That’s just like a pot smoker who hides his personal stash objecting to the cost of enforcing the drug laws.
That is, there’s nothing at all wrong with it.
I’d take the opinions of police chiefs with a grain of salt, they tend to be politicians who push the agenda of their political masters. There is often a huge disconnect between their opinions and those of the ordinary police officer.
For that matter, many police chiefs opposed the registry. Even Julian Fantino, Toronto’s chief of police - a guy in an avowedly anti-gun city, serving anti-gun politicians, who himself complained to the press every chance he got about guns in the city - said it was a stupid idea. The government’s own Auditor General reported that there wasn’t any evidence that registry reduced crime.
Actually, there’s some evidence it may have resulted in MORE crimes, as A) the registry was reposterously easy to hack into, and B) after its implementation there were some curiously well-targeted burglaries of gun collections.
What IS for sure is that had the $2 billion wasted gone into just hiring more cops, crime would have likely been reduced for real.
Contrary to the OP, it isn’t just hicks and proto-fascists (and what’s fascist about OPPOSING government control of something, anyway?) who oppose this, it’s anyone who’s taken a few minutes to study the issue.
Not by much, though. Quebec has 75 seats (24.35% of the total), which in 2006 went[ul][li]Bloc: 51[]Liberal: 24[/ul][/li]
If there was a proportional system, and figure a party needs at least 2% of the popular vote to secure a seat, the totals would have been (more or less):
[ul][li]Conservative: 18[]Liberal: 16[]Bloc: 32[]NDP: 6[*]Green: 3[/ul][/li]
I’m sure everyone but the Bloc would love to see proportional elections in Quebec ridings, but neither the Conservatives nor Liberals are likely to support such a move nationwide, at least not until after the Bloc is gone.
Yes, I’m citing facts in a Pit thread. Wanna fight about it?
And actually, if one takes the time to talk to most of the hicks who oppose the registry, you’ll find that a great many of them aren’t opposed to gun control in principle, so long as it’s gun control that will actually impede criminal use of guns without placing undue burden on those who use firearms for lawful purposes.
I think one of the key differences in attitudes in this debate between rural West and urban East is that in the rural West, most people think of firearms as tools, where most urbanites think of firearms as weapons, though of course like any generalized statement there will be many exceptions to this.
RickJay and Bryan Ekers, my understanding of featherlou’s post is that she is advocating giving each region (presumably meaning Quebec, Ontario, West and East with the possible addition of British Columbia) an equal number of seats in the House. Is that correct? If it is, I would be against it, but I could see it as a possible basis for an eventual reform of the Senate. Just a basis, of course, many other things would need to be discussed before getting to a Senate reform that I would agree with.
Oh, and Bryan Ekers, your facts are wrong. Quebec’s seats in 2006 went as such:
[ul]
[li]Bloc: 51[/li][li]Liberal: 13[/li][li]Conservative: 10[/li][li]Vacuum cleaner selling, bus driving, big mouth DJ: 1 ;)[/li][/ul]
I have no idea what the parties’ position on proportional representation is. It’s not discussed at all at the federal level.
I’m not Canadian, so I won’t go into details. However, I’ll make a prediction, based on our silly past south of the border. Even after gun restrictions have gone as far as you could expect to be effective, every new front-page gun violence story will bring a new cry for tighter gun laws, even though the latest killer(s) violated existing laws.
When you throw out the babies with the bathwater, the sewers will become clogged with babies. That’s bad form.
Yeah, that’s more what I was referring to (and the North, too, of course). I personally would like to see a time when voting in the West means something, but I would settle for having the Senate reformed. We would swing from having vast regions of Canada woefully underrepresented to having two bodies of government that would probably end up deadlocked on every single issue - hard to say which would be worse in the long run. Some people making all the decisions for everyone, or everyone making no decisions at all. 
(As far as I know, the Conservatives are in favour of a triple E senate.)
Maybe that’s Harper’s eventual goal, but I don’t think it’s in the platform of the Conservative party. And I do believe that this idea would meet opposition from some Conservatives.
Well, the facts are right, they’re just for the wrong year - I accidentally read the 2004 results.
Actually, the 2004 results were Bloc, 54; Liberal, 21. 
But it’s pretty close.
Um, this is how the Senate IS set up currently - 24 Senators for each region (plus a few extra added for the late additions of Newfoundland and the territories). The whole point of the Senate is to balance out the rep-by-pop setup of the Commons and provide a stronger voice for the less populous regions.
Yes, but since the Senate is thoroughly discredited right now it doesn’t mean much. I’d be ready to consider a Senate reform that kept the concept of equal representation for each region (or modified it slightly from how it is currently), but also gave it a greater importance.