The Liberals’ new gun control bill,
C-21, doesn’t even need to be passed into law to achieve its desired ends. That’s because Liberal firearms policy is not about reducing crime, but firing up the party’s left-wing base and forcing Conservatives to take a stand against gun control. It’s preformative political theatre at its finest.
Legal gun owners targeted, while criminals get a pass
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If passed, the vaguely titled “act to amend certain acts and to make certain consequential amendments (firearms),”
would halt all future sales and transfers of handguns in Canada. Existing owners of legal handguns will not be affected, so long as they never intend to sell their weapons or transfer them to someone else, but anyone who goes through the onerous process of receiving a gun licence in the future will be limited to other types of firearms.
It’s not the most logically coherent policy. Does Prime Minister Justin Trudeau think Canada has exactly the right number of civilian-owned handguns? Does he think that licensed firearm owners looking to buy handguns in the future are more likely to use them in the commission of a crime than those who have purchased them in the past?
No. The policy is clearly designed to make it
look like he’s instituting strict gun-control measures, without having to confiscate every legal handgun in the country.
The legislation will also institute a mandatory buyback program for what the government likes to call “
assault-style firearms.” Back in 2020, the Liberals announced a ban on over 1,500 models of semi-automatic rifles, which are used by sports shooters, hunters and farmers. This, too,
was mere theatrics, because some of the models left off the list were virtually identical to the ones that were banned.
Now, the owners of the prohibited long guns will be forced to hand them over to the state.
It is a slap in the face to those who have gone through the trouble of taking the necessary training courses, submitting to the requisite background checks and shelled out their hard-earned money to buy what they thought was a perfectly legal product. The message is clear: even if you do everything by the book, the government could still confiscate your private property on a whim.
C-21 also includes “red flag” and “yellow flag” provisions that will allow courts and police to confiscate firearms or suspend gun licences if a person is believed to be a danger to himself or others, or if her eligibility for a licence is called into question. Such laws have been gaining in popularity in many liberal U.S. states, but the truth is that similar provisions have
been in place in Canada
for years.
Anyone who applies for a Possession and Acquisition License already has to submit a list of current and former romantic partners, who may be contacted by police to see if they can think of any reason why the applicant shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun.
Police already have the ability to confiscate guns without a warrant if they suspect “an offence is being committed, or has been committed.” Firearms can also be confiscated if an owner is accused of domestic violence or has been diagnosed with a mental illness. And all licence-holders are subject to “continuous eligibility screening.”
So while the new red-flag provisions may sound good to liberal Americans who look at Canada’s strict gun-control laws with envy, and to gun-control advocates on this side of the border who are unfamiliar with our current laws, they will not have a meaningful effect on gun crimes.
In fact, the only provisions of the legislation that have the potential to further Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino’s stated aim of deterring “organized crime and illegal gun smuggling at the border, and (preventing) gun crime from occurring in the first place” are the increased penalties for smuggling and modifying guns to increase their capacity.
Even still, like previous Liberal gun control attempts, C-21 mainly targets legal gun owners, who are not responsible for the vast majority of gun crimes in this country. It effectively bans legal handgun sales, despite the fact that the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police said a handgun ban
will do nothing to deter gun crime and
Toronto police said that at least 86 per cent of the guns used to commit crimes in the city last year were smuggled in from the United States.
It’s not that the Liberals don’t know this; it’s that it’s much easier to target lawful gun owners whose personal information and firearms are already in government databases than to bring down the organized criminals who are actually shooting up our streets.
And it doesn’t matter anyway, because the point of the legislation is not to make Canadians safer, but to sew divisions and gain support from the anti-gun lobby and urban voters.
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