February 21, 2021
To:
Editor
The Sault Star
RE: Liberal Party Persecution of Law-abiding Firearm Owners
Government ineptness in one area leads to overkill in others to enact what I call the deflection effect creating the mirage that all is well so just trust us and you’ll all be well-taken care of; we’ve all seen this ruse enacted before by the Liberal Party but never so blatantly as the current manipulations under Justin Trudeau. The current trade-off in this context is the Covid-19 vaccine screw-up vs the current gun control enactments simultaneously rising in the clouds above Ottawa.
Trudeau’s love affair with China that follows on his father’s praise of Moa back in the ’60s led us into an ill-conceived deal with Can Sino Biologics for vaccine production that unsurprisingly fell through the cracks given the CCP’s habit of retribution whenever their image is fragmented as it has been with Canada’s house arrest of Meng Wan Zou, the CFO of global Chinese telecom Huawei, under an extradition commitment with the USA. Trudeau’s reliance on this undependable deal left our country deficient in timely contracts with other suppliers of what are now approved vaccines. As the deaths in Canada mount up, as of last week we’ve only seen 2.6% of Canada’s population vaccinated while the numbers globally include 14.4% for the UK, 50% for Israel and 9.6 % for the USA that implements 1.6 million per day under the “Operation Warp Speed” program rollout set up by former President Trump that new President Biden is now taking bows for.
To placate the emotions of Canadians while he hides in the cocoon of his cottage and avoids Parliament, our PM is impressing upon us just how safe we’ll be if his latest gun control policies are implemented. This goes back to the 2015 election when he committed to undoing the Harper government policies under Bill C-42, “The Common Sense Licencing Act” that showed some respect for law-abiding firearm owners. Trudeau is not so giving so in 2019 he brought in Bill C-71 that repealed some of Bill C-42’s licencing rules and in effect introduced a backdoor long gun registry by virtue of its record-keeping provisos; and this despite the LGR having been abolished in 2012 by the Harper government’s Bill C-19, the “Ending the Long Gun Registry Act” and Trudeau’s commitment to not ever reintroduce a long gun registry.
Last year, following the horrible mass shooting in Nova Scotia by a madman using illegally obtained guns smuggled from the USA, the Trudeau government was quick to jump on the backs of grieving families with the invocation of an Order in Council, SOR 2020-97, on May 1, 2020, that rendered 1,500 semi-auto hunting and target shooting rifle models into the prohibited category on the premise that they were “assault weapons” and needed to be banned to keep Canadians safe. This nonsense was done without a sitting Parliament that would have ensured a lengthy debate on the merits including the commitment to “buy back” these rifles from owners at a cost of hundreds of millions; this spending aspect of the Oin
C should render it unconstitutional when the current lawsuits play out since this in effect made the action a budget item that under our system requires the approval of Parliament. If this level of taxpayer dollar spending was directed to combat the smuggling of handguns and inner-city youth programs aimed at reducing gang recruitment it would make sense but as currently targeted at the theft of legally owned property it’s shameful.
Police union groups, even the one covering the RCMP, have come out decrying their lack of resources and insisting that the prohibitions now in play will do nothing to help them reduce the effectiveness of the criminal element. To add insult to injury the liberals have now introduced Bill C-21, “An Act to Amend Certain Acts and to make Certain Consequential Amendments (firearms)”. If you think that title is confusing you should read the Act itself which is a mishmash of left-wing epithets of grandeur failing to target criminals and grandstanding on the great Canadian reset to delegate authority to municipalities to ban handguns. A fundamental tenet of our Constitution is that criminal law comes under the Criminal Code as a federal responsibility; the Constitution does not provide for delegation of criminal law to the Provinces and certainly not to municipalities. There’s a big difference between a legitimate delegation of authority and abrogation of responsibility; Trudeau’s ruse is in the latter category but he is pushing his handgun policy anyway assuming the virtue signalling will gain him votes from the unwashed big city voting blocks and get him off the hook for basically doing nothing to combat crime. Liberal MP’s across the country are being “whipped” to sing the Party line, and a good example of that was the inflammatory use of out-of-context statistics by Terry Sheehan in a recent CTV news clip last week.
Lawsuits launched by citizens, gun dealers and firearms orgs are now in play with reference to the constitutionality of the above Order in Council and the severe damage to businesses that in some cases runs into millions of dollars; more will no doubt be launched challenging Bill C-21; it shouldn’t have to come to this. It’s a sad testament to our democracy that this liberal government like the Chretien government before it is so hell-bent on persecuting law-abiding Canadian firearm owners under the guise of “gun control”, failing to recognize natural property rights and refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the traditions embedded in our culture.
Ron P. Alton