Bagnell joins Easter on gun registry vote switch

With the Grit whip now off the barn wall, another Liberal MP who previously voted in favour of Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner's private member's bill to repeal the federal long-gun registry says he'll vote with this party in the fall.

Larry Bagnell, the Liberal critic for Arctic issues and MP for Yukon, says he'll vote against Bill C-391, mainly because Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has designated it a whipped vote. (For a full rundown on the numbers going into the Sept. 22 vote, go to Wherry's post because he's much smarter than I am and math hurts my soul.)

"We're not being offered a choice," Bagnell bluntly told reporters on Wednesday in Ottawa.

But Bagnell also said the Conservatives' campaign against him in his riding on the issue "backfired" because he heard from a number of groups in favour of the registry that hadn't contacted him before.

Like Wayne Easter before him, Bagnell said Ignatieff's work to reconcile the concerns of rural Canadians and find a "compromise" on the registry also contributed to his decision.

This sounds like the line we're going to hear in the coming days and weeks from the six other Liberal MPs who initially supported Hoeppner's bill, as the Liberals thrust the fate of the registry to the NDP and its dozen (unwhipped, for now) MPs who voted with the government last November.