Because Donald Trump is brandishing his 7-wood at us about fentanyl and illegal migration, Canada is leasing two Black Hawk helicopters for the RCMP and putting them on border patrol, and also bolstering the fleet of border-patrolling drones. That’s an accurate assessment of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and that’s more or less how media reported it: “Canada sending Black Hawks, drones to border as the clock to pacify Trump ticks down,” was one apropos headline.
Even as we’re doing that, though, prominent figures continue to push back on the notion that we should have to do it. This week, former prime minister Stephen Harper told an American podcaster that the United States should be less worried about what’s flowing south than Canada is about what’s flowing north — specifically “guns, drugs (and) crime.”
“I have a real problem with a lot of the things that Donald Trump is saying; it doesn’t sound to me like the pronouncements of somebody who’s a friend, a partner and an ally,” Harper said. (To be fair I don’t think I’ve ever heard Trump suggest he wanted to be a friend, partner or ally to Canada.)
The border-security boost isn’t brand new news: Helicopters were mentioned as part of a $1.3-billion border-security package announced last month, as part of the fall economic statement. (You could be forgiven for having missed it, the Liberals having spent the hours before the statement quite spectacularly melting down.)
But Global News cited multiple unnamed sources to the effect that “frontline RCMP (officers) have been asking (for) helicopter capability (at the border) for years. The pressure from the Trump (administration) moved this across the line.”
So my question is this: Given Harper’s accurate assessment of the situation, especially with respect to guns, why did it take Trump’s bluster and bravado to move us across this line and get expensively serious about the border?
Statistics Canada figures show that shooting homicides in Canada rose sharply for a decade beginning in 2013, from 134 (or 0.4 per 100,000 population) to 343 (or 0.9 per 100,000), after decades of the number trending generally down. (The shooting homicide rate in 1975 was 1.2 per 100,000.)
Since the mid-1970s, the percentage of homicides committed with handguns has soared: from 28 per cent in 1974 to 65 per cent in 2018, when Statistics Canada inconveniently stopped reporting this useful figure. Concurrently, the percentage of homicides committed with rifles has plummeted. Furthermore, in recent years, the percentage of homicide victims who were linked to gangs and other organized crime rose from 10 per cent in 1999 to roughly one-quarter in recent years. Gangs aren’t very well known for using legally purchased and registered weapons in their exploits.
Naturally, the Liberal government has been busy cracking down on rifles, specifically those they believe in their guts to resemble “weapons of war.” As of the fall economic statement, the Liberal government’s presumably now-doomed “assault weapon” buyback program had a budget of $598 million over three years to remove guns that will almost certainly never be used in crime from owners who will almost certainly never use them in a crime.
Recent purchases ofSikorsky’s Black Hawk helicopters by NATO and other western nations such as Sweden, Austria and Croatia averaged out at around $90 million to $110 million per whirlybird. I don’t know if we really need a fleet of Black Hawks patrolling the border, at that price or any other, but I’m quite certain that $600 million could be more effectively used for reducing gun crime than taking away guns from people who aren’t ever going to use them in anger.
This being Canada, no one is keeping any relevant comprehensive nationwide statistics about the sources of guns used in crime. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police launched a “pilot project” last year to “examine the feasibility of collecting firearms tracing data from law enforcement agencies” and “report on aggregate tracing statistics such as … the source country.”
What a concept! The results are due in March. I wouldn’t get my hopes too far up.
But in the meantime, Ontario police forces normally cite a figure of around 85 per cent of “crime guns” having come across the border, and not in Bass Pro Shop gift boxes. Other estimates are less lopsided, but not as lopsided as Canada’s approach to getting dangerous weapons out of dangerous people’s hands.
It’s not just the spending that Canadians should welcome on principle — and ask themselves, again, why it took The Donald to make it happen. It’s also the increased talk of co-operation with the United States at the border in every respect. Just earlier this month, the United States Border Patrol (USBP) spotted and flagged to the RCMP, and its Integrated Border Enforcement Team, someone sneaking into Saskatchewan from Montana.
USBP arrested the man, and an alleged accomplice, when they re-entered the United States, and shipped them north to face charges. The RCMP served a search warrant upon a house in Saskatoon, where they say they found prohibited firearms, “approximately 500 rounds of ammunition,” plus “quantities of chemicals/compounds (that required the assistance of the Saskatchewan RCMP’s Explosives Disposal Unit.”
These are wins we should gratefully accept, especially in the second Trump era.
National Post
cselley@postmedia
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