The following text is a transcript from the book ‘‘The Passionate Politics of Shaughnessy Cohen’’ by Susan Delacourt. It takes you behind the closed doors of Parliament. It tells the story of the birth of Bill C-68.
Law & Order
Paul Martin’s draconian budget in February 1995 brought a final end to the dreams of the activities on the Human Resources Committee, but the futility of their attempt at social policy reform had been obvious for months before. Lloyd Axworthy’s social policy task force had fared no better. In May 1994, its members had gathered at the Government Conference Centre in downtown Ottawa - a site haunted by several doomed attempts at constitutional reforms in the ‘80s earlier ‘90s – and found they could not even agree on which chapter of their report to draft first.
Fortunately for the Liberal Left, there was consolation to be found right across the road at the Congress Center where, that same May week-end, thousands of Liberals had assembled for the party’s first post election convention. They basked in their first opportunity in the decade to hold a policy convention as the governing federal party. Though the mood of the gathering was triumphal, there were plenty of questions hanging in the air. What was the party supposed to do with its regained hold on the nation? Liberals, elected and otherwise, appeared to have resigned themselves to the cost – cutting government. The trick was to find ways to be liberal without spending money.
One possible answer landed on the floor of the convention, thanks to some high-level manoeuvring by backroom strategies and by the women’s contingent within the party. Labelled Resolution No.14, it was a 6 – point plan to severely limit gun ownership in Canada, and it was put before the delegates by the National Liberal Women’s Commission, an arm of the party designed to insure female representation in the ranks and in policy decisions. The gun control resolution called for increased penalties on the criminal use of firearms and their illegal importation, a ban on private ownership of military assault weapons, strict controls over ammunition sales and handgun ownership, and, most significant, a national system of gun registration.
No one missed the symbolic importance of the resolution of its sponsor: gun control was being flagged as a bona fide women’s issue for the Chrétien government. Women voters were crucial to the Liberal Party; in sheer numbers and motivation to vote, they were a powerful group. Moreover, women were not, by and large, Reform voters. A strong gun control policy would seal the gender advantage that the Liberals enjoyed. At the same time, they could steal some of the Reform’s thunder as the party of law and order. Canadians appeared to be in the mood to get tough on crime. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien took Resolution No. 14 and ran with it at the convention’s close.
‘‘Though talk is easy,’’ Chrétien said, to loud applause from more than two thousand Liberals in the room. ‘‘What Canadians want and what we must provide is though action. There shouldn’t be any more weapons in our streets or in our play grounds.’’ He said that he wanted gun control legislation introduced in the Commons by the fall.
Chrétien knew it would be a hard sale, though. This government needed a white Knight or two to carry gun control to the Canadian people. The duty fell to Justice Minister Alan Rock, the idealistic novice who was quickly immerging as one of the stars of the Chrétien cabinet. A former corporate litigator, he was earnest, young, and attractive – especially to women voters; central casting couldn’t have produced a finer champion for gun control. And he appreciated the political dividends of good timing. ‘‘It was a very difficult time for all of us because we were faced with a ruinous financial situation,’’ Rock said. ‘‘We had to make some tough choices. But in the Justice Field there were things we’d undertaken in the Red Book that we could follow through on because they didn’t depend on economic circumstances. They were issues of principle, or they were social policies that weren’t costly in the economic sense but were important from the point of view of Liberal philosophy.’’
Chrétien said that his government believed fundamentally in the links between the old ‘‘Just Society’’ and a fiscally sound society. ‘‘Of course those great ideas for money from 1993 to 1998 were not encouraged, let’s put it this way, because we had to balance the books. But it’s all interrelated... It is the kind of society you want, and you cannot just settled problems through justice. You have to have an economy to sustain it, and you have to have the ideal of sharing among people.’’
The other benefit of this justice focus, said pollster Michael Marzolini, was that it allowed the party to put Alan Rock, and ‘‘asset’’ to be exploited, in the window. Rock didn’t need to be conscripted to the anti-gun crusade. He was adamantly opposed to gun ownership. If allowed his own way, he would have taken guns out of the hands of all citizens, except police officers and military personnel. At the very least, he liked the idea of removing guns from all urban areas. He had the party’s backing for that notion: Marzolini’s firm had developed an ad campaign before the election for ‘‘gun-free zones in the three major urban centers.’’ But the Liberals enthusiasm for the scheme was tempered in the end. First, rural MPs had pleaded with Chrétien in early 1993 to downplay gun control in the Red Book. Then Marzolini found in pre-election focus groups that, despite their fondness for gun control, women voters shared with men voters the fixation on employment issues. ‘‘What has this got to do with jobs?’’ women asked Marzolini’s pollsters when they were showed the gun control proposal.
After the election, Rock had been pulled aside by MPs such as Derek Lee who, although they represented urban areas, advocated a go-slow, incremental approach to gun control. But by the spring of 1994, the pressure for anti-gun legislation was mounting, especially after a high-profile shooting death in Toronto in April, the killing of 23-year-old Georgina Leimonis at the Just Desserts Café. Shortly after the convention a Toronto police constable, Todd Baylis, was shot dead. The 1989 tragedy at the École Polytechnique in Montréal, where Marc Lépine shot and killed 14 young women before turning a weapon on himself; remain fixed in the public’s memory.
Bob Nault, a no-nonsense kind of Liberal from the Ontario riding of Kenora-Rainy River, was serving his second term. Not yet 40 years old, he saw himself as just a regular guy from a part of the country where, as he said, ‘‘guns are part of the furniture.’’ He fervently hopes that the Liberals would leave gun control alone, but he knew he was up against formidable opposition. Eddie Goldenberg, the prime minister’s right-hand man since the 1970s, had proved impervious to Nault’s pleas. In the midst of the 1993 campaign, when Nault was unpleasantly surprised to see a press release issued on the Liberals anti-gun position – even after he and others had managed to keep the stricter measures out of the Red Book - he placed an angry telephone call to Goldenberg. By way of reply, Nault simply received a fax, a poll showing that most Canadians were in favour of strong controls on guns. ‘‘I knew then that it was going to happen, that it was part of the agenda,’’ said Nault. ‘‘We all know who makes decisions around here.’’
Most of the initial angst about gun control legislation surfaced at the newly established ‘‘rural caucus’’ of Liberal MPs. This group of about 30 members had come together soon after the 1993 election to form a unite front in the face of international pressure on Canada’s trading arrangements. Nations belonging to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade were rethinking the whole system of supply management, a re-evaluation that could have serious implications for Canada’s agricultural industry. But these mainly economic concerns soon gave way to more immediate alarm over gun control.
David Iftody, an MP from the rural riding of Provencher, Manitoba, was chair of the rural caucus. Just 37 years old when he was elected in 1993, Iftody was a rookie to politics and to the issue of guns. He wasn’t a sportsman or a hunter; he’d never handled a gun. He was somewhat mystified when the more experienced MPs at the Monday evening meetings – such as Bob Speller and Leonard Hopkins, both from rural Ontario – began to voice ominous warnings about the looming gun control debate. The rural MPs would be sacrificed for this urban obsession, they predicted. ‘‘If we don’t get up on this early, and do something about it, were going to be in trouble.’’
In 1991, when Kim Campbell, then Justice Minister, had introduced far more modest gun control proposals, these MPs had been in undated with protests from their constituents. Combative voters had poked their chests in the heat of discussion; angry phone calls flooded their offices. Only their opposition status had saved them back then. Although the Federal Liberal caucus had taken an official position in favour of Campbell’s gun control bill, these rural MPs could argue that their own government would never instigate such a thing. Now they were in government; now they couldn’t blame anyone else for stricter gun control. They could only plead with their pro-gun control colleagues to back down.
The rural MPs were sure that the enthusiasm for this measure came directly from the Prime Minister’s Office and that Rock had been picked to carry the brief for what they saw as a blinkered; politically suicidal policy. Women within the party were claiming this issue as their terrain too, especially the female MPs on the Justice Committee, such as Sue Barnes and Paddy Torsney. ‘‘To me, working on gun control was really important,’’ said Barnes, who, in her role as vice-chair of the Justice Committee, put in long hours for over a year on the issue. ‘‘I thought it was specifically important to the women of this country.’’ ‘‘It was a no brainer,’’ said Torsney, 33 at the time and one of the Liberals strongest advocate for the interests of young women. ‘‘We’d talk about this in the women caucus and I would be the one saying, ‘let’s go, come on, let’s get it done.’ ‘‘
Barnes and Torsney made it their mission to assemble everything they could about gun control – to seek out the expert, wade into the controversy, and separate the facts from the emotion. They talked to gun clubs and they met with key gun control advocates in victims’ rights groups. They argued with their rural colleagues and they armed themselves with statistics about violent crime.
Jean Chrétien recognised the early sign of caucus dissension. He ordered that a special caucus committee be established to develop, away from the glare of media scrutiny, a collective stand on gun control. (The fact that this Committee had to be established was another indication that this really interesting divisions in this parliament were not between the government and other parties but within the Liberal caucus. It was the first of several such committees.) The choice of chairpersons was critical. Here especially the personal became the political. Who you are and where you come from telegraphs volumes about your views on the subject as divisive as gun control.
Shaughnessy was an ideal representative for those in favour of gun controls: she was from an urban riding, close to the gun-toting United States, she was a woman, and she was a lawyer. Herb Gray respected her hard earned smarts. ‘‘She knew justice issues from the street,’’ Gray said. Furthermore, since being elected she had demonstrated unswerving loyalty to cabinet instructions, even if it meant rubbing the raw nerves of fellow caucus members. She like Alan Rock and had gone out of her way to back him when he spoke in the caucus. At social events, she fluttered around him whenever she had the chance. Pointedly, she had told Reg Alcock, head of the social policy caucus, that she wanted to work more directly with the justice minister. These efforts paid off: Shaughnessy was named co-chair, representing the pro-gun control forces.
Bob Nault, on the other hand, was the perfect personification of the – gun control forces. Though he was also an Ontarian, his riding, on the border with Manitoba, shared more in common with the West than it did with southern Ontario. Nault was chosen as the other co-chair. Their committee was directed to listen to the MPs and cobble together a compromise position. The hope was that the basic elements of the gun control legislation would be developed by the caucus.
‘‘We needed a male and a female, we needed an urban and a rural,’’ Nault said. ‘‘Shaughn was a lawyer – that’s a good thing - (but) she seemed very committed to the Minister.’’ That link to Rock was seen by some, especially Nault, as a liability. In their eyes, Rock was not much more than ‘‘some slick Bay Street lawyer who had never set foot on gravel.’’ Nault himself was a former trainman for CP Rail and a union man. Bay Street people set his teeth on edge. ‘‘The perception from a lot of us was that Allan Rock was not a politician; he was very naive and thought that just because the party said this is the way it is going to be, there wouldn’t be a battle. He thought that we would just go quietly, like lambs to the slaughter,’’ Nault said.
Shaughnessy seemed more willing than Rock to listen to the views of the gun control foes. Indeed, she was getting lots of practice in her off-hours away from Ottawa. Everyone around her, from her father to her brother Richard to her next door neighbour gave her a hard time about the Liberals gun control stand. The biggest event on Bruce Murray’s calendar was his annual fall hunting trip. ‘‘We never could convince her, though,’’ Bruce said. ‘‘She would just walk away.’’ Shaughnessy had her own reasons for arguing against guns. In 1990, she had served as Crown lawyer in a gun-detention hearing against a man named George Skrzydlewski. The part-time Chrysler worker had been amassing weapons in his Tecumseh Road apartment; a neighbour, Bill Clark, had complained to police. When the police went in to seize the guns at Skrzydlewski’s home, they found a rifle, three handguns, and seven thousand rounds of ammunition.
