THE NEXT GENERAL MEETING: THURSDAY FEBRUARY 9TH, 7:30 PM, AT THE CLUB HOUSE, LINCOLN PARK ROAD, IN DERBY TOWNSHIP. 

February General Meeting 

February's SSA monthly meeting will feature big game hunter and SSA member Warren Winkler. Those of us who enjoyed Warren's great slides and stories about his African hunting adventures will be looking forward to slides and 
tales of Warren's  adventures hunting North American Big Game.

March is the time when many hunters begin their turkey hunting preparations for the season opener in April. Returning for the third year as the guest speaker for the March SSA meeting is professional turkey hunting guide Trevor Aljoe. Don't miss the chance to get lots of hunting tips and to hear the details of Trevor's successful turkey hunts here and south of the border.

New Members!!

DATES AND OTHER THINGS TO REMEMBER!
 

It is a real honour to be elected as your SSA President for the year 2003. I look forward to participating in the many events and  activities that make our club the premier outdoors sportsmen's association in Ontario. Lets all work together to make 2003 a really enjoyable and productive year.

Blake Smith, President 

Boating Exam Challenge Needed?

Some members have expressed an interest in challenging the Boating Exam and obtaining a Pleasure Craft Operator Card.  If there is enough interest, we will try to offer this opportunity again in the winter assuming that Fred Geberdt, Mark Porter and Richard Manley are still willing to provide the necessary assistance and the challenge is still available through the O F A H.

It is our understanding that operators of motorized vessels less than 13 feet are now required to have a valid operators cards.  Further, by 2009, all operators of motorized vessels will have to meet this requirement.

Last year, the charge was $35 for members and $45 for nonmembers.  We will review this and inform you in the next newsletter, if, in fact a challenge is needed and the chosen date.  If you are interested in being involved, please call me at 372-0410 or email me at jford@bmts.com

Alternatively you can contact Fred at  376-2369.  We must have prepayment before we can order the books and exams.

The challenge will likely take place early to mid March. Everyone registered with Fred and John will be advised of the dates.

Youth Activities Program

January saw the beginning of the air rifle program.  Thanks to Dan Laxton for setting this up and working with us.  Air rifles will continue every Sunday afternoon at 1:30 PM.  The new executive are as follows:  Sarah Stephenson - Chair, P.K. McCallum - Vice-Chair, Cheryl Fretz - Secretary.  Any committees needing help call the YAP executive and we will try to put a crew together.

Don't forget the winter campout February 1 & 2 starting at 9:00 AM.  Everyone welcome.  Bring lots of outdoor gear and your tents. For us adults who are not ready to sleep in the snow, there is lots of room in the clubhouse to throw down your sleeping bag.

Robert Pye the Get Outdoors coordinator for the OFAH has confirmed that he will be here for the campout so lets show him a good time.  He will explain the Get Outdoors program for anyone that wants more info.  He will also have information about the leadership camp in Haliburton this summer.
Mary Stephenson 363-2893 or Sarah Stephenson 363-9845

Sarah Stephenson, Chairperson
Youth Activities Program

Forest and Wildlife Advisory Committee

There have been quite a few reports of crop damage by turkeys. Many of these allegations are quite likely rumor only, but some have been verified through direct observation by MNR staff, i.e round bales puncturing and subsequent spoilage, as well as scratching up spring planting. John Ford and this writer are working with the Grey County Forest Stewartship Council to put together a public information meeting to help solve the problem. We have to do what we can to maintain a favourable farmer/sportsman relationship. Please let John or myself know of any specific crop damage by turkeys that you know about.

The gun control issue is flaring up again over the Firearm Registry boondogle - an exercise that is heartily detested by almost all gun owners. The Canadian Police Association once again endorsed Firearms Registration saying that "Police on the street use it daily". I would really like the Police Association to give evidence on the program, i.e provide specific occurences, total numbers and how this is reducing crime. It should be really interesting to see how registration, so recently in law and ignored by so many, can provide any possible basis for any evaluation by the police. One of the saddest aspects of the matter is the breakdown of trust and respect that gun owners used to have for our police officers. By and large, hunters and target shooters are politically a bit right of centre, patriotic, reasonably law abiding, upright citizens who used to be the kind of people the police could depend on in a pinch. Not anymore, and that is too damned bad. For whatever reasons the police have adopted this wretched registration and by alienating we gun owners, they have lost the support and co-operation of one of the best group of allies they could have wished for. Some of us have long been certain that the Government's push for registration has a political rather than crime control objective. We are not the only ones. Our suspicions are reinforced by the recent following excerpts from a recent Goble and Mail article by political heavyweight John Dixon. Dixon was there when it happened and is able to give us a glimpse of the inside track, a trail of deception that has followed since 1992.

The following article was published in the January 8th/03 edition of the Globe and Mail

We now know that the government's gun-control policy is a fiscal and administrative debacle. Its costs rival those of  core services like national defence. And it doesn't work. What is less well known is that the policy wasn't designed to control guns. It was designed to control Kim Campbell.

When Ms. Campbell was enjoying a brief season of success in her re-election bid in the summer campaign of 1993, Mr. Chretien was kept busy reassuring what he called the "Nervous Nellies" in his caucus that Ms. Campbell's star would soon fall. To bring her down, the Liberals planned to discredit her key accomplishment as Minister of  Justice, an ambitious gun-control package.

Those measures - enacted in the wake of the Montreal Massacre -included new requirements for the training and certification of target shooters and hunters. We got new laws requiring: the safe storage of firearms and ammunition, which essentially brought every gun in the country under lock and key; screening of applicants for firearms licences; courts to actively seek information about firearms in spousal assault cases; the prohibition of firearms that had no place in Canada's field-and-stream tradition of firearms use. 

I was one of the Department of  Justice officials involved in that earlier gun-control program. When the House of Commons passed the legislation, Wendy Cukier and Heidi Rathgen of the Coa1ition for Gun Control, which had been part of the consultation process, supplied the champagne for a party at my Ottawa home.

So what were the Liberals to do, faced with a legislative accomplishment on this scale? 
Simple: Pretend it hadn't happened, and promise to do something so dramatic that it would make Ms. Campbell look soft on gun control. The obvious policy choice was a universal firearms registry.

The idea of requiring the registration of every firearm in the country wasn't new. Governments love lists. Getting lists and maintaining them is a visible sign that the Government is at work. And lists are the indispensable first step to collecting taxes and licence fees. There is no constitutional right to bear arms in Canada, as is arguably the case in the United States.

So why not go for a universal gun registry? The short answer, arrived at by every study in the Department of Justice, was that universal registration would be ruinously expensive, and could actually yield a negative public security result (more on this in a moment). Besides, in 1992 Canada already had two systems of  gun registration: the complete registry of all restricted firearms, such as handguns (restricted since the 1930s) and a separate registry of ordinary firearms.

This latter registry, which started in the early 1970s, was a feature of the firearms acquisition certificate (or FAC)  required by a person purchasing any firearm. Every firearm purchased from a dealer had to be registered to the FAC  holder by the vender, and the record of the purchase passed on to the RCMP in Ottawa.   So we were already building a cumulative registry of all the owners of guns in Canada purchased since 1970. 
The FAC system was a very Canadian  (ie. sensible) approach to the registration of ordinary hunting and target firearms. If you were a good ol' boy  from Camrose, Alta., and didn't want to get involved, you didn't have to -as long as you didn't buy more guns. Good ol' boys die off, so younger people in shooting sports would eventually all be enrolled in  the system.

After the Montreal Massacre, the then  Deputy Minister of  Justice, John Tait, asked me to review the gun-control  package under development. One thing I immediately wanted to know was how many Canadians owned Ruger Mini-14s (the gun used by the Montreal murderer). The Mini-14 came into production about the time the F AC system was introduced, so the FAC should have a good picture of the gun's distribution.

But when our team asked the RCMP for the information, we couldn't get it. Computers were down; the information hadn't been entered yet; there weren't enough staff to process the request: there was a full moon. After a week I said I didn't want excuses  I wanted the records. Then a very senior person sat me down and told me the truth.

The RCMP had stopped accepting FAC records, and had actually destroyed  those it already had. The FAC registry
system didn't exist because the police thought it was useless and refused to waste their limited budgets maintaining it
They also moved to ensure that their political masters could not resurrect it. 

Such spectacular bureaucratic vandalism persuaded my Deputy and his Minister to concentrate on developing compliance with affordable gun-control measures that could work. A universal gun registry could only appeal to people who didn't care about costs or results, and who didn't understand what riled up decent folks in Camrose.

Which is precisely why it appealed to those putting together the Liberal Red Book for the pivotal 1993 election. If the  object of the policy exercise was to appear to be "tougher" on guns than Kim Campbel1, they had to find a policy that
would provoke legitimate gun-owners to outrage. Nothing would better convince the Liberals' urban constituency that Jean Cretien and Allan Rock were taking a tough line on guns than the spectacle of angry old men spouting fury on Parliament Hill.

The supreme irony of the gun registry battle is that the policy was selected because it would goad people who knew something about guns to public outrage. That is, it had a purely political purpose in the special context of a hard-fought election. The fact that it was bad policy was crucial to the specific political effect it was supposed to deliver.

And so we saw demonstrations by middle-aged firearm owners, family men whose first reflex was to respect the laws of the land. This group's political alienation is a far greater loss than the $200 million that have been wasted so far. The creation of this new criminal class-- the ultimate triumph of negative political alchemy -- may be worst, and most enduring product of the gun registry culture war.

John Dixon is a hunter, and President of  the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. From 1991 to 1992, he was adviser to then Deputy Minister of  Justice John Tait.

So now it has been formally stated, the law was specifically designed to infuriate those of us who understand the wrongness of the legislation. The law was specifically designed to incite we "Rednecks" to demonstrate in front of the T.V. cameras. Our protests turned against us  the politically correct urban dwelling bleeding hearts, who had no conception of the essential wrongness of the law.

I feel like a real dupe. I reacted just the way Allen and Jean had planned. But now, how do we get this message out to the city dwellers and other assorted dupes?

Blake Smith, Co-chairperson
Forest and Wildlife Advisory Committee

Fisheries Advisory Committee

While the snow settles into Grey and Bruce counties all is well under the roofs of our fish hatchery .The salmon fry are feeding readily and going to 0.7 feed soon. All the brown trout are hatched out and doing good. The rainbow trout that we got from the Wiarton club in June are progressing exceptionally well. Coy Currie says that he has caught and fried up smaller brook trout some springs ,as have I, when you consider that our rainbows are now 9 to 12 inches in length!

We have received a reply from the Weaver,s family lawyer with some new proposals to the lease agreement. These items will be discussed by the new executive in January .

If anyone has any ideas for fisheries or wildlife projects [SFWIP] please advise anyone on the executive before the end of February as we must put in our submissions by March 15th. This is also the deadline to send in any invoices related to projects done this past year.
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If you haven, t been out to a general meeting lately you should make a point of doing so. There are a lot of good raffle prizes available and according to Peter Robson all you have to do is tell the person who just won to draw your name next and it appears in his hand. Of course there is always lots of useful information from interesting speakers.

Mike Prevost
Co-chair F .A.C.