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"The NDP party?" Are you a Liberal or a Conservative?
Thunder Bay is a metropolitan area with 121,596 residents (2011 census), of which 108,359 are in the large urban area of the City of Thunder Bay, and 13,237 in the suburbs. Thunder Bay District has 146,057 residents, of which 24,461 (17%) live outside the metropolitan area. Northern, yes. Rural, not very. Far more urban than Timmins-James Bay and Churchill, where our MPs managed.
Furthermore, John Rafferty evidently told Tom Mulcair that the long gun registry vote was a one-off, he accepted his discipline, he would accept the whip in future, and he wanted to help the caucus develop a new gun registry policy that his constituents could live with. Bruce Hyer, a very able and intelligent fellow, has made it clear to Mulcair that he would like to reserve the right to reject the whip from time to time on future issues, and Mulcair has made it clear (on Don Martin's program where I heard him, and no doubt elsewhere) that this is not possible for a shadow cabinet member. Hyer could have stayed in caucus with his views, but unwisely sulked off. I hope he will come back.
Call it urban/rural, north/south or whatever you want to call it. There is a difference. Sure Thunder Bay the city itself is urban, but they are surrounded by bush where those people go hunting. Usually a short 15 minute drive and you can hunt. In Toronto you'd have to drive a few hours any direction to get anywhere you can hunt. Much more people in Northern Ontario (or other "rural" or surrounded by "rural" ridings) hunt (per capita) than people in Southern Ontario. Also, to Unionist, support for the NDP is more labour-populist in these "rural/surrounding rural" ridings compared to the urban ones. A number of NDP supporters in these rural areas are actually quite socially conservative. To insist that NDP supporters everywhere in Canada all believe in the exact same thing just isn't right.
Aha. So now we're getting somewhere. "socially conservative", eh?
Let's see. Tough on crime? Not crazy about abortion on demand? Still trying to get their heads around same-sex marriage? Think welfare recipients should get a job? Uncomfortable about the old ways being put into question with all these new immigrants?
See, people have a right to be socially conservative, whatever that code word means to you. They have a right to vote for representatives who they believe share and will reflect those values. Where their right stops is the expectation that some MP should have the right to defy his party policy and decision on such questions.
I'm quite sure Bruce Hyer doesn't have any intention of voting the wrong way on the issues I've just mentioned. But he appears to want to maintain a 5% right to defy his caucus. He should have the plain decency and transparency to spell that out, right now, in advance. If he can't, or won't, he should have a nice day.
I watch people changing on all those issues. On all of them, most of my neighbours arent the same people they used to be.
But the LGR touchstone is different- even though the bulk of the males dont hunt any more.
'More socialy conservative' can be very nuanced and shifting, but still be tangible. So a lot of my neighbours are still less sure about what they think on most of the issues in that list- it just isnt as cut and dried as they used to think. So, no, they dont oppose abotion on demand, and.... But their overall frame is still more conservative.
And then there is the LGR, which overlaps all of that.... but is also a touchstone all of its own.
It's not as if, had the NDP come to power with a majority of one in the last electiion, and the Liberals and whatever remained of the Bloc had suddenly decided that their political salvation lay in ending the LGR(it wouldn't be the first time the Liberals decided they needed to destroy something they themselves had built in the past, after all, and possibly the Bloc would have reasoned, in this scenario, that scrapping the LGR would have helped them make the case to Quebec voters that Canada was now too bloodthirsty to remain part of), the voters of Hyer's riding would have expected him to bring down the new governmnent over the issue.
After all, their decision to vote for ANY NDP candidate would have been based on a total rejection of the Harpercrite agenda just as the voters in Danforth or most of Quebec rejected it.
The other thing about the LGR issue is...if registration is such a threat to long gun ownership, how do they explain the fact that there hasn't been mass confiscation of handguns in Canada? Those have had their own registry for years.
The LGR was never going to stop anybody from hunting.
Consider, too, that the labour-based nature of such "rural" NDP support means that one can easily perceive something of a brown/green divide btw/it and the urban base...
There's that...which is one reason the NDP needs to get really REALLY serious about "green jobs". Unless they do, the Harpercrites will always be able to siphon off rural working-class voters on "extraction means jobs" promises(the BC Socreds were also able to do this in logging areas, as have been the Alberta PC's in the oilpatch).
No but the repetitive costs every year and paperwork was deadly to those that use the LG for food, since they couldnt afford it in the first place. A simple registry with no costs after the initial registration would have been fine
Agreed. And it's not as if the NDP was opposed to that, as far as I know.
I think it was only the Liberals who were taking a "no change to the LGR at all" position.
And that's mainly because there's no such thing as a Liberal supporter anywhere in rural Canada.
And that's exactly what has been in effect for several years.
Too little too late. The LGR was tainted with the previous issues. It would have to be a new creation of simple registration and hopefully no costs
In other words, it would have to be something that an NDP government could come up but not a Liberal government.
Mulcair boxed himself in when he committed to bringing back the gun registry on the dubious premise that it "saves lives." He's tied himself to the unpopular Liberal program. He should have said something along the following lines:
"Gun control is a serious issue, but unfortunately the Liberals and Conservatives have poisoned the issue by dividing people for political gain. We intend to look seriously at gun control, to strengthen it where necessary, but we will do so in a way that is respectful of the legitimate concerns of legal gun owners."
That's almost exactly what he said, if you substitute "registry" for "control."
That substitution is an assumption which cannot be made.
There's nothing in what Mulcair has said that ties him to re-instituting the program EXACTLY as it was. He has plenty of latitude with which to create a more palatable form of the registry...unless you think the NDP will somehow lose votes by promising to do away with a fee.
When he was on Don Martin's program commenting on Hyer, he was very specific: it will NOT be the Liberal registry, which he said was flawed; and he said the NDP caucus would be working on designing the better model. Including Rafferty (and Hyer if he comes back.)
good to know Wilf
same here Brachina - that's why she got elected - to get the job done!
ha ha ha - I meant he!
Maybe he should join the Marijuana Party. He's got the name for it.
Exactly. And in any case, lest it be repeated again: Canada is not the USA. No one has an actual constitutional right to own a gun. So the historonics over the very concept of a gun registry are quite foreign and bizzare. If there are so many one issue voters out there that will base their entire electoral decision on what sort of procedures they must follow to lawfully own a gun here then let them join the Bruce Hyer Party, which apparently agrees with the NDP on 95% of the issues except that Bruce Hyer should always be in cabinet (or at least shadow cabinet) and that Canadians ought to be a lot better armed than they currently are.
Surely you mean the Beer* Party?
* Brews.
I see no reason why those two parties can't merge. Well, I remember back in grad school...
Well done! I'm not even able to construct a credible sentence that contains both those terms ("remember" and "school").
It is a mistake to assume the urban/rural divide exists between regions or ridings - there is a population centre of city size (10 000) in pretty well every part of Canada barring the Far North, to my knowledge. The divide exists within ridings - the NDP still does better in cities within Northern and rural ridings than it does in the outlying communities found there in, only the divide is less noticeable there because of the proximity of the bush and wilderness and the blending of urban/rural lifestyles. IMO Hyer quit caucus not because of decision to exclude him from the shadow cabinet, but because his pick for leader (Cullen) did not make the top spot - does anyone think he would have left NDP caucus had Cullen won? That's just me though - as far as I can tell his main gripes are with the leaders since Layton, ie Turmel and Mulcair.
As has benn pointed out at least twice before in this thread... for purposes of this discussion it is NOT a rural/urban divide, if you are using the StatsCan definition of urban. Its a [big] CITY versus rural/small town divide ....with the sensibilities of much of the smaller cities having a great deal in common with the rural/small town. Which has to do with both the literal locational proximity of people in small cities to 'the country' ...but even more, to the close and recent family ties of the small city residents [like Saskatoon and Halifax, let alone the more obvious Kelowna and Lethbridge].
So for all intents and purposes, along this measurable difference in typical sensibilities, we have a few whole provinces where in no centres do most people fit into what is loosely called the "rural" / "urban" divide.