From a grassroots non-partisan website to the undeclared brainchild of Attorney General Michael Bryant, No Gun No Funeral might be undergoing yet another change.

"No Gun No Funeral" is the catch-phrase coined by Michael Bryant who is pushing for a handgun ban. As a province, Ontario has no power to institute such a ban. Only the federal government can do that. Stephen Harper's Conservative government has already indicated that it is not considering any such move. Then a website NoFunNoFuneral.ca was created by a group of Canadians who support such a ban. A grassroots movement collecting petitions to change the mind of Stephen Harper? As it turned out, the group was made up entirely of Michael Bryant's people, Liberals all. When you called the phone number associated with the domain registration record, the phone was answered by someone announcing that you had reached the "Michael Bryant Election Campaign".

Not so much grassroots as it was a stealthy attempt by Michael Bryant to make it appear that his idea had more resonance with the electorate than the evidence suggested. Or so it appeared. In any case, a reporter called Michael Bryant out on it, and Bryant admitted the site was his, but insisted it was not a partisan website designed to promote a Liberal Party agenda or his own re-election.

It looked like No Gun No Funeral was dead in the water. But tonight, changes are afoot.

When I tried to get to No Gun No Funeral, I got an error page:

An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.)

By default, SQL Server does not allow remote connections. But that has to be enabled when you are using your database to serve up webpages. Obviously it was working at one point, so it looks like someone has turned that setting off. Or the server has been disabled entirely.

Routine maintenance, perhaps. But seriously complicated routine maintenance to require shutting down access to the database that serves up content to create the webpages.

I checked the registration information, just to make sure the domain is still active. It is, and nothing has changed there. On a whim, though, I decided to checked the domain NoGunNoFuneral.com:

Registrant:
St. Pauls PLA
Brown, Glenn
509 St. Clair Ave West
Toronto, ON M6B1A1
CA

Domain name: nogunnofuneral.com

Administrative Contact:
St. Pauls PLA nikkiholland@gmail.com
Brown, Glenn
509 St. Clair Ave West
Toronto, ON M6B1A1
CA
(416) 489-8683 Fax:

This level of detail does not exist in the Canadian version of the domain. Nikki Holland and Glenn Brown were listed, but it was only by search their names that it was established that they were connected to Michael Bryant. Still, Bryant insisted despite this that constituency resources were not used to create the website.

In the .com, though, the St. Paul's Provincial Liberal Association is listed as the registrant. No constituency resources? Really?

And then maybe someone might ask Michael Bryant why he is cheap with the details when registering the Canadian registrar, but is happy to attach the site to his constituency association when providing information to the Americans. An uncharitable explanation might be that Michael Bryant would prefer certain information not be apparent to Canadian authorities.

What is at the .com version of No Gun No Funeral? Nothing -- it is a 303 redirect to the .ca version of the site. Remember that the .ca registration record makes no mention of the St Paul's Provincial Liberal Association.

You might wonder what a 303 redirect is. I found this question posted on a search engine forum enlightening:

My web design agency wants to implement 303 redirects (rather than 301s) to preserve SE rankings during a site rebuild.

Is the .ca site about to be moved to the .com domain? It's hard to say. Both domains were registered on July 24, so it's not like the .com just came into existence to be the new home.

I'll keep an eye on this. Michael Bryant's assertion that this site has no official connection with his constituency office is not holding up well under scruitny. In the mean time, the SQL database that served up the content of the pages when requested by a site visit is offline. It might be down for maintenance. It might be on the move, being booted off the server on which it was running.

Update: The site is back up (it's 1pm on Thursday). No apparent changes that I can see. The registration information isn't any different either (though changes can take up to 24 hours to propagate). I would say they had a serious SQL Server issue, or a major upgrade or patch being applied -- something behind the scenes.

Check out other entries from the No Gun No Funeral category
Results will open in a new window.

Check out what other Canadian bloggers have written about "No Gun No Funeral"
Results will open in a new window.

Check out what other Canadian bloggers have written about Michael Bryant
Results will open in a new window.