Harper taking flak from legal experts over rural gun-justice

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Harper taking flak from legal experts over rural gun-justice remarks

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Mark Kennedy March 18, 2015

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QUOTE: "“The idea that you could use guns to threaten or indeed shoot at somebody in defence of your property — whether it’s a tractor or your home itself — is really at odds with the basic fundamentals of our Canadian law.”" - Eric Gottardi, chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s criminal justice section

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Ontario’s former attorney general is accusing Prime Minister Stephen Harper of irresponsibly counselling Canadians to commit a crime by using guns for their own security.

In an interview Tuesday with the Citizen, Michael Bryant said the prime minister has completely “misstated” the truth about Canada’s laws by linking gun ownership with the right of rural Canadians to use firearms for their own safety if police forces aren’t close enough to respond.

Bryant’s assessment of whether Canadians have the automatic legal right to use a gun to defend themselves was echoed by other legal experts and a spokesman for the Canadian Bar Association.

Those experts threw cold water on the so-called “castle doctrine” that some people say allows Canadians to protect their homes. Moreover, they noted that unlike in the United States, where there is a constitutional right to bear arms, Canadians have no such right.

“It’s not Canadian law,” said Bryant, who was attorney general in the provincial Liberal government from 2003 to 2007.

“It’s vigilantism. People are going to find themselves facing the criminal justice system and being charged with serious crimes if they decide to follow what the prime minister is suggesting.”

Bryant expressed concern that people will assume incorrectly that they have a right to use their gun in self-defence at home.

“Canadians should not listen to the prime minister on this one at all. Resort to common sense. We don’t live in the wild west. We live in a country of law. And we have a criminal law that puts enforcement and protection in the hands of police, not in the hands of citizens.”

“He’s just wrong under criminal law, under constitutional law and it’s just incredibly reckless of him to do that,” said Bryant, who is part of the Coalition for Gun Control.

“People assume that the prime minister does not counsel criminal activity. But that’s exactly what he’s doing here and I would imagine that the police are pretty upset about it.”

The controversy began quietly late last week, when Harper appeared at a public event in Saskatchewan and fielded questions on gun control.

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Mark Kennedy, Ottawa Citizen More from Mark Kennedy, Ottawa Citizen Published on: March 16, 2015