NDP gun registry promise could complicate election for northern candidates
'People thought it was a very unfair registry,' former Yukon grand chief recalls
Northern NDP candidates may have an additional challenge in the next federal election now that the NDP leader, Tom Mulcair, has vowed to begin registering long guns again if he becomes prime minister.
Some say support for the gun registry by Yukon Liberal Larry Bagnell cost him the last election.
In 2011, Bagnell lost his seat to Conservative Ryan Leef by just 132 votes, after a decade as serving as Yukon’s representative in Ottawa.
Ed Schultz was Grand Chief of the Council of Yukon First Nations when the gun registry controversy raged. He says it was an irritant to many Yukoners.
“People thought it was a very unfair registry, cultivated and developed by urban people who didn't understand rural or country living or particularly aboriginal subsistence living.”
Schultz says hunting guns are an essential part of life for many Yukoners, and so is the ability to pass them on from generation to generation.
He says the registry may have helped law enforcement officers track guns, but it didn't seem to prevent crime.
“And with the fees and the testing when a lot of First Nations people particularly in the bush who didn't read or write very well, you culminate all that together and it became a very onerous and difficult process.”
Mulcair says the new registry would be less onerous than the one abolished by the Conservatives
Liberal leader Justin Trudeau says he won't bring it back.