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National Firearms Association Newswire:
21 March 2002
YOU WILL DO AS I SAY… or ELSE!
Frankly, that is the image I have in my mind about how Saddam Hussein would deal with a person who raised concerns over what Iraq was doing.
I can picture Saddam standing and ranting. I can picture him reducing the people around him to fearful and even tearful states.
During Wednesday's Liberal Caucus Meeting, Canada's Prime Minister, in an apparent display of bad temper and anger, reduced Liberal Member of Parliament Rose-Marie Ur to tears.
Why?
Ms. Ur apparently had the unmitigated gall to question the wisdom of the federal Liberal Firearm Registry scheme. So have a growing number of other Liberal Members of
Parliament.The Prime Minister, and remember, this is a man who is proud to say he grew up as a "streetfighter", doesn't seem, after all the years he has been in the House of Commons, to recognize that the House is a place for the "best and brightest" of the country.
Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones sing "There's just no place for a street fighting man".
This program was supposed to cost $2 million dollars. Martin Cauchon is demanding $59 million dollars to "finish the year 2002" - and another $110 million or so for the new year. Surely the Prime Minister should be leading the charge to find out how and why this program is in such financial trouble?
Instead, the Prime Minister is reducing proud Members of Parliament to tears by defending a boondoggle.
Surely, in today's troubled world, the Prime Minister of Canada has better things to do.
PUBLICATION: Edmonton Journal
DATE: 2003.03.21
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Opinion
PAGE: A18
COLUMN: Lorne Gunter
BYLINE: Lorne Gunter
SOURCE: The Edmonton Journal------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------Big man! He made a woman cry: Chretien browbeats caucus into adding to gun-registry absurdities
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--------------------The spectre of Prime Minister Jean Chretien reducing a female MP to tears at the regular Wednesday meeting of his Liberal caucus, over her misgivings about voting new millions for the federal gun registry, is still further proof that being Liberal means never having to admit you're wrong, much less say you're sorry -- even when presiding over the most dishonest public policy in a generation.
Rose-Marie Ur represents the rural Ontario riding of Lambton-Kent-Middlesex, which forms a crescent around Sarnia from Lake St. Clair in the west, to Lake Huron in the north.
Like a lot of rural Liberal MPs, Ur is facing pressure from constituents to close the billion-dollar registry. Since December, when Auditor General Sheila Fraser revealed the depth of waste and ineptitude at the registry, Ur has been advocating for its closure, pending an investigation into how
nearly $1 billion could have been squandered on a registry that is still at least three to four years from functioning properly."We are talking about huge amounts of taxpayer money here and it's simply been wasted," Ur told her local Chatham Daily News the day after Fraser brought down her report last December. "There is no excuse for it and it can't be allowed to continue."
But Chretien, in full dictatorial flower, says not only can the waste be excused and continued, it must be excused and continued.
On Tuesday, the House of Commons will be asked to approve $59 million to pay the registry's bills to the end of the current fiscal year (March 31), plus another $113 million for fiscal year 2003-04. So adamant is the prime minister that his MPs vote the extra money -- even though no appreciable changes have been made to the registry's ineffectual operations since Fraser's report -- he has threatened to expel from caucus any Liberal who turns down the request.
He has also threatened to make the motion a confidence vote in his government. If by some fluke it failed, the government would then fall and an election would be triggered.
Chretien did not exercise this level of caucus discipline in 1995 when the registry bill, C-68, was passed into law. In June of that year, nine Liberals MPs, including Ur, voted against the creation of the registry.
But the continuation of the registry is another matter. To cut off its funding now would be to concede the Liberals' critics were right all along, and the Liberals wrong. And that would never do.
The only person more determined than a Liberal with a good idea is a Liberal with a bad one, particularly one that has been revealed to all as utterly without merit. To admit error would be to admit fallibility.
And more even than the Pope, a Liberal prime minister is convinced of his own infallibility. So the more colossal the screw-up, the more lavish the defence of it must be.Wednesday, the Liberals sent a four-part series of talking points to all their MPs and Senators with their typical distortions, half-truths and spin on the registry: They claimed it is increasing public safety (although gun crime is up), support for it is widespread (not anymore), opponents are spreading myths about the registry (like the government's myth that it would only cost $2 million?) and the action is being taken to improve operations (for instance, promoting the last head of the registry to an even more senior post in the Justice department).
It is a hard-won power of Parliament that it alone may approve or deny the King's budget. The ability to say "yea" or "nay" to the King's plans for spending and taxing is Parliament's principal check against
the absolute power of the monarch. But when that power was won three centuries ago, no one ever conceived of the day when the King would take up a place in Parliament, when the prime minister would begin to rule as if by divine right -- as if he had been crowned, rather than elected.Rather than permit the handful of Liberal backbenchers with guts enough to oppose the registry and the dignity to represent their constituents as they see fit, rather than concede there is anything wrong with
the registry, Chretien squeezes one of his own MPs, in front of his entire caucus, until she breaks down and cries. Ooo, big man.Not only is Tuesday's fully whipped vote a denial of the waste and futility of the registry, it is also proof positive that Justice Minister Martin Cauchon told Parliament a tall tale in December when he asked for, but failed to receive $72 million to fund the registry to the end of March. After withdrawing the request for more money, Cauchon said the registry would survive through "cash management." Apparently cash management was only good for $13 million of the registry's expenses, though, not the full $72 million, which is why Cauchon is back asking for another $59 million now.
Hiding the registry's failures, distorting its record of crime-prevention, keeping Parliament in the dark over its costs and berating one's own MPs to keep it alive is what passes for democratic accountability
in Liberal Ottawa.