Toronto – What is it with white, male, middle-aged and older Progressive Conservatives and guns?
John Snobelen, a controversial former education minister famed for riding the range at his ranch in Oklahoma, admitted having an unregistered semi-automatic handgun and a court gave him an absolute discharge, which was lenient considering guns are causing so many deaths in Toronto.
Randy Hillier, a Conservative MPP since October, was accused in the legislature by Aboriginal Affairs Minister Michael Bryant of shooting deer out of season, which caused an uproar.
Hillier had warned farmers in his area might shoot deer that were destroying crops and threatening livelihoods, and some were shot, but the MPP retorted not by him, although he does shoot wildlife and often it is necessary.
A senior Ontario Provincial Police officer in a conversation he did not know was being recorded, which was played at a public enquiry in 2005, described former premier Mike Harris and some of his ministers as “barrel-suckers — just in love with guns.”
He made the criticism after a senior aide to Harris said the premier wanted native demonstrators moved out of Ipperwash provincial park, which they were occupying as an ancient Indian burial ground. In the eviction a demonstrator was shot dead by police.
When Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty brought in legislation to ban shooting of wildlife penned in game farms in 2004, arguing it was unfair because the animals had no chance to escape, some Conservatives spoke against it.
The Liberals said such so-called hunting needed no skill, because the animals would always run into a fence, and those shooting simply were buying the right to kill an animal.
Many letters to newspapers derided the hunters as unwilling to put any effort into hunting and preferring to drive somewhere they could spend a couple of hours killing animals and speed back to their comfortable city homes.
The Conservatives argued the animals, mainly deer and elk, were not taken from the wild, but raised on the farms and harvested there more humanely than in abattoirs.
When the Conservatives were in government in the early 2000s, a party insider, Glen Wright, senior enough to be appointed chairman of the giant utility Hydro One, used its money to take party strategists and people he wanted to influence on a $750-a day hunting trip at a game club. The public even paid for their shotgun shells.
Al McLean, an MPP who liked hunting, was a resources minister briefly in 1985 until he was found to have been convicted and fined a decade earlier for being in a truck at night with friends and a loaded rifle not in its case.
McLean said the gun was not his and he did not know it was in the truck, but he was convicted under a law aimed commendably at preventing hunters turning on their truck lights at night to stun game so it was immobilized and easily shot. Under the law everyone found in a vehicle with an uncased rifle could be fined for breaking the law.
There also was John Robarts, premier from 1961-71, admired particularly for giant reforms in education and human rights laws, building the waterfront attraction Ontario Place and Ontario Science Centre and giving Ontario a lead role in debates aimed at strengthening national unity.
Robarts had a passion for fishing and enjoyed hunting, and throughout his premiership did both at an elite private club on an island in Georgian Bay, where it was not easy for quarry to escape and he was criticized for it.
In 1982, after he retired, he caught his hand in the mechanism of his gun and it gushed with blood and he said he could shoot no longer. It was the final straw in things he could not do.
Soon afterwards he took a gun given him by grateful Progressive Conservatives in London, which he had represented in the legislature, went to his bathroom and shot and killed himself. Guns have helped shape Ontario’s history.
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen’s Park press gallery.
