Upcoming strategy needed for defending the long-gun registry.
A lot of commentary in the media about the gun registry and what to do going forward. I note Jim Travers is in the Star today complaining that the Liberals (and to a lesser extent, the NDP) haven’t had a very good strategy so far: If they had started sooner and thought harder, Liberals could have offered a more creative solution than the simplistic ruling party plan to scrap the registry. Or they could have turned a Conservative wedge issue to Liberal advantage by taking a principled position appealing to the 80 per cent of us living in cities…Instead of ma

Spending some stimulus money in non-Conservative ridings might help…
That’s my suggestion for Harper’s Conservatives, in the light of this news: Canada’s unemployment rate jumped two notches to 8.6 per cent last month as employers unexpectedly shed jobs, suggesting the country is still struggling for a sustained recovery. Employers cut 43,200 positions in October, with all the losses in part-time work, Statistics Canada said Friday. Economists had expected about 10,000 new jobs following two months of gains. The job numbers might have been

Peter Van Loan decided to not release this RCMP report on the gun registry…
..until after the vote last night, and for obvious reasons, as Susan Delacourt of the Star points out at her blog: Less than 24 hours after the Commons voted in principle to scrap the long-gun registry, here’s the newly released performance report on the Canadian Firearms Centre. It’s spending less, attracting more registrants and police are using the registry  more — almost 4,000 times last year. Yep, that’s an argument to kill it.  Full report available if you click

Amendments and the ‘chamber of sober second thought’ still await Bill C-391.
Bill C-391 is of course the “private members bill” to scrap the long-gun registry that passed 2nd reading last night in the House. I will reiterate that I never believed this to be a true “private members bill” to begin with (I’ve read from news reports that the PMO was handing out talking points to every Conservative MP on Wednesday – when was the last time with a private member’s bill that a Prime Minister’s Office was issuing standard talking points to its MP’s on it? Never, I would assert), and that Ignatieff and Layton on the opposition side should have recognized that and whipped their caucus on this vote. I was furious last n

The Auditor-General is a Liberal hack and/or over-politicizing a crisis!
Will there be any of that today from our media or Conservative supporters over Auditor-General Sheila Fraser’s report that says the opposition parties are correct in being critical of the Federal Conservative government’s pandemic approach – or lack thereof ?  I’m guessing not, and note the title of this story: Opposition joins AG in criticizing government’s pandemic planning “Certainly an approved plan would have clearly indicated what the role was for Public Safety Canada, what the roles of the other department