes of unseating him in 2008.
Other rural opposition MPs, including Sudbury, Ont., rookie NDP Glenn Thibeault, who ended decades of Liberal representation by 2,000 votes in 2008, also may be vulnerable.
Easter insists the gun registry is not an issue that will decide many votes and that should be true, considering all the issues facing voters and Canadian families day to day.
But the memory returns to a prairie farmer encountered during a recent election campaign who railed against the Conservative position to abolish the CWB monopoly.
Then he confided to a surprised reporter that he would be voting Conservative.
“My issues are guns, God and gays,” he said.
Be afraid, Wayne Easter. Be very afraid.
