Rex Murphy is on Target Again

This is a great piece of work. Of course it is best to watch him "perform" his monologue. He always seems to cut straight to the key ideas of the issues. I personally have a vague idea of what Kyoto is about but on the whole I see an agreement that means nothing. It is the kind of thing that gives politicians a bad name. If you sign an agreement on behalf of me as my representative then you had better keep the agreement. At this point countries who have not signed on have a better record on the envoronment requirements than many countries that have signed on. As for the gun registry it was poorly planned, poorly managed and again it is the kind of thing that makes politicians look bad. If gun registry is the "magic bullet" then why is it that we still have gun crime? It has not done any change for good. Anyway read Rex. He says it better than I ever could.

"Yoking wishfulness to vast expenditure"

May 16 2006

The gun registry and the Kyoto Protocol are, at least in one respect, twins. They both illustrate the uselessness of piety pretending to be policy, of half thought mixed with full-bore emotion substituting for a rational response to a perceived public problem.

Kyoto is a great empty house of wishful thinking. Some countries that have signed on have done less than those that did not. Canada has done less than the U.S., for example, though the U.S. Congress universally voted it down during the Clinton years, while Canada touted its signature on the accord as being in itself a great Boy Scout badge of international and environmental do-good-ism.

And then there's the gun registry. Whatever the gun registry was supposed to do, beyond raising a cloud of vague righteousness that something was being done, what has it specifically done for places like Toronto, say, with its year of the gun?

Where real gun crime exists, it almost always is handguns, stolen, smuggled, and unregistered, that are causing havoc.

Where's the registry in that picture? And today Sheila Fraser pounded a few dozen more 9-inch nails into the coffin of the gun registry. That other response to a problem which over the five years of its life has been an epic catalogue of unimaginable expense, was going to cost $2 million net and cost $1 billion instead.

She told us of computer systems whose costs ballooned, amounts in the tens of millions not recorded, and even more damning, added that the information these wonderful systems so expensively collected can either be (a) incorrect or (b) incomplete, and at a press conference that the data cannot be relied on. So it can't be relied on; its information is incomplete or incorrect, and it costs more than the tar sands.

Well, not the tar sands.

In the early days of this program, it was all so simple. We had then Justice Minister Allan Rock standing to tell the country, 'All that we're asking of firearms owners is to fill out two cards and mail them in.'

A few postcards and a postage stamp. And we get a billion dollars?

Who was the mailman? Wile E. Coyote?

The gun registry accomplished negatives, however, by the bucket load. A cost overrun that yet will make 'Ripley's Believe It or Not', antagonized whole swatches of harmless citizens, from duck hunters to farmers, who found themselves hectored and harassed to fill in its unreliable forms, pay its useless fees, or wind up listed as criminals if they did not.

Now, Kyoto is not a registry, but it has the same impulse at its centre, vagueness of intention surrounding an amorphous good cause. The science is contentious, regardless of what the propagandists of global warning will tell you. It is advocacy-driven and as much a lobby as General Motors.

As Kyoto is globally, the gun registry is for us nationally, a perfect parable of yoking wishfulness to vast expenditure to appease wistful public sentiment. Whatever that sentiment, it urges politicians to just do something. In both cases, they did. Kyoto eight years on is a hollow piety, and the gun registry is a compound of excess, uselessness, annoyance, and the most highly capitalized piece of policy pointlessness since the Newfoundland government 20 years ago spent $27 million to fund a science fiction dream of growing cucumbers out of the East Coast granite.

Keep the gun registry? Only if they open a museum for monumental illustrations of how to waste public money. And in that museum, the registry will occupy the same place in public policy that the private sector has long ago given the Edsel. For 'The National', I'm Rex Murphy.



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