Perceptions by Gerry Warner

Stephen Harper is a warmonger and he loves guns too! No wonder he’s preparing to send troops into Syria and telling rural Canadians to arm themselves because the Canadian countryside is unsafe.

What else can you conclude after Harper’s bizarre comments last week on the need for a rural arms race and his musing about sending our jets into Syria after what started out as a ‘non-combat’ mission in Iraq. And he even brought his own wife into his dark discussion!

“My wife’s from a rural area and obviously gun ownership wasn’t just for the farm, but was for a certain level of security when you’re a ways away from immediate police assistance.” Harper told the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister didn’t say if Laureen kept a gun under the pillow while he’s away fighting the Taliban in Ottawa. But Harper’s remarks were troubling and ignorant on several levels not to say belligerent coming from the chief lawmaker of the land.

For starters, Canadian law does not give homeowners in urban or rural areas unfettered rights to blow away someone who unintentionally or intentionally happens to stumble onto your property in the dead of the night.

“The suggestion that rural people have firearms in case the police cannot reach them in time is not really consistent with Canadian law on lawful use of force but smacks of American arming for self-protection,” said Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, in an email to the Ottawa Citizen.

It also smacks of taking the law into your own hands and vigilante ‘justice,’ but this doesn’t seem to bother Harper and his core supporters, whom he was clearly playing to when he made his gun toting remarks. And with an election coming soon, there’s money to be raised for Conservative coffers as was made plain by Jenni Byrne, the party’s hard-bitten campaign manager and former deputy chief of staff in Harper’s office.

“As someone who grew up in a rural part of our country, I was proud to hear what the Prime Minister had to say yesterday,” said Byrne in an email sent to Conservative supporters. “Our Conservative Party recognizes that guns play an important role in the livelihoods, recreation and safety of many Canadians. And we’re standing up for responsible gun-owning Canadians.”

The National Rifle Association in the U.S. couldn’t have said it better.

And for those who bristle at Harper being called a warmonger, have you ever considered how much of your tax money the Prime Minister spent on glorification of the almost forgotten War of 1812, which was actually fought on our behalf by the British?

Our spendthrift Prime Minister spent $28 million on the bicentennial celebrating the forgotten war, including such necessary adornments as a special silver coin, which cost $60-a-piece, a new national monument, funding for historical re-enactments, upgrades to historic sites and even a new mobile phone app! If you don’t think our Prime Minister enjoys a ‘good’ war, you must think the Toronto Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup this year.

And then there’s Syria; a place Harper is obviously itching to go with an announcement expected in Parliament next week. The fact that Syria is not at war with us doesn’t seem to deter the Prime Minister nor the fact that the war would be illegal under International Law. But the U.S. and its Middle East allies have been bombing ISIS in Syria since last summer and we know that legal niceties won’t stop our Prime Minister from sucking up to Uncle Sam.

How sad! We’ve already lost one of our soldiers to ‘friendly fire’ in Iraq and we lost 158 soldiers in 12 years of fighting in Afghanistan – and did not defeat the Taliban – while suicide took 178 Canadian Forces members over the same period.

Surely there’s a message here, but it seems to be lost on our war mongering Prime Minister.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who believes politicians should serve in the wars they support.

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