Appealing to hunters, prime minister invokes spectre of gun registry
SAULT STE. MARIE, Ont. — He says he doesn’t want to sound paranoid, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper is concerned his own federal bureaucracy is trying to bring back the long-gun registry “through the back door.”
Harper courted gun owners and anglers Friday in northern Ontario with a carefully stage-managed question-and-answersession with invited representatives of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters.
Killing the long-gun registry was a long-standing Conservative government promise — and fundraising cash cow. Now that it’s dead, a governing party in election mode is reviving alleged threats of its resurrection in repeated donation appeals to Conservative faithful.
The government introduced new legislation last month to simplify gun licensing, and also has loudly denounced and reversed an RCMP move to prohibit a couple of guns police say can too easily be converted into fully automatic weapons.
“I don’t want to feed paranoia, but as prime minister I can tell you I share the frustrations of our caucus members,” said Harper, before alluding to “bureaucratic initiatives that we think are effectively trying to put the long-gun registry back in through the back door. “This is not something we can tolerate.”
He said the government would ensure, in future, that such measures “can’t be done without some degree of political oversight.”
However, documents obtained by the CBC show the RCMP notified the public safety minister well in advance about — and sought input on — its decision to ban the Swiss Arms Classic Green and the CZ858 rifles last winter. Harper himself was briefed in May 2013 on issues surrounding the reclassification of firearms, according to a heavily redacted document.
Still, resurrecting the ghost of the gun registry is good politics for a Tory government that already appears to be in full flight toward a date with voters in 2015. Frank Fata, a Sault Ste. Marie city councillor who was among 100 or so invited guests at the Harper event, said the Conservative stand against the gun registry was a decisive factor in northern ridings such as Sault Ste. Marie, where the Tories reclaimed the seat in 2011 — by fewer than 1,200 votes — for the first time since 1988.
“Looking back to the last federal election, that did play a very important part in people’s minds,” said Fata. “Us being from northern Ontario, we tend to see it a little more personal and closer to home.”
Harper noted to the audience that conservation, hunting and fishing aren’t simply rural or northern preoccupations, citing statistics that 40 per cent of the fishing licences in Ontario belong to people in the Greater Toronto Area. He said the issues “unite a wide range of Canadians from all backgrounds.”
Still, members of the crowd listening in the hotel ballroom were predominantly male, white and in suit jackets.