Bill C-391

Bill C-391 was a piece of Canadian legislation aimed at abolishing the wasteful Canadian gun registry, introduced to the Canadian House of Commons 2nd Session, 40th Parliament, in May 2009 by Candice Hoeppner, Conservative Member of Parliament for the riding of Portage-Lisgar, Manitoba.

Bill C-301,an earlier bill tabled by CPC MP Garry Breitkreuz in February 2009, was dropped in favour of Hoeppner's approach to the issue. The bill is particularly memorable due to the particularly underhanded way in which the Parliamentary Opposition (Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois) killed the bill.

Readings

Second

The Bill was again brought before the House of Commons on November 4, 2009 and passed second reading by a vote of 164 to 137, including 12 NDP MPs, eight Liberals and one Independent. From there the Bill will go back to a Commons committee again, where it can remain for up to 90 days, for further study and a possible amendment before returning to the Lower House for the third and final reading.

Third

see also: List of MPs who flipped on C-391 and Gun registry map: How the MPs voted across Canada (CBC)

September 21, 2010: The bill never made it to its third reading. It was removed from the order after motion by the opposition — that the bill should proceed no further, with no reason given — passed by a vote of 153 to 151, after 16 Opposition MPs who had previously voted to scrap the registry flipped.

Differences with C-301

The primary difference between Hoeppner's and the Breitkreuz bill was that, where Bill C-301 contained many additional provisions which some thought would be unpalatable to the Opposition (the Conservatives were in a minority government position at the time), C-391 dealt exclusively with the abolition of the Canadian long gun registry and nothing else.

Pundits at the time claimed that while Opposition parties could deflect criticism arising from voting against the Breitkreuz bill, opposing a straight-up killing of the costly and ineffective long gun registry would be politically damaging. Given that Canada was in a recession at the time and costs of the registry had already ballooned to over 1000 times the original estimates, it was generally believed that voting in favor of the white elephant could be political suicide, particularly for Opposition MPs from rural ridings.

Opposition

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Bill C-391 was not so much how it was written, but rather the backroom political antics of Opposition parties to keep the bill from ever coming to a vote in the first place.

On June 15 2009, in a meeting of the subcommittee on private members business, opposition MPs Marlene Jennings (Liberal), Christiane Gagnon (Bloc), and Chris Charleton (NDP), in spite of being instructed and admitting that there was no procedural reason for preventing the bill from coming to a vote in the House, all moved against allowing such a vote.

Upon a request by Conservative Party of Canada MP Scott Reid (the only one on the committee to vote in favour of allowing Parliament to vote on the bill) for a spoken vote, they were then reminded that they were in a public meeting and as such, were on the record. At that point, all three Opposition members protested and demanded that the meeting be moved in camera. Committee meetings held in camera are not recorded into the public record.

Clearly, Jennings, Gagnon and Charleton did not want the Canadian public to know what they had done, but the cat was already out of the bag.

Opposition MPs also used their numerical advantage to restrict Hoeppner's time to 30 minutes to introduce the bill. It's standard for an MP who introduces a bill to be allotted a full hour to properly present their legislation. Instead, in a highly unusual step, Hoeppner was called as a witness.

Whipped vote

On May 10 2010 Michael Ignatieff, the Leader of the Official Opposition and of the Liberal Party, announced that the final vote would be whipped and the 8 Liberals who had previously voted in favour of the bill would now be required to vote against it (against the wishes of their constituents) or face disciplinary measures. It is almost unheard of in the Canadian Parliamentary system for there to be a whipped vote on a private member's bill.

While the NDP did not announce that the vote would be whipped, 6 of their MPs flipped from their previous positions (which many had publicly declared for years) and voted to keep the registry in place. Whether any of these hypocrites will be able to win reelection remains to be seen.

External links

• Text of Bill C-391, First Reading version, Parliament of Canada website.