After years of unsuccessful attempts to disarm the long gun registry, Conservatives and a score of mainly rural opposition MPs have taken a major step toward that goal.
On Nov. 4, a private member’s bill to end the need to register non-restricted long guns passed by a surprisingly robust 164 to 137 vote in the House of Commons.
The result brought lusty cheers from Conservative benches in the Commons but afterward Portage-Lisgar MP Candice Hoeppner, who sponsored the bill, said supporters of ending the registry should not assume the fight is won.
Read Also
Alberta crop diversification centres receive funding
$5.2 million of provincial funding pumped into crop diversity research centres
Opponents will line up to denounce the bill at the Commons committee on public safety and national security. As well, most members of the committee voted against the bill and it still has to go through further debate in the Commons and then through the Senate.
An election triggered before the bill passes through all stages would kill it.
“This is by no means over,” said Hoeppner, a rookie MP.
“You take it one day at a time.”
The committee is expected to start hearings later in November, presided over by chair and long-time gun registry opponent Garry Breitkreuz from Saskatchewan.
Under Commons rules, the committee should report back sometime in winter.
Hoeppner said she is encouraging rural, hunter and aboriginal groups to speak out in support of the bill during what will be a heated Parliament Hill debate. She said she hopes individual police officers who disagree with their official organizations will testify about why the long gun registry is not an effective crime-fighting tool.
The emotional Commons vote came after an aggressive Conservative campaign to target rural opposition MPs through flyers and radio advertisements in their ridings, urging voters to pressure their MP to break party lines.
Because it was a vote on a private member’s bill, party discipline is not supposed to be applied and MPs are supposed to be free to vote as they wish.
On Nov. 4, the Conservative caucus voted unanimously in favour of Bill C-391, the Bloc Québécois voted unanimously against, 12 of 36 New Democrats voted for the bill and eight of 77 Liberals did the same.
In past votes, party discipline largely kept rural dissidents silent or absent on gun registry votes.
Northern Ontario New Democrat Charlie Angus, a former agriculture critic, said he resented the Conservative tactics, which he said did not influence his vote.
“I will be voting to oppose the gun registry because it has failed in our region.”
A registry for handguns and prohibited weapons has been in place for most of a century. A Progressive Conservative government created an expanded registry after a campus massacre in Montreal 20 years ago this month.
In 1995, the Liberals strengthened the registry by adding long guns and provoked a backlash that has continued ever since.
An auditor general’s report in 2002 that reported massive overspending in creating the registry fueled the argument that the money would be better spent on crime prevention.
Hours before the vote, public safety minister Peter Van Loan from rural Ontario continued the verbal assault.
“The long gun registry does a good job of harassing law abiding hunters and farmers and it does a good job of wasting money but it does not do a good job of combating crime.”
When he said that, Van Loan had a report from the commissioner of firearms that claimed otherwise. Van Loan tabled the annual report in the Commons two days later, as he had to do under the rules of Parliament.
The report from the RCMP, which now houses the Firearms Centre, said 7.3 million guns are registered in Canada and the database does help combat crime.
One of many incidents included in the report was about a man who pulled a handgun on medical staff in an ambulance after he drove his car into parked cars.
Police arrested him, checked the registry and found that he had 31 registered firearms. He was charged and police found two extra guns that were not registered and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Hoeppner’s bill would keep the registry for handguns and prohibited weapons and still require people buying legal long guns to obtain a licence and pass a gun safety course.
