While the bill to end the controversial registry received royal assent in Ottawa last Thursday, the NDP's newly minted leader vows to bring it back if he becomes Prime Minister.
Speaking on the Radio Canada show Tout le Monde en Parle Sunday, Thomas Mulcair said the solution is to fix the irritants in the long gun registry — not scrap it.
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Meanwhile, the Liberals, who introduced the controversial registry in 2001, say they would not re-introduce it if they were to form government after the 2015 election.
"Liberals would not bring back the registry," Liberal spokesperson Daniel Lauzon told Yahoo! Canada News in an email exchange, Monday.
"But we strongly support maintaining the data so Provinces can maintain their own if they wish to do so."
Two thirds of the nation support the gun registry; one third does not. The Mulcair NDP has just signalled that it intends to seek its parliamentary majority by attracting that national majority. Meanwhile the LPoC is in the process of running away from its own policies, and at the same time wondering what there is left for it to believe in. Other than legalizing weed, which is fine, but trivial.
A couple of things on this.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I'd start sweating the Liberal position if we had an official leader in place. Hopefully, a leadership contenders will bring this up during the race. Short of that, I'm bringing it up at the next policy convention.
As for the position NDP takes on the LGR -- after years of seeing rural NDP MPs vote against the LGR, they're finally going to take a stand... after it's gone. (Insert melodramatic crying spell.) Okay, they'll bring a new and improved registry, but the drive to get done this seems more top-down than the usual NDP grassroots approach to policy. Will they have a debate on this at their next convention? Good question. I think without an official policy, it will be hard to rally all the NDP MPs behind it. One of the two NDP MPs who voted against the registry used the absence of policy as the reason for his vote. Potentially, more candidates in rural ridings could take similar stands, especially if Mulcair doesn't end up selling the position well. It was hard enough for some of them to vote to save the LGR. It's going to be harder for them to argue to their constituents that they will create one. Anyway, I don't see this as a fait accompli until the policy passes. But that's my absolutely worthless opinion on the situation.
Oh, wow.
ReplyDelete"Savvy move", you say?
Stupidest thing he could have done, and the fact that you support this inane ploy is an excellent indication of why the Liberal Party is where it is today.
Watch the polls for the reaction of the general public to this embarrassingly inept attempt to appease Quebec (but thanks for demonstrating so quickly just how completely out of your depth you really are, Mulcair)...