After the last federal election in May, I set aside a bottle of bargain bubbly to open when the Conservatives make good — now that they have a parliamentary majority — on their promised to end the long gun registry; i.e. when a bill to do just that passes third reading, and not one moment before.
Somehow I am getting bad vibes that the bubbly will have gone flat and I’ll have expired from holding my breath before the unjust, horrendously expensive and ineffective registry is gone. Long gun owners and their groups have been sitting back and basking in what they regard as a foregone conclusion, while the registry forces have redoubled their lobbying efforts to fix-up and retain the registry, because it might, some day, save just one life.
Even in anti-registry Alberta, leader of the ultra-conservative Wild Rose party, Danielle Smith, has been heard to say that Alberta made a major mistake way back when by not “occupying the field” and establishing its own long-gun registry and, more recently, telling us that, when elected, she would work toward the appointment of Alberta’s own firearms officer.
I find it hard to believe that the Alberta Fish and Game Association has not called Ms. Smith to account on this and explain just what she means and what is her total plan for Alberta’s lawful long gun owners, and why she thinks we need an Alberta firearms officer (we have one now) if and when the federal registry is gone.
Alberta’s outdoors people tend to act against their own best interests in matters political. Many tell me Wild Rose is our salvation, and many more are enthused that two of “our” ministers, are front-runners in the provincial Conservative leadership race: Dr. Ted Morton, former minister of sustainable resource development, and a former environment minister (as SRD was then called), Gary Mar.
Outdoors people were excited when Dr. Morton was appointed, because he is an active hunter and angler, but slowly soured as he actively promoted what they perceived to be paid hunting initiatives. Then, when he became finance minister, he further cut into SRD’s already subsistence budget. But he did greatly widen Sunday hunting in the province and slightly increased the number of fish and wildlife officers in the field, besides bringing in the largely symbolic and costless initiatives of the Heritage Hunting, Fishing and Trapping Act and Provincial Hunting Day.
Gary Mar, in his short tenure, seemed reluctant even to discuss with “stakeholders” what the environment, the outdoors, the fish and wildlife really needed. In 2000 he did “sign off” on the first Alberta Fish Conservation Strategy, a document largely justifying the province’s total lack of initiative in fisheries management; for example, expressing an antipathy toward non-native species (brown and rainbow trout) in favour of coddling less hardy native species, such as the west slope cutthroat.
That latter “strategy” haunts us today, with Alberta having proclaimed the west slope as “threatened” in 2009, and threats since of cutthroat fishing bans. All this is totally mindless of the fact that one of Alberta’s last real fisheries initiatives was the planting of west slopes from B.C. into the barren Ram River system in the early ‘60s, producing one of North America’s better west slope cutthroat fisheries.
The Upland Bird Alberta proposal that we preserve pheasant hunting in Alberta by stocking 40,000 shooter roosters annually met skepticism at the recent executive meeting of the Alberta Fish and Game Association. Some members reportedly were concerned even that Dr. Ted Morton might be a supporter and that alone raised red flags for them.
But the majority was concerned that many of their Southern Alberta clubs raise and release pheasants, including hens, in the hopes that they will breed and produce wild birds, while the UBA proposal would be to release only roosters, cannon fodder, and how does that, ultimately, do anything for the future of Alberta pheasant hunting?
Last week’s column on bear sprays for cougars has drawn much reader interest, some even commenting on the picture of me, and asking who I was thinking of as I red-fogged away, emptying a bear spray. Answer: our all-study and mismanaging wildlife managers.
The 2011 Alberta Guide to Hunting Regulations is now available and contains particulars of a new fall cougar season, allegedly in response to current large numbers of troublesome cougars: Basically, the holder of a resident cougar licence, hunting without dogs from Nov. 1 to 30, may take one cougar of either sex.
But the new fall season is not open in most of the more easterly Wildlife Management Units, my own favourite WMU 324, for example, where cougars have arguably become too numerous and inarguably too troublesome, even dangerous.
“They gotta have something to study,” one reader says: we mustn’t interfere with all those graduate students with grants and radio collars doing yet another study that never results in any practical wildlife management.
I still have two outdated bear sprays to empty . . .
Bob Scammell is an award-winning outdoors writer living in Red Deer. Contact him at: bscam@telusplanet.net