Harper has long-gun registry in the crosshairs
Preventing Quebec from keeping its records will put lives at risk
The Quebec government is requesting to keep its long-gun registry records, just as the Conservative federal government plans on scrapping the entire thing, a controversial move a lot of people are questioning.The registry was put in place in 1995, after the tragic Polytechnique massacre in Montreal in 1989. It costs $2.2 billion and holds the records of more than 7.1 million guns acquired in the past decade in Canada. The Conservative government, however, sees it as useless, saying it singles out rifle-carrying farmers and hunters who follow the rules.
The only Canadian provinces that are in favor of abolishing the long gun registry are Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, all Harper strongholds with large rural areas.
However, that is the only reason the long-gun registry should be abolished. Maria Peluso, a Concordia political science professor and anti-gun activist, has been involved with the long-gun registry for an extended period of time. She said that if the Harper government removed the registry, something that has been scientifically proven to save lives, it would put Canadian lives in danger, under section 7 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“Everyone is entitled to their security and their lives, and the government is deliberately putting our lives in danger right now. Where is the security for our life?” said Peluso.
Harper also argued that registering all guns is useless because people need to get a license to own guns in Canada anyway. He failed, however, to realize that registration and licensing aren’t the same thing. Once you have a gun licensed, it does not have to be renewed again, whereas registration gives you many advantages, such as having “registered” gun users in a database, complete with names and addresses.
“The government has no revenue whatsoever with gun licensing,” said Peluso. “It’s terrible that there are so many more licenses than registrations.”
The data acquired since 1995 is overwhelming. On average, every single police station in Canada uses the registry about 14,385 times a day. Denis Côté, head of the Fédération des policiers et policières municipaux du Québec, recently told The Gazette that a big majority of average daily searches of the federal registry are conducted by Quebec.
Crime associated with long-gun use has also gone down significantly (65 per cent), according to Peluso, since the insertion of the long-gun registry. These numbers cannot be ignored, but Harper’s majority is blinding him.
Quebec and Ontario are, so far, the only provinces to request to keep their long-gun registry data. The data would in fact be very useful to police stations and government officials in both provinces. The Conservatives haven’t yet made the decision of whether or not they will give this information to Quebec.
Quebec is also emotionally involved in the gun registry. Three of the most tragic incidents involving shootings in Canada happened here: the Polytechnique massacre (1989), the Concordia shootings (1992), and the Dawson College shooting (2006). An enormous database with everyone who possesses guns would therefore be of critical importance to the provincial government.
Quebec and Ontario also hold the most registered users in the system, and have almost half of Canada’s entire population. To scrap it would be a huge loss, especially for these provincial governments.
Joe Couto, a spokesperson for the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, recently told The Gazette that it would make sense to link potential provincial gun registries because police officers in both Ontario and Quebec already share a lot of gun-related information. “If Quebec moved that way Ontario would most likely consider it,” he said.
Let’s agree, however, that this is not a perfect world. Keeping the long-gun registry here in Quebec doesn’t mean that everyone in possession of a long-gun would be in our database, many being able to slip under the radar with guns acquired from the growing black market. However, it would allow us to keep an eye on most citizens in possession of such dangerous firearms. To have to start from scratch here in Quebec would most certainly not happen because of the enormous costs associated with it.
So we must ask ourselves a critical question: why is Stephen Harper hesitating to give Quebec its own records? The “innocent farmers and hunters with rifles” don’t really apply here, because most of our population lives in cities. Is it really so that farmers and hunters are put at ease? There are bigger issues at stake here, such as the safety of our citizens from dangerous firearms.
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Hey teachers, don’t leave them kids alone!
Academic offences may be down, but fewer students are getting caught
“I find ways to cheat all the time,” a classmate recently told me. As a graduate student studying journalism, a field where plagiarism can and will likely destroy your reputation and career, I took the confession pretty seriously.Catherine Bolton, associate dean of student academic services for Concordia’s faculty of arts and science, is conducting a study on academic integrity along with two other colleagues. They presented their preliminary findings at the 2011 International Conference on Academic Integrity last month in Toronto.
So far they’ve found that most students “don’t cheat because of their desire to learn, work hard and succeed,” said Bolton. Well, I have some frightening news for her: a lot of students just don’t get caught.
She is spot-on about one thing though: Concordia does ensure the highest standards of academic integrity, and punishment for cheating is the academic equivalent of Chinese waterboarding torture from the 14th century.
The problem with today’s crop of students is that technology allows them to cheat in ways thought previously impossible, and faculties, professors and universities as a whole are having a hard time keeping up.
Firstly, let’s define cheating as any act that specifically goes against the school’s academic code of conduct, and your own professor’s outline. Concordia’s own code of conduct, available on their website, was only updated in the summer of 2008. Out of the document’s 14 pages, only two pages are devoted to explaining what academic offences are. Article 16 states that any “unauthorized collaboration between students” is deemed an offence.
Remember when 18-year-old Chris Avenir was almost expelled from Ryerson University in Toronto a few years ago because he started a study group on Facebook? I would expect our own code of conduct to be a little more specific about those situations, as to prevent any arbitrariness that may arise.
Another form of student collaboration is note-sharing, and notesolution.com allows students from universities across Canada to upload and share class notes with each other. However, nowhere in their terms of use is it spelled out that sharing exam-related material or answers to quizzes is prohibited. Concordia’s Provost David Graham was interviewed about the website this summer by Maclean’s: “Some (professors) will have rules whereby students can’t collaborate on homework—other professors will promote that kind of co-operative work because they believe it promotes learning.” This remains entirely too vague and leaves the door wide open for students to find news ways to cheat.
Donald McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University Business School and an academic integrity czar, has been researching academic cheating, dishonesty and plagiarism for years. A survey of 14,000 undergraduates he conducted over the past four years yielded some unsurprising results: about two-thirds of students admitted to cheating on tests, homework and assignments.
In a 2007 issue of The Canadian Journal of Higher Education (Vol. 36, No. 2), a study by Julia Christensen Hughes and Donald McCabe reports “that 53 per cent of nearly 15,000 Canadian undergraduates admitted to cheating on written work at least once in the 12 months before the survey.”
While Bolton may claim that “the vast majority of students earn their degrees without ever being accused of cheating,” it’s because they’re simply the byproduct of a technologically-driven generation that has many tools at their disposal to facilitate cheating.
A computer science teacher at NYU made headlines last year for writing a blog post entitled “Why I will never pursue cheating again.” He had accused 20 per cent of his students of cheating and ended up with low student-teacher evaluation scores (even though the students confessed when confronted). The moral of the story is that professors cannot let potential consequences such as those prevent them from reporting cheating offences.
The bottom line is that professors and faculties need to do more. Where writing and research is required, more fact-checking needs to be carried out. Although it’s time consuming, finding and exposing a single student guilty of plagiarism would undoubtedly send a stark message to the rest of the class and department for the rest of the semester. I know it did for me, during the second year of my undergraduate degree, when an English professor of mine thoroughly embarrassed a fellow classmate just to make a point.
Taking the time to check for cheating on all assignments early in a course shows students that you care about academic value, right from the beginning. Making sure guidelines and boundaries are established from day one will ensure that students cannot claim ignorance down the line if they get caught. It involves more time and dedication initially, but it pays off in the long run.
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