When Churchill MP Niki Ashton campaigns for re-election in less than a year, she will most certainly face questions about her party’s stance on a controversy that refuses to be shot down.
The federal long-gun registry was terminated more than two years ago, apparently much to the delight of northern Manitoba and other rural regions that largely opposed the program.
But the divisive database has remained a surprisingly hot topic in Canadian politics.
The Harper Conservatives have touted their dismantling of the registry as a triumph over gun-hating elitists. The Liberals, despite enacting the registry during the Chrétien days, have no plans to resuscitate the program.
As for Ashton’s party, journalists often report the NDP plans to bring back the registry lock, stock and (long) barrel.
Yet according to NDP spokesperson George Soule, the position of the party and leader
Tom Mulcair is not so straightforward.
“We have always brought forward practical solutions to address the legitimate concerns that many Canadians have with the gun registry,” Soule tells The Reminder, “like those for whom hunting is an important part of life, as well as respecting the treaty rights of Aboriginal peoples – but also ensure that police have the tools they need to keep our communities safe.”
‘Strong’ laws
Soule says Mulcair has been clear that “New Democrats are going to make sure our country has strong gun laws, but we will never bring back the divisive approach that we have seen too often from others in this debate.
“We believe that gun control must be done in a way that brings people together to address public safety concerns, not as a way to divide rural and urban communities.”
Soule says Mulcair wants to ensure there is “a way to track firearms,” but he “also believes that reasonable people from different parts of the country could quite easily work together and come up with solutions on this if we applied more common sense and less wedge politics.”
When presented with news articles that clearly state Mulcair would restore the registry, Soule says they are based on a “loose translation” of what the party leader actually said during a French-language interview in 2012.
The NDP has begun to roll out its policy proposals for the 2015 election and its full platform, gun control components and all, “will be released in due time,” Soule adds.
Ashton herself once voted with the Conservatives to end the registry, but subsequently voted to keep it.
Whether this was a true flip-flop is open to interpretation, since the second motion, unlike the first, specified that all data from the registry be destroyed.
At the time, Quebec hoped to access the data to launch its own provincial version of the registry. Ashton used Quebec’s position as rationale to oppose the vote, arguing the Tories were ignoring differing regional views on the registry.
