The Volokh Conspiracy

Yesterday the Canadian Senate voted 50-27 to abolish the long gun registry. Bill C-19 received unanimous support from Conservative Senators, and some support from Liberals. The bill had previously passed the House of Commons. It became the law of the land today, with the Royal Assent of Canada’s Governor-General.

The bill does not change Canada’s registration system for handguns, which has been in effect since the 1930s. Nor does it change the registration system for certain long guns which have been classified as “prohibited” or “restricted” weapons. Likewise unchanged is Canada’s complicated and burdensome system for licensing gun owners, which was created by a Liberal government in the 1990s.

The registration changes, however, are monumental. Registration records for seven million ordinary long guns are to be destroyed. The government of Quebec has announced that it while file suit to attempt to obtain custody of the 1.5 million registration records pertaining to citizens of Quebec.

Ever since the regime of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s, gun control in Canada has been primarily a culture war campaign against the “masculine” values of rural Canada, and as a means of demonstrating the dominance of Canada’s urban New Class.

To this day, the foremost public justification for all forms of gun control is Gamil Rodrigue Gharbi (who changed his name Marc Lépine). Gharbi/Lépine was the son of an alcoholic, wife-beating, child abuser who had immigrated to Canada from Algeria. In 1989, he murdered 14 women (13 by gunshot, one by stabbing), and wounded 8 women and 4 men in the engineering building of a school affiliated with the University of Montreal. An incompetent response by police dispatchers to the 911 calls gave Gharbi/Lépine the opportunity to murder at leisure.

In The Montreal Massacre (gynergy books, 1991), Quebec feminists describe their outrage, and demanded the rehabilitation of masculinity, whose (allegedly) misogynist pro-death culture is based on aggressive sports, violent entertainment, and the penetration of women during sexual intercourse.

Canada’s leading public proponent of gun control, Prof. Wendy Cukier, had previously proclaimed that in Canada, gun control is a one-way street; once restrictions are imposed, they are never lifted. This was never entirely accurate; popular demand forced the removal of some long gun restrictions that had been imposed during the World Wars. But the removal of a major peacetime anti-gun law truly does signal a new era in Canadian right to arms politics.

Efforts to repeal the long gun registry lasted 17 years, and they finally succeeded in part because the majority of Canadians have concluded that the registry was a colossal waste of money,  of no value in crime control, and a pointless invasion of privacy.

Globally speaking, the repeal of the registry is the most important gun policy event of the last year. As the United Nations works towards a final draft of an Arms Trade Treaty this year, the Canadian public’s rejection of registry adds to the challenges of the global gun control organizations which want the Treaty to include gun registration requirements.

An article in Forbes profiles Saskatchewan MP Garry Breitkreuz, whose tireless work was essential to the repeal.  Breitkreuz, incidentally, had started out as a supporter of registration, and changed his mind after studying the evidence about whether it would help reduce crime. Kudos also to the Canadian Sport Shooting Association, to Canada’s National Firearms Association, and especially to the late David Tomlinson, who passed away in 2007, and who for over three decades was the Founding Father and leader of Canada’s right to arms movement.

Canadian gun owners know that much more needs to be done to undo the damage caused the kulturkampf which Trudeau began, and which has burdened Canadians with laws that do nothing to enhance public safety, but whose purpose and effect is to harass and persecute law-abiding gun owners. Bill C-19 is a good first step, and a monumental one.

Canada is in the midst of an important election campaign. Many important issues are at stake, including the state of the Canadian economy, crucial foreign policy decisions, and others. Nonetheless, the leaders of most of the contending parties have asked for the postponement of an upcoming debate between them to avoid a schedule conflict with a Montreal Canadiens’ first-round playoff game:

A move is afoot to reschedule a federal election debate slated for Thursday so it doesn’t conflict with the opening game of the Montreal Canadiens’ first-round playoff series against the Boston Bruins.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe got the ball rolling Sunday by saying there’s little doubt hockey-mad Montreal fans will choose the game over the debate.

NDP Leader Jack Layton later echoed those sentiments, the Liberals followed suit, and the Conservatives said they could live with whatever the debate broadcasters decide.

Bloc leader Duceppe wants other party leaders to join him in urging the consortium of broadcasters who organize the debate to move it back a day….

“We all know that hockey is very popular in Canada and in Quebec, which is why it would be a better idea to push the French debate back to allow hockey fans to watch the debate as well as the game on Thursday night.”

As a longtime Boston Bruins fan, I’m well aware of how popular hockey is in Quebec. At the same time, I’m sure that most Canadian voters recognize that the election is ultimately more important than the outcome of a hockey game, especially one that is merely a first-round playoff matchup. Why, then, would most of them tune in to the game instead of the debate?

The obvious answer is that the game is likely to be far more entertaining. But that still doesn’t fully explain the situation. Surely sacrificing an hour or two of entertainment is a small price to pay for becoming better-informed about a crucial public decision.

The real explanation is probably rational political ignorance. Because any one vote has only a tiny chance of actually determining the outcome of an election, most voters have little incentive to become informed about political issues. If a random hockey-loving Quebec voter knew that his decision would definitely determine the result of the election or even have, say, a 10% chance of doing so, he would probably watch the debate instead of the game. But in the real world, there is only a tiny chance that his vote will have any impact, so he feels free to turn the channel to the game instead.

For a very well-informed voter, of course, watching the debate won’t be useful because she probably already knows most of the points the party leaders will make. But most Canadians, like most Americans, have fairly low levels of political knowledge. Ironically, the low-information voters who could increase their knowledge levels the most are probably the least likely to watch the debate because they have the lowest level of interest in politics.

Thanks to rational political ignorance, only the most dedicated Quebec political fans are likely to watch the debate if it conflicts with a Canadiens playoff game. Interestingly, however, sports fans and political fans actually have a lot in common: Both enjoy rooting for their preferred “teams” and hating the teams’ rivals, and both tend to evaluate information in a highly biased way.

Having finished this post, I will now go back to preparing to root for the Bruins in Thursday’s game. If the favored Bruins play up to their potential, Habs fans will wish they had spent the night watching a political debate instead! Of course since I’m an admittedly biased Bruins fan, that’s exactly what you would expect me to say.

Whenever we have an election, pundits and politicians wax eloquent about the supposed need to increase voter turnout. Much less attention is paid to the question of whether the people going to the polls actually understand the issues they’re voting on.

In conjunction with the upcoming Canadian election, political philosopher Jason Brennan, author of the excellent new book The Ethics of Voting, takes aim at this oversight:

Before Canadians head once again to the polls, they should do their homework. This election is an opportunity to make Canada even better, but it’s also a chance to make it worse. Bad decisions at the polls can lead to increased poverty, a stagnant economy, lost opportunities, worse pollution or unjust wars….

Casting an informed vote is hard. Knowing what the problems are is not enough, because the solutions to Canada’s problems are not obvious. Reading parties’ platforms is not enough. Knowing what policies the different political parties favour is not enough, because a voter needs to know which policies have any real shot of working. The Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, Greens and others each want Canada to be healthier, happier and stronger. They’re like doctors each offering different prescriptions to cure Canada’s illnesses. Some of these prescriptions will work, some will have no effect and some will make Canada sicker. Voters need to learn how to evaluate these prescriptions….

Voting is not like choosing food from a menu. If a citizen makes a bad choice about what to eat in a restaurant, she alone bears the costs of her decision. But if she makes a bad choice at the polls, she imposes the costs on everyone. Voters are not just choosing for themselves, but for all. If a restaurant offers bad food, diners can walk away or get their money back. This is not the case with public policy. Political decisions are imposed on all and enforced by law. Fellow citizens can’t just walk away from a menu full of bad policies.

Voters face some choices. They can form their beliefs about politics in a self-indulgent way. They can ignore evidence and form policy preferences based on what they find emotionally appealing. They can treat voting as a form of self-expression and ignore what damage they do. Or they can be good citizens. They can form their policy preferences by studying social scientific evidence about how institutions and policies work, and by using reliable methods of reasoning to study the issues. They can work to overcome their personal and ideological biases and choose in a smart, thoughtful way.

Unfortunately, extensive evidence shows that most voters both know very little about public policy and do a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know. Elsewhere, I have argued that such ignorance and bias is actually rational. There is only an infinitesmal chance that any one vote will be decisive. So individual voters have strong incentives to remain ignorant. But not every form of rational behavior is morally defensible. Sometimes, rational individual behavior leads to terrible collective outcomes. Consider the case of air pollution, where individuals might rationally choose not to limit their emission of dangerous pollutants because any one person’s behavior has only a tiny effect on overall air quality in the area. Widespread voter ignorance is a kind of pollution of the political system.

As Brennan notes, many people resist the idea that voters have a duty to become informed because they consider voting to be an individual right that the voter can use however he wants. But voting is not simply an individual choice. As John Stuart Mill emphasized 150 years ago, it is the the exercise of “power over others”:

The spirit of vote by ballot- the interpretation likely to be put on it in the mind of an elector- is that the suffrage is given to him for himself; for his particular use and benefit, and not as a trust for the public. . .

Now this one idea, taking root in the general mind, does a moral mischief outweighing all the good that the ballot could do, at the highest possible estimate of it. In whatever way we define or understand the idea of a right, no person can have a right (except in the purely legal sense) to power over others: every such power, which he is allowed to possess, is morally, in the fullest force of the term, a trust. But the exercise of any political function, either as an elector or as a representative, is power over others.

Like Brennan, I don’t believe that citizens have a duty to vote. Staying home on election day isn’t morally wrong. But if you do choose to go to the polls, you have a moral obligation to your fellow citizens to exercise the power of the ballot responsibly. And that means trying to become a better-informed voter and making a real effort to evaluate the information you learn in an unbiased way.

UPDATE: The repeal just passed 2d reading by a vote of 164 to 137! The bill now proceeds to a committee for public hearings. The Canadian Conservative Party has 143 Members of Parliament, so the bill attracted over 20 votes from members of other parties–significantly more than had been expected by Canadian political commentators. Today is a good day for Liberty.

Will take place in the Canadian House of Commons today, at approximately 5:30 p.m., Eastern Time. Bill C-391 is a private member’s bill  (by Candice  Hoeppner of Portage—Lisgar, Manitoba) to repeal Canada’s failed and extremely expensive long gun registry.

Background information about the registry is available in this short presentation from Prof. Gary Mauser, a magazine article by Mauser, and in Mauser’s journal articles on the politics and efficacy of the registry, and in some articles I have written about Canada.

For the last two decades, Canada has been the test bed of the international gun prohibition movement. Repressive ideas from Canada have been exported around the world by the international gun prohibition lobby, which is vastly better at international coordination than the other side.

Repeal of the Canadian registry would, accordingly, be of tremendous global significance. Repeal would also shatter the claim by the Canadian gun prohibition lobby that gun control in Canada is an irreversible ratchet.

If the House votes for repeal today, then there will be committee hearings on Bill C-391, followed by another vote in the House, followed by Senate consideration.

You can follow a webcast of the House of Commons by going here.