Liberals defending their useless, costly brainchild… again.
Well, it looks like the federal Liberals are still trying to defend what’s turned into nothing less (and nothing more) than a catastrophic, onerous bureaucratic boondoggle that the Conservatives have finally vowed to start tearing down.
Yes, I named the now disappointingly famous gun registry, a typical Liberal brainchild in all ways. See for yourself: 1. It reinforces statism and government control in a field where it is not needed or wished for; 2. It uses precious taxpayers’ money to manage something non-governmental institutions (like police departments) could have managed by themselves; and 3. It costs a lot more than what was planned…
And until the day we abolish it, it still costs us money to maintain and use.
Yet, we’re still seeing people like Liberal senator Lucie Pépin come forward and defend its existence and say that more good has come out of it than anything else. This is just Liberal craziness pushed to the max. Frustrated by their loss of power, they lash out at the other parties by trying to save their "heritage" at all costs, ie: what they’ve put forward and created during those twelve long years. Of which not a lot was truly great and/or valuable, come to think of it.
Anyhoo, Pépin’s main argument is that the almost automatic use of the gun registry by police corps across the country demonstrates its usefulness. She even goes further: according to her, it completely justifies its creation as a whole, and it should be sufficient to guarantee the continuation of its existence, which is, make the Conservatives promise that they won’t abolish it.
Senator Pépin must not have a very high level of respect for taxpayers’ hard-earned money if she wants to keep a two billion-dollar bureaucratic nightmare like the gun registry alive just out of frustration for not being in power anymore. It has been demonstrated and re-demonstrated that the whole Liberal initiative was superfluous. We could have gotten by without it, hell, we would’ve been a lot better without it! And we especially had to consider the fact that there was simply nobody really willing to register their firearms other than spotless law-abiding citizens - criminals weren’t going to use it for sure! Or, if criminals were to stumble upon a registered weapon, would they refuse to use it to commit a crime because of its registered status? I don’t think so. So, the gun registry is basically useless since it’s criminals we are targeting with it. Law-abiding citizens agree to register their guns, but it’s not those guns we have a problem with, it’s the illegal ones that will never get registered anyway! And if crimes are committed with a registered weapon, the only thing we’ll end up knowing is that the weapon was probably stolen from a law-abiding citizen, which we’ll learn about no matter what…
I still can’t make out a use for it. And it has cost two billion dollars, people. And counting. To think the initial prospected cost was in the range of two million. Either we find a use for it fast and cap down the costs, or we just scrap it.
For now, count me in the second option’s supporters.
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Source:
Lucie PÉPIN, "Toujours pertinent", a letter to the editor of La Presse
So lets redeploy 2 billion and see how many police officers that will buy. According to one superintendent I’ve talked to the RCMP haven’t seen a staffing increase in some 10 years to match population growth rate.
So I guess thats why 20 prostitutes got ground up in to hamburger meat at the Picton farm, and why 4 mounties got whacked by someone who shouldn’t have had firearms in the first place, but we decided to let a person with known problems out on the street anyway.
Nah, funding has got nothing to do with it.
Comment by Hans Rupprecht — April 1, 2006 @ 9:11 pm
I’m not saying we need more police. I’m saying we need less money wasting. I never heard about the Picton ON incident you are describing. But you’re right, we never should have let someone with problems back on the streets, let alone giving him a gun! I’m all for background checks, but not the registering of weapons themselves which is a waste of taxpayer funds.
Comment by Xavier R. Dubé — April 1, 2006 @ 9:20 pm
You wrore “I never heard about the Picton ON incident you are describing.”…. proving yet again a) how insular many Quebeckers are, and, b) that to many easterners in general, Canada ends at Thunder Bay, except that it’s nice to visit Vancouver.
The Picton Farm was in Port Coquitlam, BC…
http://www.warphead.com/modules/news/makepdf.php?storyid=17….
Comment by Andrew Spencer — April 2, 2006 @ 10:43 am
Whoa, calm down here, Andrew!
I really thought Hans meant Picton, Ontario; and with that spelling, it WAS that Picton he was talking about. The name of the guy who slaughtered prostitutes in Port Coquitlam BC (which I HAVE heard about, I just KNEW it wasn’t in Ontario) is Robert Pickton. With a “K”. If Hans had written “Pickton Farm” instead of “Picton farm” I would probably have understood what he meant. Truth is, I initially thought about the deranged man and the farm slaughterhouse in BC when I read “Picton farm” but I assumed he was talking about something else because of the spelling, and with good reason. As I had rightfully never heard of anything bad that happened in Picton ON, I just said so.
Yes, we Québecers can be quite insular. But you can thank our media and the fact that most of us don’t speak two languages for that. And while it’s true that I have never been any further to the West in Canada than Toronto and the Niagara area, and to the East than Caraquet NB, and in the U.S. to Arlington VA, I am one of the most knowledgeable folks among my friends and family about what happens in the news and the country’s geography. True, I know more about the U.S. than I do about Canada, but that’s just a matter of interest.
You know, most Québecers aren’t even aware there’s a Picton in Ontario.
No offense taken, though.
Comment by Xavier R. Dubé — April 2, 2006 @ 12:02 pm
Got to agree with Xavier here. As an anglo, I’m well up on the news that the MSM allows me to hear, but the Francophone media runs to a totally different agenda. Many of the stories you will not recognise, or the emphasis is very different. For example, Le Devoir frothed enormously about Groupe Action, rather than the overarching Adscam, because the former could be used to rope in all federal parties, and so help Le Devoir’s buddies in the BQ. Same news, different emphasis, totally diferent spin. Sadly we all pay a fortune for the CBC which continuously maintains low editorial standards, but cannot even be bothered to ensure that CBC and SRC are actually saying the same thing. The CBC/SRC is not the national broadcaster it presents itself as; it actually reinforces the Two Solitudes.
Comment by Dave — April 2, 2006 @ 12:58 pm