THREE CHEERS FOR CANADA

THREE CHEERS FOR CANADA
http://www.newswithviews.com/Pratt/larry61.htm

By Larry Pratt
June 23, 2006
NewsWithViews.com

Canada has been suffering from an acute case of
Big Brotherism for years. Canadian life has
increasingly been suffocated by the hand of
government intrusion into every aspect of life.

Well, big brother seems to have been sent
packing, at least for a while. Voters last
January tossed out the Liberal (socialist)
government. The Tory, Conservative party won a
plurality, but was forced to organize a minority
government as had the Liberals before them.

One of the major issues in the campaign was gun
control. For about a decade, the Liberals had
attempted to convince Canadians that a registry
of the long guns of the good guys would keep the
bad guys from having guns. As crime rose, and
suspicious gun owners refused to obey the law,
the Liberal claim to divine knowledge became tattered.

Legitimacy was replaced by contempt when it
turned out that the registry's computers had been
hacked and used for precision burglaries of gun
collections. The system sold as the way to keep
guns out of the hands of bad guys was actually
putting guns in the "wrong hands" as Sarah Brady
likes to put it! (I know, Sarah really means all
non-government employees are the "wrong hands.")

The Liberals not only looked silly for supporting
an obviously failed program, but their position
lost all legitimacy when it was learned that the
gun registry was a cash cow for consultants and favored businesses.

Try as they might to cover up their financial
hanky panky, an audit by the Auditor General of
Canada revealed that the system was one thousand
times over budget and climbing. A second, recent
audit revealed fiscal tactics had been used that
would have been admired by an Enron accountant.
Gun registry spending was pulled from many
different budgets without a trace -- no line
items flagged the covert movement of the funds.

The Liberals were further wounded when an Adscam
scandal of similar proportions came to light
where party cronies were awarded contracts
because they were insiders. Payola here, payola
there, payola everywhere was increasingly the image of the Liberal party.

The Tories campaigned on an
"end-the-gun-registry" plank in their platform.
It was very helpful in ousting the Liberals.
It focused opinion on much that was wrong with the Liberal government.

While lacking the majority (yet) to outright
repeal the long gun registry, they have been
taking the money for the registry and giving it
to the Mounties so they can do real police work.
They have also proclaimed an amnesty so
unregistered gun owners don't have to register pending repeal of the law.

Interestingly, when the Liberals decreed (without
a vote in Parliament) many amnesties to try to
snooker Canadians into registering their guns --
that was good government. Now that the Tories
have decreed an amnesty in the same
non-parliamentary fashion (it would be called an
executive order in the U.S.), opponents have
decried the amnesty as a horrible violation of
the rule of law. Just ask the Liberals and their
allies in the mainstream (partisan) media.

Not only is the gun registry heading in the right
direction (to the trash heap), the Tories have
sacked Canada's rabidly anti-gun representatives
at the UN's ongoing gun control convocation.
The UN has been seeking for years to impose worldwide
gun control (read: disarm American private gun
owners). Canada, along with Japan, has been a
major supporter of a treaty which would have the
UN administer an international gun registry.

With the still-growing scandal of the Canadian
long-gun registry, the UN will have a harder sell
for its own global gun registry. To put it
in other words, guns don't get into criminals hands
because of negligent gun owners, guns get there thanks to gun control laws!


To add insult to injury, the UN would like to
have its anti-gun powwow over the week of July 4.
This is a plan much like kicking a sleeping dog.
If US gun owners have been too busy until now to
pay attention to the UN's lust for their guns,
this little bit of timing might change all that.
Maybe we will come to see the UN as George III's revenge.

In light of this, the Canadian election in
January takes on a worldwide significance. The
Conservative government of Canada has become a
true ally of the United States, and of individual
gun-owning Americans -- indeed of gun owners everywhere.



We should all take heart that a people that
seemed to go along with every oppressive policy
of their socialist government finally "pushed
back," as member of Parliament Garry Breitkreuz
(Conservative from Saskatchewan) told me in my
Live Fire interview with him
(<http://www.gunowners.org/radio.htm>hear the
interview). Maybe those of us who are Canada's
southern neighbor will follow suit and push back
against our own suffocating socialists. [ boldface emfasis added by OmSigDAVID ]