PUBLICATION:            GLOBE AND MAIL 

DATE:                         FRI MAY.21,2004 

PAGE:                         A4 

BYLINE:                     JOHN IBBITSON 

CLASS:                       Column 

EDITION:                    Metro DATELINE: 

WORDS:                     668 

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Liberals might have been better off letting this dog lie

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The Liberals' late, lame efforts to fix the gun registry have infuriated some members of the party's caucus, none more than Sarnia-Lambton MP Roger Gallaway. "This is beyond disingenuous. This is deceitful in the worst way," he fumed yesterday. "And it's all driven by a bunch of zealots." This can't be the reaction election HQ had been banking on. Anne McLellan, the Minister of Public Safety (they really need to change that Robespierrian name), has revealed the government's latest effort to make the gun registry disappear as an election issue.

The plan is so timid and contradictory, you have to wonder if the Liberals wouldn't have been better off -- far better off -- letting this snarling dog lie.

The proposals, based on four months of consultations by Minister of Civil Preparedness Albina Guarnieri, try to plug the holes in Ottawa's gun-control policy in the worst possible way. Claiming that 90 per cent of gun owners have registered their weapons, the government now plans to woo the remainder by eliminating registration fees, thus rewarding people for breaking the law and punishing those who complied.

Hoping to lower costs to $25-million annually, the government promises, among other things, to enhance telephone answering services. Message to government: Improving answering services is expensive; that's why we're always on hold. This is the kind of thinking that took the gun registry's cost from $2-million to $1-billion.

Most of the so-called initiatives are larded with such fatal phrases as "providing ongoing funding," or "continuing to consult." For all such mendacities, substitute the words: "doing nothing new."

That, apparently, was the whole point of the exercise: to do nothing while promising to do something. The Paul Martin Liberals felt they had to take action on Jean Chretien's gun registry, which had become so expensive, intrusive and ineffectual that MPs from rural ridings feared their seats were in jeopardy.

Ms. McLellan, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, was particularly vulnerable, since she had once overseen the program as minister of justice, and since her grasp on her Edmonton riding is always tenuous at best.

But many urban, leftish and often female MPs inside caucus -- the "zealots" Mr. Gallaway referred to -- fiercely support the registry, and see it as a crucial part of the government's gun-control program. So the challenge was to rein in the program without scrapping it entirely.

It failed that challenge by concocting a series of cosmetic changes that fooled and satisfied no one. Worse, by slipping this new program in without allowing Parliament to vote freely on whether funding for the registry should continue, the Liberals deepened the democratic deficit that Paul Martin had promised to eliminate.

Mr. Gallaway, who is parliamentary secretary for democratic reform, is particularly incensed that caucus has been kept from expressing its will through a parliamentary vote. He believes that a large minority, "or perhaps even a majority," of Liberal MPs would have opposed funding the registry. Along with support from the Conservatives, he is certain it would have died.

Instead, the government is offering up these half-baked measures, which simply served to remind voters who might have forgotten about the mess. "For some of the rural members, it would have been better to just let it be," Mr. Gallaway believes.

Pundits, including this one, predicted in both 1997 and 2000 that the Liberals would lose rural seats in Ontario, citing the gun registry as a defining issue. We were wrong; rural voters electorally have more in common with their urban counterparts than many observers suspect.

This time out, however, the gun registry comes wrapped up in a bundle of issues -- including Liberal support for same-sex marriage and decriminalizing marijuana possession -- that could test the tolerance of voters in that central Ontario belt from Lake Huron to the Ottawa River. If they go, they'll take the Liberal hopes for a majority government with them.

jibbitson@globeandmail.ca