Yorkton-Melville's Member of Parliament says he is saddened by the outcome of last week's vote to defeat a private member's bill that would have ended the federal long-gun registry.
"It's something that I've been following for more than 15 years," Garry Breitkreuz told Yorkton This Week. "I was very disappointed in the vote last Wednesday."
After making it through two readings in the House of Commons, Portage-Lisgar MP Candice Hoeppner's Bill C-391 was struck down by a hair-thin 153 to 151 vote on September 22.
The decision came down to a handful of MPs from the New Democratic Party - the only party whose leadership allowed it to vote freely on the bill. Twelve NDP representatives voted last fall to end the registry, but half of them changed their position for Wednesday's decision.
The six members had each spoken of their plans for a reversal in the weeks leading up to the vote, but Breitkreuz - one of the gun registry's most vocal opponents, and sponsor of a previous bill to dismantle it - says he was still shocked to see it happen.
"I just couldn't believe some of the people who reversed their position on this. The flip-flop was something I did not expect, because some of those MPs, like Peter Stoffer, at every opportunity urged me to get rid of the gun registry. In fact, he committed to me that at least a dozen votes would be there from the NDP caucus, and he would deliver them. For himself to do a flip-flop was just unbelievable."
Stoffer cited the Conservative government's tactics surrounding the issue as a key reason for his change of heart.
Other NDP members have mentioned Garry Breitkreuz's name specifically. In an August 30 editorial published online, Breitkreuz argued that "public control" is the motive behind police support for the gun registry and that some police "don't want Canadians to own guns." The NDP's Charlie Angus called the article an example of "wild and crazy conspiracy theories about our local police forces" being forwarded by Harper's Conservatives, and said that it convinced him to retract his previous support for bill C-391.Breitkreuz doesn't buy that explanation.
"He never repeated [his statement] after that first day, because I happen to know that many people contacted him and said, 'Breitkreuz is exactly right." Everything I said was completely factual, ... so that was not the reason for his reversal. The reason was that his leader leaned on him because they did not want to have to explain in the cities why the NDP were responsible for getting rid of the gun registry."The Yorkton-Melville MP stands by the statements he made in the editorial, while noting that he has spoken with many police officers who share his views on the gun registry.
Breitkreuz echoes statements made by Stephen Harper that the Conservative Party remains dedicated to scrapping the gun registry, but acknowledges that the party will probably need a majority government to make it happen.
"I think that we may have lost the battle, but we're not going to lose the war."
