To be published in CUFOA's Newsletter and published on this site on April 20, 2008
My Resistance Against the Police-Bureaucratic Complex
by
Pierre Lemieux
The Canada Firearms Centre – the federal bureaucracy that administers firearms registration and licencing and which is now part of the RCMP – claims that “21,676 firearms licences have been refused or revoked by Chief Firearms Officers for public safety reasons” (see www.cfc-cafc.gc.ca/media/program_statistics/default_e.asp). A note immediately explains: “Reasons why firearms licence applications have been refused or licences revoked include: a history of violence, mental illness, potential risk to himself/herself or others, unsafe firearm use and storage, drug offences, and providing false information.”
What are the unlisted reasons which fall outside of the “include” category? Answer: any reason that the Police-Bureaucratic Complex can get away with in order to negate our traditional liberty to have firearms. I have some personal experience of this since the bureaucrats have refused to renew my own licence for a very different reason than what they publicize.
Every five years, a Canadian who owns legally registered firearms must renew the license that allows him to legally keep his guns. Otherwise – if he simply keeps his previously registered guns – he is guilty of a crime and liable to up to 10 years in jail. It is important to understand this perverse double-barrelled system: licencing and registration. To register your guns, you need a permission, which is the firearms licence (that comes in different versions, to make things simpler!). It is as if it were criminal to own a car, even on one’s own land or in one’s own garage, if one did not have a driver’s licence. The firearm licence renewal process involves filling in Form 979, which is somewhat less contemptible than the form required for first-time gun owners, but not exactly the ultimate mark of the free citizen. Indeed, this is what CUFOA is fighting against.
I am ashamed to say that I am not among the real CUFOA heroes. When “my” licence (as one says, “my cancer”) expired last Summer, I refused to answer one of the form’s obscene questions. Question 6(d) asks, “During the past two (2) years, have you experienced a divorce, a separation, a breakdown of a significant relationship, job loss or bankruptcy?” I did not check “yes” or “no”, but wrote, “My love affairs are none of your business”. Besides sending the form to the Canada Firearms Centre and to the Prime Minister, I posted it on the web, at www.pierrelemieux.org/policecanada/Form_979_2007.pdf. Anybody can check the complete, unedited version of this renewal application. I even filled the form in English for the whole world to see.
More generally, the timeline of the case and all the documents are available at www.pierrelemieux.org/policecanada/cafc-cfc.html.
George Jonas, the famous columnist, wrote in the National Post: “The problem is that gun control in any form practical in a free society – certainly in any form currently proposed or practiced in Canada or the U.S., such as demanding details about Professor Lemieux’s love life – doesn’t keep guns away from criminals. It only keeps guns away from the law-abiding.”
On September 11, after more than two months without even an acknowledgement of my application, I launched a few of access to information requests to know what was going on. The Sûreté du Québec – the Québec provincial police, which enforces the federal controls on behalf of their Big Brother in Ottawa – denied my request, except for an incomplete copy of my application form. They invoked two exceptions in the Québec Act Respecting Access to Documents, that is, when “the divulgation of information could impede an investigation ... or reveal a method of investigation, a program or a plan designed to prevent, detect or repress crime...”, and when information “is contained in an advice or a recommendation ... when the organization has not made its final decision”.
The RCMP, on its side, provided what they said were all the documents they had. A few pages are interesting. A faceless and nameless bureaucrat from the RCMP/Canada Firearms Centre sent to a certain Annie Bureau at the Sûreté du Québec a few pages of my Confessions d'un coureur des bois hors-la-loi (Montréal: Varia, 2001) where I am not especially nice towards praetorians and the politicians they serve. The comment on the fax cover reads: “here [sic] is the text received from Mr. Pierre Lemieux, licence # 11590568, ‘Confessions d'un coureur des bois’.”
It is certainly refreshing to see that the bureaucrats read something, even if, I must say, I had myself included copy of these pages with my application! Note that this document, sent from the RCMP to the Sûreté du Québec, is one that the latter has refused to release. “Public safety” was obviously their motivation.
On November 8, I published in the Ottawa Citizen an op-ed about my being a daily criminal, without a firearms licence since the summer. I couldn’t help faxing the column with a nice letter to the faceless RCMP bureaucrat who had forwarded my book excerpt to a Sûreté du Québec bureaucrat. I urged him to read the whole book, as well as the one I published in Paris on the right to keep and bear arms (Le droit de porter des armes, Paris: Belles Lettres, 1993). “If you can spare the time, between two Taser shots”, I wrote, “you may learn something from these books.” I copied the provincial police.
A few days later, on November 27, I received a letter from the Canada Firearms Center/Royal Canadian Mounted Police revoking the registration certificates of my guns. Then, a few more days later, I received a registered letter from the provincial police containing the legal excuse for this: a “Notice of refusal to issue a firearms licence”. The reason is clearly stated in the letter:</p>
<blockquote>Did not supply all the information required by the Firearms Act, The Regulations for firearms permits, or any other applicable regulation, the application for renewal of a firearms licence in order to obtain the Licence (art. 54(1)a Firearms Act.<br>
Question 6d) section C Personal History: “My love affairs are none of your business / Ça ne vous regarde pas.”</blockquote>
I have reproduced the three-line typewritten reason with all its typos, including the missing closing parenthesis and quotation mark. Obviously, the bureaucrats still have some reading to do. But the interesting point is what they call the “public safety” reasons: criminalizing somebody who refuses to answer a question about his love life.
I am tempted to conjecture that such low-life bureaucrats must not have a love life as exciting as mine, but I will abstain.
I had provided the same “none of your business” answer on the similar forms I had to fill in 1995 and 2001. At that time, the Police Bureaucratic Complex issued my licence anyway. But things have obviously changed. I conjecture that the Police-Bureaucratic Complex has become much more self-righteous and assured of their ultimate victory against our traditional liberties, now that they have a law-and-order government in Ottawa.
Contrary to some of my resister friends, I do not think we should reserve our attacks for the “bad cops”, who would be the politicians, and have good words for the “good cops”, who would be the actual uniformed policemen. Although I do understand that there are good front-line cops who are concerned with the demise of our liberties, and that they are just obeying orders, there are also politicians who claim to be powerless against the uncontrolled monster state that crushes our liberties. Moreover, the Nuremberg trials have established that obeying orders is not always a sufficient excuse. Policemen are willing or unwilling accomplice of the mounting tyranny; they must be made to realize it.
On December 27, I appealed the bureaucrats’ decision to not renew “my” gun licence and to revoke the registration certificates of my guns. I am arguing that the firearms legislation violates my traditional liberties and is thus unconstitutional. The hearing date in provincial court was set to March 28. On that date, however, the court transferred the case to another town, and I am waiting for a new court date.
The interesting question is, will I be the first Canadian to be jailed for refusing to tell the state about his love life? Or will it be simply because I refuse to submit to a liberticidal and unjust law? As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “[u]nder a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison”.