Molly

I'd sure as H-E-double toothpicks prefer one who has been through an 83% effective treatment program over one who has not!

They don't realize that telling kids stuff like that is one of the reasons there is less and less respect for the Police everyday. Once the kids are old enough to know better they view them as liars, and don't trust them. Needs to be said twice.

It's a pretty easy message to say, "Yeah!" to, regardless of your political leanings. It'll help.

Voters/MP is a different tratio than people represented/MP. The redistribution proposes that while Quebec MPs will represent the most voters, Alberta MPs will still represent more people.

Yes.... hoard the resources, and gut the communities. As one of those who paid for that financial soundness, I'm quite familiar with the strategies that led to it. I rarely go back to visit, because the destruction is difficult to bear.

The Sask Party is a functional merger of Liberals and PCs....

The sky did not come crashing down, but that doesn't mean that the right-wing predictions of less than stellar economic performance, and individual opportunity reduced by committee decision-making/ collective action, were not accurate. One need only compare Saskatchewan to Alberta to recognize that there are serious up- and down-sides to the choice.

Your great desire to avoid it doesn't make it a strawman.

You found one. I'm opposed to mandatory minimum sentences pretty much wherever they appear, because the one and only thing they are guaranteed to produce is miscarriages of justice. The best, most noteworthy example of it is Robert Lateimer, still serving a sentence 10 X as long as his judge or jury saw as appropriate.

It was too convenient by half to snub Ahmadinejad... and to have a snub to the UN and to and collective environmental action both thrown in as freebies. I find it all very uncomfortable, very disquieting.

Yes, that inclination to 'omnibus' legislation, to push the poison pills through, unconsidered, folded into a package with essential housekeeping.... defeats the spirit of parliament. Even in minority, that hard right wing social agenda is being slipped in, slipped in, slithered in.....

There are few things more annoying than having someone guess at what you might say, so that they may then argue with their own fantasy. It is, however, completely true that the US is the source for most guns used in criminal activities. Largely, that's because handguns are startlingly accessible there, and handguns are the tool of choice.... not long guns. It might actually be well less than that, in urban areas. The numbers I've seen suggest that it is a higher number in rural areas than in urban ones, and that long guns are more often a factor in rural crime too, so overall numbers are padded by events that largely don't happen in urban settings. The statistic is relevant because it means that the money spent was badly mis-aimed. Turning the chicken-coop into Fort Knox is not helpful in preventing the coyotes from eating the sheep. Caught up in it? It's the entire issue!!!!

You'd best provide a source for that number, because it is wildly out of whack with any stats I've seen-- from nearly double to about 12 X. But of that, how many were long guns? And how many involved long guns? Was it as high as 1 or 2%? And what effect did the registry have on that number? Which involves how many long guns? And does the registry address that issue in any manner?

Dobbin, folks have been studying it to death for over a decade, albeit, not impartially. Google can get you any number of analyses, in a heartbeat- some half-decent, most so one-sided as to be laughable. The information is readily available to anyone interested -- but the issue is emotion-, not thought-driven. It doesn't take a a pack of researchers combing gun-nut propaganda to report that Canadian-sourced long-guns (much less legally-owned, Canadian-sourced long guns) play a paltry role in crime, and that introduction of the registry had no discernable effect on it. Nor does it take that pack of researchers to tell you that it has been a stunningly expensive exercize, for individuals as well as govenment, even if it did accomplish its presumed goals (which it does not). How much more analysis do you need than that?

FACs predated the long gun registry, and are not part of that legislation. No one is objecting to FAC requirements, nor to purchases being recorded, nor to a safety course requirement. No one is objecting to having themselves checked out and recorded as a gun owner, or even of being denied the privelege if they are found not suitable. Your car is not siezed if you don't renew the registration, you are not subject to criminal charges if you fail to register a car that doesn't leave your property, and you are not consenting to warrantless searches of your home by registering a car.

Do you even have any idea how many crimes are committed in Canada in a year using long guns? Didn't think so. Our greatest use of guns was to dispatch animals in distress, or for butchering. If you have an alternate, equally humane way to do it, feel free to suggest it. We also shot predators and vermin, and sometimes even used a shotgun to make noise to scatter ducks and geese gorging themselves on our crops. And, honestly, it was nice to have access to a gun somewhere nearby as a a matter of personal safety, since police response in an emergency could be several hours. I don't buy 'protection' as a reason in the vast majority of circumstances, but .... I did tuck the 22 within reach behind the porch door a couple of times, when I didn't like the look of the folks in the yard. One of our neighbours used her gun to kill a cougar that seemed bent on joining her in the kitchen. But I've never seen the need for handguns, either. I see the registry didn't prevent them from having one. And that's exactly what folks who own guns said it was at the bottom of it: folks who were not interested in reasonable compromise, but in making gun ownership something between difficult and impossible, regardless of their usefulness. Reasonable rules, controls and restrictions met no resistance at all.

Cost and hassle for a start. Suspension of some pretty basic liberties, to go with it. Even the determinedly law-abiding were run through the wringer, and to what end? It was a response to Marc Lepine, not because it would be effective, but in order for government to be seen to be responding. It was a poor response.

Detailed analysis isn't needed when something is an obvious dog on sight. We're well past first blush, and it's still a dog.

They still don't know. That was already covered by FACs.

That's why so very many guns went underground. The real pro-gun folk estimated it at millions, and were pooh-poohed, but I figure they weren't far off. Grandpas Colt.45 has nothing to do with the long gun registry.

Pfft! It was a mess from the getgo, harrassment rather than reasonable limitation, effective control, or even an accurate list-- and even now that it's 'up and running', provides virtually no useful information. Even if it only costs $20,000,000 a year to continue, that's money that could be better spent.

My team? My team? I didn't have a dog in that race, Punked, and in case you are wondering, adding a Liberal candidate wouldn't have given me one. The Liberal party is irrelevant in that province, and hasn't shown any sign of being a positive influence since Lynda Haverstock was the leader. I do, however, have long familiarity with Lingenfelter, and firmly believe that your party, and the province, will rue the day he came back. How well he is tolerated by party / province/ constituency- how he conducts himself- interests me mightily. I consider him to be the authour of most of the very worst that came from the Romanow cabinet, in terms of both policy and of ethics.

Ha! Van Mulligan won with 52% of the vote in that riding in a general election with the NDP in decline, and the Liberals filedinga candidate! (edit: Just checked. 57% of the vote in 2003...) You have a very different definition of a 'big win' than I do!

Well, well, well.... Lingenfelter didn't exactly slam-dunk that by-election in one of the safest NDP seats in the province. He scored 50.2% of the vote, to the Sask Party 45%. That's a steep decline from Van Mulligans record there.

And in Saskatchewan, harmonization particularly suffers from the 'Devine Effect'. "The idea of harmonizing Saskatchewan's tax with Ottawa's has been on the back burner since former premier Grant Devine's Progressive Conservatives proposed the idea in the early 1990s. Proponents said it would reduce paperwork and result in fairer taxation to businesses. The NDP called it a tax grab. The PCs ended up being trounced in the 1991 election." (CBC)