Columnists
Thank you Halifax
So Halifax is initiating a program called “Fares for Firearms,” whereby gun owners can turn in their weapons for um, well, er, um—bus tickets.
That’s right. This is the second time Halifax has tried a manouevre of this sort. In 2009, it started a “Pixels for Pistols” progam that saw over a thousand firearms turned in for a free camera. This time, the municipality is budgeting $5,000, and offering 50 two-dollar tickets per gun; which means it values a surrendered gun at $100 and estimates that 50 guns will be turned in.
This sounds like relatively small potatoes but, as local police say, any program that takes some weapons off the street is worthwhile, especially in a city that has seen a spike in gun violence. And that makes it worth taking in stride the snickers of those who imagine thieves and robbers using a water pistol to hold up a bank and then taking a free ride on a getaway bus.
Now I recognize that the County is not the sort of place where gun ownership presents a problem, even with hunting season just around the corner. And I agree we do not have much of a municipal transit system, so that offering free bus tickets is not much of an incentive for anything. So is there any way for the County to adopt a Haligonian inducement-and-reward strategy? I say there is, as I will demonstrate in the following two-part rigorous analysis.
First, what does the County issue that is like a bus ticket, that has some sort of hard currency value? When the question is put that way, the answer becomes clear: it’s the garbage bag tag. So valuable are these uniquely numbered pink stickers that armoured vehicles are reportedly hired to steer them safely to local retail outlets for resale. And counterfeiting rings, rumoured to exist behind the bland facade of innocent euchre tournaments, have allegedly caught the attention of the local OPP.
Second, what do people have, or do, that the County wants to stop them having or doing to such an extent that it is worth giving them a hundred bucks worth of garbage bag tags in exhange for giving up what they have, or stopping what they do? The obvious answer, based on the recent deliberations of council, is “making noise.” What better way to encourage people to be quiet than to offer them the opportunity to get rid of their garbage for free? Here’s an example. Let’s suppose you’re having a New Year’s party that is bopping along until ten in the evening or even later, and Uncle Fred, who has commandeered the keys to the karaoke bar, is letting everybody hear for themselves just how faithfully he can reproduce Mustang Sally. You can imagine his immediate reaction when a County bylaw officer gently confronts him with an offer of 33 three-dollar garbage bag tags to shut it down!
Put these two parts of the analysis together and you have to conclude that a program in the County with a name such as “Tags for Tranquility” would have a more than decent chance of flying. Admittedly, you would probably encounter some in the urban bumpkin press who might make sport of our efforts, but that is just the price of making a meal out of the cards you are dealt.
Besides, I don’t see anything wrong in an underfunded municipal government trying to create a result using the nearest thing it has to hard currency. So long as the Bank of Canada does not step in and charge the County with printing its own money, why not take the concept a little further still and issue municipal staff their bonuses (assuming they have otherwise earned them) not in cash but in garbage bag tags? Why not make municipal grants the same way? Or pay paving contracts? If those tags happen to get resold privately for real cash at a discounted value, where is the harm? The reseller gets the cash he or she craves, and the purchaser gets the cheap tag he or she desires in order to have the luxury of putting his or her garbage out at the end of his or her driveway instead of surreptitiously strewing it over one of our more obscure back roads. The free market, albeit shaded a little black, would set the price— so even ‘independent’ newspaper editorialists would like the idea.
Perhaps this is what all those starry-eyed economic development officers had in mind when they told us we should build a “creative rural economy.” Thank you, Halifax, for the inspiration.
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