A bad time to be Liberal

After the auditor general of Canada revealed last week that our Liberal government in Ottawa may have spent as much as a billion dollars on a national gun registry that’s still incomplete, everyone in Nunavut who voted Liberal, or who in any way associated themselves with the Liberal party in the last election, must now be hanging their heads in abject shame.

As James Eetoolook, the first vice president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., says in a letter published in these pages, the true cost of the Liberal’s ill-conceived gun licencing and registration system extends far beyond the hundreds of millions that the government wasted on it.

Consider its corrosive effect on the Inuit hunting culture. While we now know that Inuit owners of unlicenced weapons are temporarily exempt from prosecution, the Liberal government’s new gun regulations are still preventing many Inuit from harvesting country food. That’s because they don’t have the piece of paper that permits them to buy ammunition.

Numbers released by Statistics Canada this week show that Nunavut households spend an average of 23 per cent of their household budget on food, compared with a national average of only 11 per cent.

Against this background the federal government’s gun licencing system is literally taking food out of the mouths of Nunavummiut, food that many cannot afford to replace by going to the nearest store.

Some provisions contained in Ottawa’s 1995 gun legislation are useful, to a degree, such as minimum prison sentences for those convicted of using firearms to commit crimes, and tighter safety regulations.

But the worst parts of the new system — the gun registry and the heavy-handed licencing system that accompanies it — cannot even be excused as good intentions gone wrong. The Liberal gun law was not well-intentioned. It was a cynical, poll-driven exercise aimed at winning votes from naive urban Canadians who, because they are not gun-owners, will never experience the system’s absurdities.

The legislation that gave effect to Ottawa’s billion dollar gun registry was influenced by the wave of emotion that arose after a deranged gun-man murdered 14 women at l’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.

But the law that the Liberals created was not a response to those emotions. It was a manipulation of them. There is no evidence that Ottawa’s new gun registration system has prevented any crime or saved any lives, including the lives of women killed by men.

We’re sure that Nunavummiut could easily find a long list of areas where the federal government could have better spent the billion dollars they wasted on their botched gun registry. Our list would include things like housing, literacy, substance abuse treatment, and mental health services — the kinds of things that might actually prevent violent crime in Nunavut.

As for members of the Nunavut Liberals Association, who’s beloved political party is responsible for the gun registry fiasco, we’ve heard reliable rumours that many are ready to bolt if one of the other parties were to produce a credible candidate. Who can blame them?

JB