Mulcair’s gun gambit is gift to foes
NDP: Knowing Ontario beyond Toronto is unwinnable, party revisits registry
Had Tom Mulcair set out to deliberately torch his party’s chances in rural, small- town and suburban English Canada, he could scarcely have found better kerosene than the federal long- gun registry, which the NDP leader has now de facto promised to revive.
Why would Mulcair assert, as he did this week, that every firearm in Canada must be registered? Why would he suggest — ironically of course, these city slickers are so clever — that duck hunters don’t need assault rifles, unless they’re hunting pterodactyls?
The timing is obvious: The looming anniversary of Dec. 6, 1989, when a homicidal maniac murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. That horror created a wave of political pressure that led to the introduction of the Canadian Firearms Registry in 1993. The registry was projected to cost, initially, $ 2 million a year. It wound up costing 500 times that, causing the Jean-Chretienled governments of the day no end of difficulty.
But the cost overruns were only the start. The bureaucracy was mind- boggling; the forms, opaque; the process, Byzantine. Hunters found it irksome and expensive. Farmers, for whom a rifle or shotgun is a tool, found it insulting. Neither the Ecole Polytechnique massacre nor the Dawson College rampage in 2006 were perpetrated by farmers. Nor were the handgun shootings that routinely wracked Toronto’s club district in the wee hours. Lawabiding gun owners, especially the rifle and shotgun users who comprise the majority, began to feel they had been deliberately made to pay for the sins of others.
Now fast- forward to 2006, through 2010. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are in power, but in a minority, and the longgun registry remains in place. Increasingly, it is reviled in the countryside; increasingly, it is the focus of Conservative grassroots fundraising efforts in Ontario. It becomes apparent the registry is actually good for the Tories, because it provides them with an ideal symbolic wedge for the division of Canada into two distinct parts; rural, small- town and suburban dwellers on one side, urban “elites” on the other.
So even as Jason Kenney, the minister for curry in a hurry, worked his magic in the immigrant communities of the suburban Greater Toronto Area, Conservative Ontario MPs haunted church basements, Legion halls and gymnasiums in towns such as Gravenhurst, Hanover, Brockville and Wallaceburg. The long- gun registry, like industrial wind turbines provincially, had transcended mere program status, to become an almost perfect symbol of rural and small- town alienation.
This is the deadfall trap into which the Liberal party hurled itself in 2011. Though the Grits understood the long- gun registry was a problem for them in rural Ontario, they’d not spent enough time there to understand the visceral antipathy it evoked. Mulcair now has trod directly in their footsteps, tossing what he considers to be bouquets to gun owners, vague reassurances about not going “overboard,” before casting aside his life ring and leaping into the North Atlantic.
Thanks just to these remarks by the Opposition leader, Harper’s re- election drive will catch a lift in the Ontario hinterland, which is critical to the national outcome because of seat distribution. It’s important to note that the suburban Greater Toronto demographic, and those of the outlying bedroom communities, have more in common with Bracebridge than anywhere in the megacity core. In communities such as Barrie, Ajax and Orangeville, weekend and holiday hunters are common as ticks on a hound.
Of course, Mulcair and his advisers are aware of these trade- offs; they have likely concluded, correctly, that Ontario beyond Toronto is already lost to them, so what the heck? This foray is another straight play for Quebec votes, and further evidence that the NDP’s strategy for Election 2015 is not to win, but rather to survive with most of its Quebec seats.
The more interesting question is, what will Justin Trudeau do? He made a strategic choice, back when he was still seeking the Liberal leadership, to rule out reviving the long- gun registry. He later back- pedalled a bit, wary of a backlash among the Liberal old guard, then front- pedalled some more. Recently the Liberals have spoken out against Bill C- 42, which is odd, considering it’s a straightforward set of minor reforms to the Firearms Act, and changes nothing important. Should Trudeau allow himself to slip back into reflexive urban- toned anti- gun rhetoric, he will be playing directly into the Conservatives’ hands.
Should he, on the other hand, present a moderate, commonsense alternative to the Liberal cant of yesteryear, with Mulcair as his foil — say, by slamming the old long- gun registry, or taking target practice on a range, within view of some cameras — he might just make it palatable for country and small- town dwellers to once again vote Liberal, if they grow tired enough of the status quo.
Because the rural Ontario sensibility extends well into the Toronto hinterland, it is more important than population data suggests. That won the day for the Tories in 2011. It could win it for them again next year, if the opposition parties allow themselves to once again fall into anti- rural symbology. Like the song says: Country strong.