Why won't Breitkreuz let Breitkreuz be Breitkreuz?

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 3:01 PM - 88 Comments

Garry Breitkreuz says the language in yesterday’s embarrassing press release “is not me.” Well, gee, Garry, it may not have been you, but as a longtime observer of your career I thought it was an excellent likeness. If you ask me, you picked a pretty bad moment to disavow the self-portrait.

Joan Bryden’s wire story for CP says that Breitkreuz’s statement “compared Canadian police chiefs to a cult and urged Liberals to beat their leader, Michael Ignatieff, ‘black and blue’.” On count one of the indictment, Breitkreuz must be judged not guilty. He actually compared the opposition in the Commons to a cult, and said it was being “led by organizations of police chiefs”—i.e., political advocacy groups that claim to represent police chiefs, and that have a strong interest in the naïve citizen (or the naïve reporter) confusing them with the police qua police.

Breitkreuz has always worked hard to emphasize this distinction, and it was highlighted rather intensely a year ago when John Jones, an ethics advisor to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, quit because of the association’s incorrigible addiction to questionable corporate donations. As Christie Blatchford wrote in the Globe at the time:

Dr. Jones and the members of the ethics committee were in Montreal in August for two days of meetings around the CACP’s annual conference when they learned about Taser’s sponsorship and that of others, including a joint Bell Mobility-CGI Group-Techna donation of $115,000, which went toward the purchase of 1,000 tickets at $215 each to a Celine Dion concert on Aug. 25.

CGI Group Inc. is a major, long-term firearms-registry contractor. In the odious press release, Breitkreuz, or his evil twin, asked “Could it be that CACP support for the registry is financially motivated?” Why the pussyfooting? Seems like he could have just said flat-out that when it comes to the gun registry, the CACP has an obvious conflict of interest and cannot be considered an uncompromised source of policy advice.

As for the charge that Evil Garry called for Ignatieff to be beaten…well, the world will always have its thick-as-a-plank literalists, won’t it? The press release didn’t even refer explicitly to a beating, but said that “[Ignatieff's] true colours are showing, and if his caucus has any integrity, those colours should be black and blue.” If Breitkreuz thinks that this rough-and-tumble metaphor is an offence worth apologizing for, fine; standards, after all, are ever-evolving in this area.

His real problem is that his rather careful statement about the CACP’s conflict of interest would have been easy for the opposition to strip of its context and twist into an anti-cop sound bite. In the wild-and-woolly Reform days, when the party’s base consisted of half-anarchist and heavily-armed rural Westerners, this kind of tension was not a major problem. Old Reformers readily recognize a implicit distinction between lawfulness and regimentation, between policing and the police state. But this philosophical razor is naturally a little blunter in a federal party that is trying to straddle multiple regions and political traditions. Reform’s passion for old-fashioned, demotic criminal justice seems to have been diverted into the task of elevating the police into a species of untouchable philosopher-king. And in the Ignatieff era, this is a contest in which the Liberals no longer have any compunctions about competing.

That puts someone like Breitkreuz in an awkward position, since he is dedicated to the destruction of a gun-registry program that many police really might like—not because it is in the public interest, but because it gives them another pretext for arrests, searches, and horse-trading with the bad guys. The registry self-evidently gives the police more power, but it is difficult to imagine that it protects anyone from personal harm. You can build all the databases you like, but no properly trained officer of the law will ever enter a premises or stop a suspect without accounting for the possibility of a weapon coming into play. If one were to take the CACP at its word, and accept that the registry with all its inaccuracies is routinely used to “check for the presence of firearms” in homes being visited by police, one would be forced to consider the possibility that the damn thing is nothing but a digital Petri dish of overconfidence and carelessness—well worth consigning to oblivion in the name of safety and common sense alone.

'Just recently'

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 12:32 PM - 47 Comments

Peter Van Loan, Thursday. I received it and looked at just recently, in recent days.

Toronto Star, today. Responding by email to questions from the Star, RCMP Sgt. Greg Cox said late Friday the force submitted its 2008 firearms report on Oct. 9, four weeks ago.

For it before he was against it, Easter edition

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 6, 2009 at 2:46 PM - 14 Comments

Fun facts. From 1892 to 2005, Canada had a solicitor general. From Oct. 2002 to Dec. 2003, Liberal Wayne Easter, as noted here, held that title. From April 2003 to Dec. 2003, that position put Easter in charge of the federal firearm registry. And on Wednesday night, Easter voted to have long guns removed from that registry.

In July 2003, six gun owners showed up at Easter’s constituency office, reported that they had not registered their weapons and invited him to take action. He declined. “I don’t direct police operations,” he told Canwest at the time, “that’s up to the police to decide. And as I’ve said a number of times, the police know the difference between somebody trying to make a point politically versus concerns for public safety.”

Three months later though, with the release of statistics showing a drop in gun-related deaths, Easter was sought out for comment and seemed generally supportive of the registry’s general purpose. Canadian Press dispatch after the jump. Relevant portion in bold. Continue…

'That was totally useless. Thank you.'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 6, 2009 at 10:49 AM - 46 Comments

Strolling casually around the House of Commons foyer yesterday, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan happens upon a group of reporters. A delightful exchange of pleasantries follows.

Question: How long have you had the report from the Commissioner of Firearms?

Hon. Peter Van Loan: The report from the Commissioner of Firearms has to be tabled tomorrow which it will be.  I know that some information – some information on it will be coming out shortly.  Some of it has already been released in the public accounts.  The one that I know has attracted some interest is the number of times that the police access it which is close to three and a half million times.  What’s very interesting about that statistic is of those three and a half million times only 2.4 percent of the time is it actually information about the registration of a long-gun that would eliminated by the long-gun registry.  If the bill to eliminate the long-gun registry is passed and becomes law, 97 percent of the times that the police utilize that information from the firearms centre would continue to be in place because of course the bill does not eliminate the requirement for licensing of gun owners and only, as I said, 2.4 percent of those queries had to do with information related to long-gun registration.

Question: (Inaudible)

Hon. Peter Van Loan: I am referring to the 2008 statistics.  And what’s more interesting -

Question: (Inaudible)

Hon. Peter Van Loan: If I could finish, what’s more interesting -

Question: You haven’t answered my question once yet though.

Continue…

The yeas have it

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:06 PM - 53 Comments

C-391, a private member’s bill to abolish the long gun registry, has passed second reading by a vote of 164-137.

By the unofficial count, 21 opposition MPs supported Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner’s bill, including eight Liberals, 12 NDP and one independent.

More from Canadian Press, the Star, Sun and CBC.