THE EXPECTED decision by the Stephen Harper government to kill the long gun registry seems like a no-brainer throughout much of rural Canada but in fact it is a large political gamble for the Conservatives.
It was payback for rural voters who have supported the Conservatives but it presents a challenge for political and election planners in the governing party.
How do you sell killing the registry to a large voting bloc who see it as a good, sensible policy?
The registry is popular in many urban areas where a gun is a gun is a gun, where most people don’t own firearms and where bicycles and dogs have to be registered so what’s the problem?
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It is in these big city areas – Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver more precisely – where Harper must win new voters if he is to convert a minority into a majority.
With some provincial exceptions, the Conservatives own rural Canada politically. Their growth potential is in the big cities.
Ontario and Quebec are key electoral battlegrounds and last week both provincial governments denounced the end of the long gun registry. A gun is a gun is a gun in cities where gun crime is common. Leaders of Canada’s police establishment bemoaned the end of the registry even as Conservatives suggested rank-and-file cops are supportive. Still, the police are a core constituency for this law-and-order party.
How to sell it?
Canada’s political and media classes are atwitter over Harper’s strategic instincts and selling the end of the long gun registry will be a test of those skills.
The Conservatives have shown several strategies of selling a policy opposed by the majority of MPs in Parliament.
Public safety minister Stockwell Day has stressed that the registry for handguns responsible for most gun violence is staying in place, the restricted firearms list remains intact, firearms acquisition certificates and safety courses still will be needed for any gun purchase and the money saved from getting long guns out of the registry system will be spent on hiring police and contributing to programs such as suicide prevention for young people.
“I can assure the people of Quebec that we understand their concerns,” Day said, recognizing that since the massacre of female engineering students in Montreal by a deranged misogynist, the province has been a hotbed of gun control sentiment.
For anti-gun urban dwellers elsewhere, the message is that this was an ineffective program that cost $1 billion, has no provable results and a database that is suspect.
“I represent a big city in urban Ontario and I think taxpayers in my constituency would find that the (cost) going at $1 billion for a program that was supposed to cost $2 million a year to be an egregious violation of middle class hardworking taxpayers,” treasury board president John Baird said last week.
He represents a suburban west Ottawa riding.
Will the references to wasteful spending, continued regulation of the most dangerous weapons and ineffective policy really appeal to urban voters who see a gun as a gun as a gun?
It is a gamble heading into a probable 2007 election.
Odds are that the Conservatives will win the bet, at least on this issue.
