It’s fair to say the federal Liberals’ 2020 ban on “assault-style” weapons has been a complete flop. It was launched after the April 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting during which Gabriel Wortman, masquerading as a Mountie, killed 22 people.
All of Wortman’s five guns had been acquired illegally. One illegally in Canada, three others smuggled from the United States, while the fifth was taken from the hands of a policewoman Wortman murdered during his rampage.
Because all of his guns were illegal, the Liberals, of course, convinced themselves the best way to reduce gun crime would be to ban hundreds of thousands of legally held firearms, just as the best way to prevent bank robberies is to ban legal withdrawals from bank accounts.
However, it’s not the illogic of that 2020 ban and corresponding mass confiscation that make them a flop. It’s this one simple fact: In the nearly five years since the Liberals announced the largest seizure of personal property in Canadian history, not a single banned gun has been collected.
Not one.
If legally owned rifles are such a threat to public safety, how come all the guns that were in place before the ban are still in the same hands today? The ban and confiscation have so far cost taxpayers more than $70 million without even one gun being collected by the government.
So what is the Trudeau government’s solution to its expensive failure? Maintaining the same illogic as the original ban, the Liberals are expanding the confiscation. Banning even more guns. Throwing good money after bad.
On Thursday, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Public Services Minister Jean-Yves Duclos (Trudeau’s Quebec lieutenant) announced that hundreds of additional models of long guns will now be banned. Although few details were revealed, at least 100,000 more individual guns in the hands of law-abiding Canadians are likely to be made illegal.
The ministers claimed the purpose for this expansion is to make Canada’s communities safer. However, the only possible explanation is that this is a wholly cynical attempt to revive Liberal fortunes in Toronto and Montreal, just like the two-month GST holiday is not about saving families money, but rather about regaining popularity for a woefully unpopular government.
The Leblanc-Duclos announcement could have been made at any time, but it was made on the eve of the 35th anniversary of the École Polytechnique shootings in Montreal, and only a week after feminist and gun-control groups scolded the government for not moving faster on a 2023 law that would make firearms licence revocations easier.
Also, Minister Duclos was there because he is the senior Quebec political minister and the ban has always been most popular in Quebec.
Wednesday, the Leger polling group released its latest federal results showing that Trudeau and his party have shed another two percentage points since its GST holiday announcement. If a signature new initiative (GST holiday) fails to bolster your support, dig down in your bag for an old favourite: targeting law-abiding gunowners for the failure your government’s criminal justice reforms.
Thursday’s order-in-council extending the five-year-old ban is about nothing but rebuilding Liberal fortunes in Toronto and Montreal, pure and simple. It is highly unlikely any confiscations will occur before the next federal election. Public safety is a charade.
Surely, in the backrooms, away from cameras and microphones, where cabinet ministers can be frank, even the Liberals must know the problem is not legal gun, but illegal ones.
In October, when Trudeau boasted about the two-year anniversary of his parallel handgun freeze and claimed it had made Canadian streets safer, police unions, police chiefs and others bristled. They know that handgun violence is up as much as 60 per cent since the freeze and that 85 to 90 per cent of criminal handguns are smuggled into Canada from the States.
Expect Thursday’s enhanced ban to do no more to control crime than the Liberals’ other efforts.