SENATOR SPRAYING CHEAP SHOTS

He's Playing Politics Instead Of Passing Gun Laws

Sen. Larry Campbell has an easy, three-point plan for ridding our
streets of violent gangsters who spray all-night Chinese restaurants
with deadly gunfire:

A: Legalize pot. B: Sell it. C: Use the money to hire more cops.

Simple solution, right? But there's one simple problem stopping it
from getting done. And his name is Stephen Harper.

"You have a simple man, the prime minister, running a simple party in
a simple way," Campbell, the former Vancouver mayor, told me in one
of his classic shoot-from-the-lip interviews.

The political crossfire began shortly after two masked gunmen strafed
the Fortune Happiness restaurant with a blizzard of bullets, killing
two people and wounding six in an apparent gangland hit.

The chalk outlines of the bodies had barely been drawn when
Conservative boss Harper went political, pointing a finger at the
Liberals for holding up two gun-crime bills in the Senate.

Bill C-10 would increase mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes, while Bill

C-35 would make it tougher for suspects in gun crimes to get bail.
Both bills were still awaiting Senate approval when Parliament shut
down for the summer.

"Let's get on with passing these laws so we can crack down on this
phenomenon," Harper said, calling on Liberal Leader Stephane Dion to
"get his unelected senators out of the way."

"Nonsense," Campbell fires back, saying it was Harper who shut down
the parliamentary session before the Senate had a chance to consider the bills.

"He talks about unelected senators," Campbell fumed to me on
Nightline BC on CKNW. "About a third of Canadians want the
Conservatives and two-thirds can't stand them. Where's his moral
right to govern?"

Despite that, Campbell said he supports Harper's gun-crime bills.
Though you'd never know it by the way he trashes them.

"They're simple solutions to complex problems," he said.

"If I kill or wound someone with a gun, should I go to jail longer
because I used a gun? If I used a knife, I don't go to jail for so
long? We're talking about instruments of killing here. Why is one
worse than another?"

Did I mention he supports the bills? Don't ask me to explain why he'd
vote for a bill he so clearly dislikes. But here's Campbell's
ultimate simple solution to gangland street crime:

"If we legalize marijuana and use all the money from that . . . we
could free up more police officers to start doing community policing
and who could be on the street," he said.

"But, my God, that would go against the Christian right-wing views of
the government!"

The marijuana debate is an important one, but any consensus on
legalization and taxable sales of pot is years away. The gang wars,
meanwhile, are happening right now and people are getting killed.

The bottom line: Canadians want a crackdown on gun crime. The good
senator should drop the "simple" political cheap shots and get on with the job.