NDP Leader Jack Layton is a good man with a political problem: the long-gun registry that the Conservatives want to abolish.
Usually, the New Democrats spurn with varying degrees of bile anything the Conservatives desire. True, they kept the Conservatives afloat for a while in the minority Parliament, but that tactic reflected the NDP's instinct for self-preservation, not any warming toward Stephen Harper and his crowd.
The long-gun registry, controversial since its inception under the Liberals, has always been seen by the Harper strategists as a "wedge issue" demarcating their party from the others. Indeed, it has done just that, but the registry has also driven a wedge into the NDP.
At least 12 NDP MPs oppose the registry; the others, including Mr. Layton, want it kept, perhaps with a few administrative adjustments. The dissident New Democrats represent largely rural ridings, places in Northern Ontario or British Columbia where folks like to hunt and where they've grown up with guns, think they know better how to handle them than pinheads in Ottawa or urban chiefs of police, and resent the state's intrusion into their lives.
In this debate, the NDP reveals a part of itself often obscured by the party's urban leaders since the 1970s: David Lewis, Ed Broadbent, Alexa McDonough and now Mr. Layton. There was only one truly rural leader, Audrey McLaughlin, from Yukon.
Elements of the NDP are often quite traditional - dare we say conservative? - when it comes to certain ways of thinking about such issues as gun ownership, heterosexual marriage and aboriginal claims. Most of the time, these expressions or sentiments are not visible publicly; but the long-gun registry has made them so within the party.
Leaders, therefore, have had to cope as best they can - which, in the current debate, means that Mr. Layton really has no choice but to allow his caucus to vote freely on a Conservative MP's bill to scrap the registry. With the support of the dissident New Democrats, a couple of independents and the Conservative herd, the bill will pass.
Until the past decade or so, the NDP used to win a bunch of rural seats in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. But those days have vanished because farms have consolidated and the NDP has been pushed back into urban redoubts. In eastern Saskatchewan up against the Manitoba boundary, for example, the NDP used to own an area called Red Square around places such as Yorkton and Melville.
That area now belongs to one of the Conservatives' most right-wing MPs and among the fiercest critics of the gun registry, Garry Breitkreuz. Mr. Breitkreuz is, shall we say, quite passionate about killing the gun registry. He's a real law-and-order man, too, so that on most issues he and the police are bosom buddies.
Except that, unfortunately for him and the rest of the Conservative caucus, Canada's chiefs of police (with a very few exceptions) want the gun registry maintained. They think, and said so loudly at their recent convention, that the gun registry is an important tool in combatting gun-related crime.
Now, one might have thought that the "tough on crime" Conservatives, the ones who want stiffer sentences for gun-related crimes, mandatory minimum sentences and other politically popular measures, would be embracing the chiefs' message.
Yet, as we have seen in criminal policy (as in other areas - the long-form census springs to mind), the Conservatives don't like voices or evidence that contradict their views. So, instead of listening to the chiefs, Mr. Breitkreuz now insists that the "chiefs should not be lobbying to tell the government which laws it should adopt. The tail is wagging the dog with such intensity, the pooch is a veritable blur."
Now forget the incomprehensible metaphor and ponder what Mr. Breitkreuz is saying: that a group in disagreement with the government, even one as important as police chiefs, should essentially shut up if it disagrees with the government. It can agree with the government and say so publicly, but, if it disagrees, it's "lobbying" and should remain silent.
The NDP dissidents would never be so revealingly upside down in their thinking about democracy, since they make their living criticizing the government. Except just this once when, to Mr. Layton's discomfort, they're climbing into bed with the Harperites.