Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Kill Bill C-391,the Long Gun Registry

CPC MP Candice Hoeppner has sponsored Bill C-391 to scrap the ineffective costly long gun registry. The third and final vote comes up in approximately a month from now. Liberal MPs who had previously supported Candice's Bill will now vote against it because their leader,Iffy says he will now whip his members. Three Lib MPs have three different reasons. for changing their minds.
Three Liberal MPs, three different reasons why they will now vote against a private member's bill to repeal the long-gun registry — or at least, why they won't be voting for it.
And only one of them says it's because of the party whip.
It is clear though one Liberal MP is conflicted. Larry Bagnell, MP from the Yukon. What is he to do?
As for Larry Bagnell, Yukon MP, “there won’t be a choice” in how he is expected to vote. “It’s certainly not easy,” he said.

“It’s easier this time, in the sense that Ignatieff’s put forward a compromise, which no other Liberal leader has,” said Bagnell.
So it's now up to the NDP whether the registry will be scrapped or not.  Twelve NDP members had supported Bill C-391 before and I hope they will continue to support Candice and her bill.  The NDP suggests that  some Lib MPs will skip the vote when it comes up but Doorknob Wayne Easter claims  that's not an option. Have we not all heard that story before? That's what they've been doing it since 2006, why should they change now?
Several NDP MPs, who have a free vote, have suggested that some Liberal MPs may not show up.
But that’s not an option, said Easter.
“I’ve found it more troublesome often to not to show up, than to vote. Not showing up is...just not the way to do it,” he said, before adding:
Those MPs better remember who they actually work for.  They work for their constituents not their party or interest groups.
Meantime the National Post editorial lays out a good reason for killing the bill.
We stand among the abolitionists. The gun registry criminalizes law-abiding gun owners by penalizing them if they fail to register their guns. Yet it scantly inconveniences actual criminals, who don't register their guns anyway. Moreover, the cost of the program, estimated at over $2-billion, is far out of proportion to the theoretical effectiveness of the registry in preventing crime (though, admittedly, most of that money is a sunk cost). Even if it were true that a life or two had been saved because of the registry, orders of magnitude more good could be done with that money if it were instead invested in any number of other areas -- from projects to target cybercrime and child pornography, to programs to divert the at-risk youth who might one day be tempted to join the ranks of criminal gun-toters.
It's time to pressure those opposition MPs who previously supported Bill C-391 not to cave, stand up for their constituents and support Candice one more time to finally get rid of this cumbersome, intrusive, money sucking program.