PUBLICATION:              Edmonton Journal

DATE:                         2003.07.23

EDITION:                    Final

SECTION:                  Opinion

PAGE:                         A12

COLUMN:                  Lorne Gunter

BYLINE:                     Lorne Gunter

SOURCE:                   The Edmonton Journal

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Most aboriginals ignore gun registry: Ottawa hired counsellors to help promote registry

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When it was revealed two weeks ago that the Liberals' national gun registry had registered and re-registered the same stolen rifle three times, I made a prediction: Because their registry caught the error, even though it was on the fourth attempt, I predicted the Liberals would proclaim their registry to be a resounding success. After all, the registry had identified the rifle as stolen and ordered police to seize it.

The following week, David Austin did just that. Austin, spokesman for the Canadian Firearms Centre, told the local paper in Orillia, Ont., where the stolen gun was finally seized, that identifying it proved the registry works. "In terms of the system working, it appears the fact that the gun was stolen has come to light as part of the registration process," he said.

Sorry, that was too easy. Yep, give them enough tries and even federal firearms bureaucrats eventually get it right. Now if we could only convince gun-wielding criminals to be equally inept, then there might be a chance the registry will make Canadians safer. Naw!

Anyway, I raise this example not to gloat ... much ... but mostly to point out how the Liberals will use even the thinnest pretext to trumpet the virtues of their registry. Even news that isn't good the Liberals beamingly declare to be stunning proof of their registry's public benefit. So why would the government black out the compliance rates from 68 native reserves in access to information documents released last month to Canadian Alliance MP Garry Breitkreuz? If there was any way -- any way at all --for the Liberals to make the rates look like a success, you can bet they would. So if they are declaring off-limits data from hundreds of thousands of native gun owners, then you can be sure it's because the compliance rate among aboriginals is abysmal -- worse than abysmal, likely laughable. On most reserves, it's a safe bet (based on the numbers the Liberals did release), that almost no aboriginals have bothered to acquire a gun owner's licence or to register their guns.

Prominent among the 136 pages of documents released to Breitkreuz is the assertion that on the Mohawk reserve of Kanesatake, south of Montreal, 60 per cent of native gun owners have complied at least with the licensing requirements.

But Ottawa was forced, in its own documents, to admit "these results may reflect overlaps in postal codes," which means this compliance rate likely comes from "a mixed aboriginal and non-aboriginal applicant population."

In plain English, the only reason it looks as though nearly two-thirds of Kanesatake gun owners have complied with the Liberals' firearms law is that the postal codes that include the reserve also include a lot of non-native communities. The much larger non-native population is complying (sort of) and that is skewing the results for the reserve.

The neighbouring Mohawk reserves of Kahnawake and Akwesasne have compliance rates of just five per cent and one per cent, respectively. It is naive to believe Kanesatake would be remarkably higher.

If you believe that gun control will lead to less gun crime, the compliance rates on these three Mohawk reserves have to trouble you enormously. Among the three of them, these reserves are responsible for half or more of the smuggled cigarettes and liquor entering the country. Significant percentages of smuggled guns, illegal drugs and illegal migrants are brought in through these three that straddle the Ontario-Quebec-U.S. border.

Thanks to politically correct customs regulations, aboriginal Canadians are seldom forced to declare their goods at border crossings or be subjected to searches of their vehicles. Thus many Mohawks maintain lucrative smuggling businesses, bringing in tens of thousands of contraband a month and on-shipping it to biker gangs and other organized criminals who resell it across the country. If gun control means crime control, these Mohawks are the first people the Liberals should target. Instead, they will be the last.

Overall, "although there appears to be pockets of high licence compliance among aboriginal communities ... there is an apparent general pattern of low-to-moderate compliance across the country." Try low to non-existent.

Despite millions spent on "First Nations outreach" and special, lenient licensing requirements for natives, few have licences and even fewer have registered their guns. Very likely no more than 15 per cent of natives have a federal firearms licence, and probably far fewer than that. Ottawa has hired dozens of aboriginal licensing counsellors, sent them out across the country to cajole aboriginals into registering themselves and their guns, and even made the licensing test for aboriginals almost unfailable (the test for non-natives is usually 50 written questions, for aboriginals it is a dozen oral questions for which coaching is allowed).

Chiefs can vouch for elders, too, thereby exempting them from having to take a test at all. Despite all these bend-over-backwards incentives for aboriginal gun owners, 35 per cent of reserves in B.C. refused to participate with the outreach efforts, 52 per cent in Alberta, 46 per cent in Saskatchewan and 60 per cent in Manitoba. Aboriginal gun ownership and use is, not surprisingly, almost three times higher than non-aboriginal, and yet aboriginals are almost completely ignoring the registry.

Let's see the Grits find the silver lining in that.