OTTAWA—She is the unlikely champion of Canadian farmers, hunters and outdoor enthusiasts — a 45-year-old mother of three who doesn’t even own a gun.

She is Candice Hoeppner, the rookie backbencher who went from being a low-profile Manitoba MP to the crusading face of the Conservative government’s current effort to kill the long-gun registry.

Hoeppner, a former campaign manager for Stephen Harper, introduced a bill to scrap the registry in March 2009, five months after being elected as member for Portage-Lisgar, a mostly rural Manitoba riding where the registry is about as popular as Quebec sovereignty.

Whether or not her bill is shot dead on the Commons floor Wednesday, Hoeppner will remain a champion for non-criminal gun owners.

Not a gun owner herself, she repeatedly jokes she’d rather buy a piano for her house than a gun. Yet she is driven, she says, by the overwhelming disdain for the registry that exists in the rural communities of her riding and in other ridings that she has visited across the country.

While Michael Ignatieff spent his summer on the Liberal Express, busing around the country trying to show Canadians his human touch, Hoeppner spent the latter weeks of her summer holding “town hall” meetings in ridings where NDP and Liberal MPs had switched their support away from her bill, betraying, she says, their constituents in the process.

From Manitoba, she flew to Vancouver Island, then onwards to Whitehorse and Saskatchewan before dropping into northern and southern Ontario, where she travelled from town to town in a rented Chevy SUV decked out in “Scrap the long-gun registry” liveries.

Her message is a clear one that can be summed up in bumper sticker comments like the one she recently posted to her Facebook page: “Kids who hunt, trap, & fish don’t mug little old ladies.”

Though her online support suggests otherwise — she has just 28 followers on Twitter and only 291 people seem to like her on Facebook — she remains adamant that she and her bill have the support of many Canadians.

“I’ve been travelling throughout Ontario,” she says. “I was in the Yukon, in British Columbia. It is an issue and I’m certain it will continue to be an issue.”

Shortly before the Liberal Express dropped Ignatieff off on Parliament Hill Monday, Hoeppner arrived in her decaled SUV and proceeded to lambast the growing opposition to her bill during a press conference in the parking lot.

Tuesday morning, she was in front of the cameras again, this time on a muddy farm on the outskirts of Ottawa, one last stop on a shotgun tour through rural Canada.

There she vowed to continue fighting for her bill. Later, as she exited the House of Commons, she seemed almost resolved that her efforts might soon prove to have been in vain.

“It’s very difficult,” she said.

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“Even though we thought we had committed Members of Parliament who liked my bill and said that they would support it.

“They’ve changed their mind, flipped their vote.”

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