Worth More Alive than Dead: Why the PM may have engineered Bill C-391 to fail

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Everyone knows Bill C-391, the second so-called Conservative private member’s bill (PMB) to propose destroying the registry is really a government bill—after all, if it walks like a duck hunter and squawks like a duck hunter, chances are it’s a duck hunter. Never in Parliamentary history has the governing party hired billboards, set up websites, sent out flyers etc., in support of a private member’s bill. So why the subterfuge? Because clothing a government bill in PMB clothing means Mr. Harper could exhibit pretend outrage at the opposition’s whipping the vote, all while imposing party discipline in his own ranks (why else would all 10 Quebec Conservative MPs have voted with the government?).

But division among the opposition is not the reason Mr. Harper may be satisfied with the 153-151 outcome on Bill C-391: money is. 

While researching links between the Canadian gun lobby and the U.S. National Rifle Association (NRA), a vociferous and financial supporter of its Canadian branch, the imperative made famous by informant “Deep Throat” during the Watergate scandal popped into my head: “follow the money.” The NRA, America’s most influential lobby group, wields a shockingly large annual budget--$307 million USD. To give you a taste of what that buys in Washington, in addition to lobbying against virtually any and all gun restrictions, the NRA recently lobbied: against an appointment to the supreme court; to be exempted from a proposal requiring lobby groups to disclose donor lists, and; to graft a ban on insurance companies charging higher premiums for people with guns in their homes onto a health care bill. Also, for the NRA, gun control anywhere threatens gun owners everywhere; they’ve meddled in Brazil and at the UN, so why not Canada? This is the bull the Conservative Party welcomed into our Parliamentary china shop.

The long gun registry may be the best cash cow the Conservative Party’s ever had: why would they kill it? What if the failure of C-391 is what the government set its sights on all along, a milestone in their strategy to achieve a majority? With Bill C-391 defeated, Mr. Harper can shrug and tell supporters he gave it the old college try, but that the effort to squash the registry failed because of the “socialist coalition’s dastardly tactics,” like whipping a so-called PMB. This leaves the Conservatives free to exploit, once again, the registry as a key weapon in its fundraising arsenal, a war chest ostensibly necessary to gain a majority and so destroy the registry another day. 

The government denies the relationship between the NRA and their drive to destroy the long gun registry, despite the fact that the Public Security Minister’s Firearm Advisory Committee (FAC) includes Tony Bernardo, executive director of the Canadian version of NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (CILA) and CILA’s sister organization, the Canadian Shooting Sports Association. The CSSA/CILA Facebook page brags it has 4 senior organization members on the Public Security Minister’s 12-member FAC, and that most of the rest are CSSA members; that CSSA/CILA is “fully endorsed by the NRA and NSSF [U.S. National Shooting Sports Foundation],” that “CILA’s work has been personally endorsed by NRA Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre and former Presidents Charlton Heston, Kayne Robinson and Sandy Froman,” that “as a direct result of our lobby efforts, including CILA-coordinated conference calls between Ministers and major firearms manufacturers, we proved to the Canadian Government that they were being mislead by their bureaucrats,” that they “conducted an election poster campaign which was approved by the PMO - posters sent to all dealers, retailers, clubs and businesses; conducted a ‘train-the-trainer’ session for grass roots lobbying – facilitated by the NRA Director of the Grass Roots Division, Glen Caroline and we are now offering grass roots political action training to clubs and members…”

The NSSF, the other American organization CILA proudly associates with, has a board of governors representing a who’s who of major gun manufacturers: Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Winchester, Glock, Sturm, Ruger & Co., Colt’s Manufacturing, and Remington Arms. 

The $100,000 anti-registry video the NRA produced in 2000, “Gun Control in Canada,” features Tony Bernardo and John Perrochio, a “former gun shop owner” who laments that the Canada’s gun industry has dropped from 6,000 dealers to 875 and was “a $6 billion industry that has been annihilated by ignorant politicians and absolutely pathetic firearms legislation.” Follow the money indeed.

If C-391 had passed, Mr. Harper’s grateful gun lobby supporters may have decided that donating to the Conservative Party was no longer so important. So despite all the heat generated by Bill C-391, the Prime Minister had the strongest of motives not to destroy the long gun registry, because its continued existence will fill his party’s election coffers more assuredly than the converse: the gun registry is worth more to him alive than dead.

References

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17wwln_essay.html

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=3219083173&topic=5930

http://www.nssf.org/industry/boardNSSF.cfm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmrqT9SIkQw (3min43secs into the video for John Perrochio’s quote)

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/09/13/canada-nra-gun-registry.html

When a picture is worth a thousand words

The meaning of the phrase “a picture's worth a thousand words” was made manifest at this week’s hearings on Bill C-391, the Conservatives’ latest attempt to murder the long-gun registry, a registry the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled to be an essential component of our gun safety system. Tune into the House of Commons hearings of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (SECU) at

http://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/ParlVu/ContentEntityDetailView.aspx?ContentEntityId=6217; around 1hr 51 minutes into the session, Bloc Quebecois MP and SECU member Maria Mourani brandishes the attached image of Gary Mauser, appearing as a private individual, though he was in fact appointed in 2007 to the government’s firearms advisory committee (FAC). Mourani shows Mauser the photo, verifies it is of him, and asks how many guns he owns.

“I’m not sure,” Mauser responds.

She presses a bit more—“How many shotguns do you have?...You have guns but you don’t remember how many?”

Mauser finally responds lamely, “I’m getting old.”

“By contrast, you aren’t too old to carry a weapon like this, though,” she counters.

“…the photographer asked me to pose like this and I resisted. And obviously, I should have resisted harder,” he admits.

“So you’re the big advisor on issues that concern firearms,” Mourani finishes. The photo shows Mauser aiming but Mourani’s the one who scored the direct hit.

The photo illustrated Susan Delacourt’s 2007 Toronto Star article “Panel loaded with gun buffs,” about the then-new makeup of the Conservative’s FAC. Originally from the Canadian National Firearms Association website, the image was, for obvious reasons, quickly removed. But it haunts us still, as does Mauser’s committee, which was, Delacourt wrote, “appointed and operating in virtual secrecy…made up almost entirely of pro-gun advocates opposed to the firearms registry.”

Mauser is touted as an emeritus professor and éminence grise of Canada's gun lobby. In 2006, when the Conservative government cleansed the FAC of police organization representatives, suicide prevention experts, women's and health advocates, they then appointed gun dealers and people like Mauser and Tony Bernardo, head of the Canadian branch of the US National Rifle Association (NRA). In 2001, Bernardo crowed to his Canadian Institute for Legislative Action (CILA), “We have been working hand in hand with the NRA regarding international issues for the past three and a half years...in fact, the NRA was instrumental in the formation of CILA…the NRA provides CILA with tremendous amounts of logistic support.”

By an amazing coincidence, the NRA's lobby arm is called the Institute for Legislative Action.

Okay, maybe it isn’t a coincidence.

Bernardo also appeared before SECU last week. Interestingly, CILA’s website doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2008, but the website of an allied group, the Canadian Shooting Sports Association (CSSA) carries an endorsement by Wayne LaPierre, NRA Executive VP: “The NRA of America supports and endorses the work done by the CILA and strongly encourages all Canadian firearms owners to become CILA supporting members.” Another recent posting has LaPierre saying repeal of Canada’s long-gun registry would be “huge on the world stage and made all the more significant as a backdrop in the pending debate on the United Nations' global gun ban…As my friend and colleague Dave Kopel, research director of the Independence Institute in Colorado, astutely noted, ‘Repeal of the Canadian registry would be of tremendous global significance. Repeal would also shatter the claim by the Canadian gun prohibition lobby that gun control in Canada is an irreversible ratchet.’”

These two themes—the derailing of the UN’s international treaty limiting trade in small arms (responsible for about a thousand deaths daily), and that gun control anywhere threatens the right to bear arms everywhere--are traditional NRA bugaboos, as discussed in the New York Times by Josh Kurlantzick, special correspondent for The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (see “Global Gun Rights?”, NYT, September 17, 2006).

Ostensibly, the NRA constitution prevents it from giving money to groups outside the USA but according to Kurlantzick, the NRA stopped openly fighting gun control abroad because it “enabled gun-control advocates to accuse local gun lobbies of selling out to America.”

Instead, the NRA counsels indigenous gun lobbies to recast restrictions on gun ownership as threats to civil liberties. Indeed, Al Dorans, CILA’s 2001 operations director is on record noting that CILA and the NRA “shared a belief in the existence of a worldwide conspiracy to rid the world civilian population of small arms such as hunting and sport rifles, shotguns and handguns,” according to a 2001 article by Tim Naumetz for Southam Newspapers. The NRA has also repeatedly given “lobbying seminars” during Canadian election campaigns.

Though Bill C-391 masquerades as a private member's bill, when ministers of the Crown speak on behalf of a bill and spend money on fliers attacking opposition members for their stance on a bill, well, if it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it's a friggin’ duck. And, as NRA style paranoia spreads, it is clear that the organization is up to its eyeballs in Canada’s gun lobby, and has been for some time.