The editors of The Line regretfully return from holidays to start a new year, and the federal government’s gun confiscation bill (not called that, of course) gets both barrels:
The first item worth mentioning: remember how back in November and December the prime minister and the public safety minister, Messrs. Trudeau and Mendicino, were dismissing any suggestion that they were banning hunting rifles as hype? Or Conservation misinformation? When they were saying that the suggestions were false, and those making them were sowing confusion?
Well! Funny thing happened over the break. The PM, in his year-end interviews, is now admitting that the suggestions were, in fact, right.
Take this, for example, from his sit down with CTV News (our emphasis added):
“Our focus now is on saying okay, there are some guns, yes, that we’re going to have to take away from people who were using them to hunt,” Trudeau said. “But, we’re going to also make sure that you’re able to buy other guns from a long list of guns that are accepted that are fine for hunting, whether it’s rifles or shotguns. We’re not going at the right to hunt in this country. We are going at some of the guns used to do it that are too dangerous in other contexts.”
We’ll skip much analysis here. We think this is dumb policy, and we’ve explained why before, but it’s at least an acknowledgement of what their policy actually is, and very obviously was since the very time it was announced back in November. There’s no room for any confusion or doubt here. The Liberals spent weeks crying LIES! and MISINFORMATION! at people who were accurately describing what they were doing.
You can support the policy being proposed — again, we don’t, but that’s fine — but you can’t excuse this. The PM and the public safety minister were lying to the public. That should matter.
We’ll have more to say on this later. But for now, that’s the update: The Liberals now admit they’re trying to do the dumb thing they spent weeks insisting they weren’t doing.
This is, incredibly, a kind of progress.
Related somewhat to the above: a smart friend of The Line, who cannot be named as this stuff is their day job, told us weeks ago to watch for a schism in the NDP over this issue. For the Liberals, their dumb policy proposal still makes political sense. Well, it probably does — we have some suspicion that the LPC has maxed out the electoral utility of hammering on guns, and may now face more blowback than benefit, but time will tell. Still, the proposal may make sense for the Liberals: they are utterly dependent on urban and suburban women to survive, and the dumb gun proposal apparently resonates with them. And that’s true for part of the NDP’s base, too, but, critically, our friend reminded us, not for all of it.
The federal NDP of today is a strange creature. It’s partly very much a party of the deepest, wokest downtown ridings, but there’s also a big contingent of Dipper MPs from places like northern Ontario and rural parts of Manitoba and British Columbia. Cracking down on guns just plays differently there. When the policy was first announced, this division among NDP MPs didn’t take long to come into public view. Jagmeet Singh, himself very much of the NDP’s woke urban contingent, was quiet for a few days before very clearly and obviously pivoting to oppose the proposed expansion of the banned firearms. The Liberals can afford to write off their last remaining rural, non-urban MPs. The NDP simply can’t.
And, our friend told us — again, this was weeks ago, right at the outset — if Singh didn’t get the message pronto, the party would fracture over this … and that Wab Kinew, leader of the Manitoba NDP, would be the leader of the rebels.
We aren’t experts on Kinew, or in internal NDP power dynamics, so we simply thanked our friend for the tip and analysis, and assured them we’d keep an eye on it. And we did.
And wouldja look at that.
Interesting, eh?
Anyway. As of now the Liberals are still talking tough on the amendment. But they need at least one party to work with them to push it forward. We can’t say for sure, but we wonder if the Liberals are comfortable talking tough about it because they now accept they can’t push it forward — at least not any time soon. The Bloc seems wary of getting saddled with this and the NDP, indeed, might split over this issue if Singh were to try.
So we’ll keep watching this, and particularly Mr. Kinew, who may indeed covet Mr. Singh’s job.
To our friend: you were right. Thanks for the tip.
