Trudeau should have stuck to his guns
It is difficult, perhaps, for an urban Liberal — a dyedin- the- wool, red- sweater wearing, Stephen-Harperhating, slightly-better-educated-than-average, culturally aware, biscotti-nibbling, economically comfortable Liberal — to understand why rural and small-town Canadians, those crass dolts, so loathed the federal longgun registry.
This is why even now, with the registry deleted, done, gone, in every province but one, there are still senior Liberals — Martin Cauchon, a former justice minister — vowing to bring it lurching back to life with an electrifying jolt of your tax dollars, say a billion, and set it staggering, scarred, through the countryside. And this must be why Justin Trudeau, after last week calling the registry “a failure,” then frantically back-tracked, insisting that he still believes in it, and is merely ditching it because it was too “divisive.”
Too divisive? How about useless, prohibitively expensive and offensive to the vast majority of people whose behaviour it purported to regulate?
I recall once sitting down at a lunch, years ago, beside a Liberal nominee for a central Ontario seat. In my thenjob as a small-city newspaper editor, I’d been fielding calls and emails from rural readers unhappy about the registry. Here’s what they said, mostly: Hunters and farmers aren’t the source of most gun crime. Criminals in the city, wielding illegal handguns, are the source of gun crime. Crack down on them. Any 15-year-old farm kid understands gun safety better than any city-raised politician. We aren’t criminals. Show us some respect. Leave us alone.
I sought to convey this sentiment, as much emotional as it was political, to the candidate. Further, I sought to impress upon the candidate that, until Liberal leaders extended their “rural outreach” beyond appearing at plowing matches in ill-fitting plaid shirts, and actually listened to farmers and landowners, they had no hope — zero — of ever winning back rural Canada. The candidate smiled politely. The candidate’s eyes glazed over.
This was some time before Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty set a torch to his party’s future in rural Ontario with his Green Energy Act, specifically with provisions that allowed the province to override municipal decisions and impose industrial wind turbine developments willy-nilly, including in areas previously zealously protected by the Niagara Escarpment Commission.
Granted that was provincial, not federal: But many of the same players grace both tables. The current president of the federal Liberal party, Mike Crawley, is a former Ontario wind-industry executive.
Until his sorcerer’s apprentice move to prorogue the Ontario legislature (the sorcerer being Stephen Harper), McGuinty was the darling of Liberals everywhere. Few seemed to care that he’d stomped on the democratic rights of rural people — who are statistically less affluent as well as, obviously, less numerous than their urban cousins — in imposing former energy czar George Smitherman’s will on the province. The hypocrisy was palpable, and not lost on anyone living beyond the Greater Toronto Area.
Which brings us back to Justin Trudeau, and his startling statement — startling because it’s so unusual to hear a politician from any party stating a blunt truth that deviates from dogma — that the long-gun registry was a failure, and that there are better ways to keep Ca- nadians safe. Eureka! You could almost hear the whiplash in backrooms across the country as Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats alike turned to one another and said, “What? He said what?”
As with the 1980s-era National Energy Program, as with support for the oilpatch (or non-support, as the case may be), the registry has morphed beyond its beginnings. It has become a shorthand for other issues, extending beyond the countryside — a morality play of intrusive, wasteful big government versus efficient, respectful small government. Because it evokes such passion, across the board, the registry has for years been a key Conservative fundraising tool.
Trudeau’s initial thrust at the heart of this dead policy — because let’s face it, no party, not even the NDP, will ever dare spend the money required to restore it nationwide — was therefore both right, and strate- gically astute. Symbolically, there could be no better way of showing Canadians he means what he says about “building, not re-building.” The griping of true believers such as Cauchon would only serve to reinforce his message: This is not your father’s Liberal party.
Except that Trudeau then blew his advantage, or most of it anyway, by going wobbly. Nuance and ambiguity may work in a backroom. They’re lost on voters, who rightly want a politician to believe in what he’s doing.
Is it really too much to expect that, with their party reduced to a few “safe” zones in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, Liberals at last remove the sprigs of parsley from their ears and listen to the people they purport to serve? Is it too much to expect that they do so forthrightly, directly and without apology or equivocation? Can they not admit they were, gasp, wrong?
One would think that they could. But old habits …