Last week’s Supreme Court of Canada hearings on the constitutionality of national gun control legislation ended as it began – with political rather than legal arguments.
Moments after chief justice Beverley McLachlin said Feb. 22 the court was reserving judgment on the Alberta challenge of federal law, chief federal lawyer Graham Garton emerged to insist critics of the bill were using the nation’s highest court to carry on the political argument they already had lost.
“Alberta and the intervenors came here with a political argument dressed up as a legal argument and the clothes didn’t quite fit,” he told reporters.
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Alberta lawyer Rod McLennan had a different interpretation of the two days of hearings over whether Ottawa’s law, which requires all gun owners to be licensed and all guns to be registered, is a violation of provincial control over property.
He also said the federal law violates the Canadian principle that regional diversity should be recognized.
The Supreme Court judges heard arguments that guns are a more integral part of the prairie and northern culture than in eastern urban Canada.
“What suits Toronto doesn’t work very good in Whitehorse,” said McLennan.
Garton tried to answer that issue in his statement to the court. Gun control is a public safety issue in all Canadian regions because “all firearms are lethal weapons,” he said. There are more guns on the Prairies and in the northern territories and more crimes committed with guns in those areas.
“It (the law) is intended to bring control where it is needed most,” said the federal lawyer.
“This is a national response to a national concern.”
Regina police chief Cal Johnston, president of the Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police, said in an interview the idea that guns are part of the culture of the West comes from a different frontier time.
“This legislation is trying to help the evolution of our view of firearms to a more English model, a sporting model,” he said.
Johnston said those who argue law-abiding gun owners will be the targets of controls while criminals will ignore them seem to suggest society is divided into two distinct camps – criminals and law-abiding citizens.
“Some people are in transition at different times and some people, normally law abiding, occasionally do criminal acts if they have access to firearms,” he said.
“I think registration and screening will reduce violence, absolutely.”
In court, a lawyer for a group called the Law-Abiding Unregistered Firearms Association warned that its 14,000 members will ignore the law if it is upheld.
McLachlin quickly called Red Deer lawyer David Holman to task for threatening illegal acts.
“I don’t think it should be heard in this court at all,” she said.
Later, McLennan told reporters Alberta will establish its own gun owner licensing system if the federal law is struck down by the courts.
If it isn’t, he predicted “many many” individual challenges under the Charter of Rights.
All three English Canadian opposition parties oppose the gun registration law.
Reformers and the Progressive Conservatives have promised to scrap the registry if they are elected.
