ALLAN ROCK'S CALL TO ARMS You have permission to distribute this in electronic format so long as it is unaltered and is credited to Alberta Report, BC Report or Western Report. In the bush of northern British Columbia, Aryan Nations leader Charles Scott is preparing for civil war. Just three weeks after he announced plans to create a private, armed, national militia, dubbed the Patriot Training Network (PTN), Mr. Scott boasts he has 50 followers ready to fight the "Communist, Zionist, anti-Christ government" in Ottawa. Since such militias are illegal in Canada, PTN's exercises will occur at night and its members' firearms will be stashed in secret locations. "When they come after our families and our guns," warns Mr. Scott, "we won't give in without bullets flying." While private militias are illegal, they still pop up now and then. Usually the nearby RCMP detachment keeps an eye on them to make sure they do not get out of hand. Most eventually die from lack of members' interest. But since last month's terrorist bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Okla., which has been linked by U.S. authorities to at least two young men loosely connected with the U.S. militia movement, Canadian paramilitary groups, such as Mr. Scott's, have come under much more deliberate scrutiny by Ottawa. So too have right-wing extremists. Leading the charge is Justice Minister Allan Rock, who assured Parliament two weeks ago that tougher gun control laws would prevent similar carnage in Canada. The Oklahoma City bombing is strange proof of gun control's effectiveness. Even a few Liberal MPs admitted last week that the blast_caused by an explosive mixture of diesel fuel and chemical fertilizer_had nothing to do with guns. Reform party critics claimed Mr. Rock's linking of his anti-gun legislation, Bill C-68, to the bombing showed just how desperate the Liberal government is to sell an increasingly unpopular piece of legislation. Bill C-68 will give police and bureaucrats unprecedented powers to search and inspect homes for firearms. The bill is so far-reaching, in fact, that analysts fear it may even stimulate the very paranoia that provokes terrorism and escalates rather than lessens anti-government hostility. Several legal experts now say the bill gives the police the broadest range of powers ever created in a piece of Canadian legislation. Besides establishing a national registry of Canada's seven to 18 million firearms, the bill gives police the authority to enter businesses and homes to ensure compliance with its registration and storage provisions. The police can, according to section 99, enter any home where a police officer "believes on reasonable grounds there is a firearm [or] prohibited weapon." Once in the home, a police officer can "examine any firearm and examine any other thing that the officer finds and take samples of it." Most significant, these searches can occur without a warrant. If a police officer arrives looking for guns, according to Section 100 of the bill, the homeowner is required to give that officer "all reasonable assistance to enable him or her to carry out the inspection," even if that officer lacks a warrant. Citizens who refuse to co-operate face up to two years in jail. As a result, gun owners will ultimately have less legal protection than drug dealers. Under existing narcotics legislation, a police officer must convince a judge that drugs are actually being sold from a house or business before it can be searched. "You don't have to be a gun owner to oppose this bill," says Michael Green, a lawyer and director of the Alberta Civil Liberties Association. "Any home in this country could be subject to random searches by the police," if the officers are prepared to swear after the fact that they were looking for guns. That enables them to avoid the supervision of judges, who have traditionally demanded evidence of criminal activity before granting warrants. Facing strident opposition to Bill C-68 within the Liberal caucus, Prime Minister Jean Chretien issued an ultimatum last month. Any MP who disagreed with the legislation must either refrain from voting in the House of Commons or lose his committee appointments and all special party perks. When the government called a vote after second reading of the bill in late April, 35 government MPs ducked the issue and failed to show up for the vote. Only three government members mustered enough courage to actually vote against Bill C-68. Even though he was kicked off a Commons committee as a result, Ontario Liberal MP Rex Crawford claims he is "proud to have voted against the bill." He insists that many of his Liberal colleagues are aware that Bill C-68 "essentially abandons the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms," but are unwilling to challenge the party leadership. He claims that most Liberal MPs are hoping to pass the legislation quietly before their constituents "read the fine print and discover that this bill will leave Canadians defenceless against arbitrary search and seizure by the government." The more Canadians know about existing gun-control laws, the more their support for firearm registration weakens, according to a recent public opinion survey conducted by Simon Fraser University business professor Gary Mauser. As with other national polls, Prof. Mauser found that over 80% of Canadians support registering all guns. However, support falls to 50%, when respondents were told that registration would cost an estimated $500 million over five years. It dropped to 44% when respondents were told that paperwork could force police departments to reassign some officers from the street to desk jobs. And, when asked what should be done to reduce violent crime, only 4% of Canadians cited stricter gun control as the top priority. The current discussion over Bill C-68 is, according to Saskatchewan Reform MP Garry Breitkreuz, very similar to the Charlottetown Accord. The initial polls on the accord indicated a great deal of popular support, often as much as 65% nationwide. But the more Canadians learned about the deal, says Mr. Breitkreuz, the more they realized it had little to offer, especially for the West. Eventually 54% voted against the deal. In order to give gun owners and civil rights advocates more time to inform Canadians, Reform party members hope to delay passage of the bill until the summer recess by presenting a continual stream of new amendments at the committee level. When the bill hits the Commons floor for third reading, the Reform caucus plans to hold around-the-clock debate on the issue. Even so, a government with a majority as large as the Liberals' can invoke closure, which would limit debate and automatically push the bill to a final vote, if it is able to intimidate its MPs to hold to the party line. Saskatchewan Reformer and party house leader Elwin Hermanson admits, "if the Liberals are determined to pass Bill C-68 during this sitting, there is absolutely nothing that can stop them." Critics charge that Mr. Rock has attempted to use the Oklahoma City bombing to divert attention from staunch grassroots resistance to more gun control. Five days after the blast he told the House of Commons justice committee that a national registry would help to prevent the creation of American-style private militias. The stockpiling of arms by paramilitary groups is a "compelling example of the benefits of registration," he said. "Isn't that what authorities should know, whether someone's stockpiling guns, creating their own militia?" But white supremacists like Mr. Scott, a self-declared colonel in his own militia, scoff at the idea of a national registry. Anyone who is seeking to protect his home and family from government invasion is not going to register his guns on a state computer, he argues. "Does Allan Rock really believe that people who are joining militias are going to tell the socialists in Ottawa whether they're stockpiling guns?" The only people who will register their guns, predicts Mr. Scott, will be law-abiding Canadians who are "too weak to stand up against the government." And just who is a stockpiler? Residents of Nelson, B.C., were shocked when, just over a year ago, Shirley Poohachoff was thrown in jail for "stockpiling" weapons. At 58 years of age, struggling to deliver papers with a heart condition, Mrs. Poohachoff hardly seemed like a threat to the community where she had lived peacefully for 35 years. But in the winter of 1994, a wildlife officer spotted several guns hanging on the wall of her home and notified police that they were not properly stored. So while she was delivering newspapers one February morning, two police cars forced her off the road. After surrounding her car, they demanded that she get out with her hands raised above her head. Minutes later she was sitting in a jail cell staring at her collection of a dozen rifles in the cell opposite. The local police took photographs and declared it the "largest arms bust in Nelson history." After spending a night in jail, she was allowed to return to her ransacked home outside town. The police had broken the front door off its hinges, thrown clothes out of the dressers, knocked over the refrigerator, broken into the filing cabinet and dumped out the contents of two safety deposit boxes. "I've seen a lot of hippies and drug dealers come around here," says Mrs. Poohachoff. "But no-one ever trashed my house until the cops came looking for guns. Now I lock my door for fear of the police." Even though a local judge slapped her with a minor penalty for unsafe storage, the police did not return her guns until early March of this year, one year after the weapons were originally confiscated. Bill Baldwin of Gloucester, Ont., can sympathize. While he was on vacation in March, burglars broke into his apartment and stole his computer. After ripping his guns out of their bin, they left them lying in the middle of his room. A few days later, the building superintendent noticed the guns through an open window and notified the local police. While Mr. Baldwin was still away, the police forced their way into his apartment and confiscated his firearms. On his return, Mr. Baldwin was immediately notified that he faced three charges of "careless storage," which he must resolve in court before he can return as a competitive shooter on Canada's international shooting team. By arresting law-abiding citizens simply for what they own, the government is "paving the way for right-wing extremism," claims Allan North, a professional trapper and English teacher from Tofield, Alta., about 40 miles east of Edmonton. "Allan Rock doesn't have a clue about [extremists]," he says. "If he did, he would see that the worst thing he can do is to give Canadian citizens yet another grievance against government by breaking into their houses and trucking them off to jail for not surrendering their legal right to own a firearm. That is the surest way to fire up extremism." Indeed Bill C-68 has played right into the hands of radical conspiracy theorists. Groups like the Canadian Institute for Political Integrity in Ottawa and the Canadian Institute for Economic Stability in Edmonton are sending speakers across the country to convince people that Canada has fallen under the control either of the international bankers or the United Nations, or both. Although these meetings are not well-publicized, attendance has "never been better," admits Glen Kealey, director of the CIPI. "Never before are so many people convinced that Ottawa is out to destroy their constitutional rights." Conspiracy theories were also flying at a recent anti-tax rally in Edmonton. Speaking before a standing-room-only crowd of 170 people in the basement of the Jubilee auditorium, tax protester Murray Gauvreau carefully explained why he thinks the federal income tax is unconstitutional and how international bankers are scheming to bankrupt Canada. Videos and pamphlets were circulated, purporting to give documentary evidence that the UN has established a standing army of between 350,000 and 450,000 soldiers in North America and is planning to enslave the entire continent. Most popular among these conspiracy tapes is America in Peril, produced by the Michigan Militia, a group allegedly connected with the Oklahoma City bombing. After Mr. Gauvreau's seminar, a handful of people sat around and shared the latest evidence of a UN army: "suspicious" helicopters were seen flying over Wainwright, Alta., a concentration camp is going up outside Ottawa and railroad cars equipped with handcuffs are secretly being assembled in the Arizona desert. Even Oklahoma City managed to fit neatly into a conspiracy theory. The bombing was, according to the latest "confidential reports," orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, under orders from the United Nations, in an attempt to discredit the militias. Also, by blowing up a major federal building, the theory goes, the UN can create the "sense of national crisis" needed to disarm Americans and impose a dictatorship. The same theorists insist there are upwards of 30,000 UN soldiers in Canada, too, although they never explain how they are able to conceal themselves. Such xenophobia and paranoia goes beyond gun control. It is part of a more widespread sense of cynicism and distrust of government. According to a survey of 2,400 Canadians conducted last year by Toronto's Ekos Research Associates Inc., ill feelings toward government are at an "unprecedented level." Fully 69% of those polled agreed that the ethical standards of the federal government have "slipped badly" over the past decade; and 50% of respondents felt they had "no influence on the political system" in Canada. According to the survey, just 33% of parents would be "proud" to see their children become politicians, versus 64% 10 years ago. The results are, according to University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan, a damning indictment of the past 30 years of federal policies. Since the early 1960s, Canadians have witnessed the creation of a socialized health care system, national and provincial human rights commissions, employment equity, official bilingualism, the shift to the metric system, a new flag, and a Canada Pension Plan that is scheduled for bankruptcy in 20 years. To fund all this, the tax bill of the average Canadian family has risen 1,167% since 1961. Unable to see any direct benefit from such sweeping change, Prof. Flanagan says, "it is only natural that some people start thinking they are victims of a more insidious conspiracy." At present, intelligence and police sources estimate that there are at most 2,000 white supremacists, militiamen, and armed extremists in Canada, and more likely less than 1,000. On the prairies, one police source estimates "there are maybe 20 to 40 at any one time. And they don't pose much of a threat, although we do keep an eye on them." Unlike American law enforcement officials, who are prohibited by congressional order from even keeping press clippings on militias and other radicals, Canadian police and intelligence services can and do maintain surveillance. While gun control is not the sole cause for distrust, Mr. Rock's legislation is still "the most offensive bill in the last 30 years," says Tofield trapper North. The socialist policies and programs may have been misguided and expensive, but they left people's basic liberties intact. By robbing people of their private property, he argues, the government will encourage the right-wing extremists it is trying to stop. Adds Aryan Scott: "without Allan Rock, I don't think we would need a national militia." _ Christopher Serres.