The situation was urgent, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said four years ago, nearly to the day. There was no time to go through Parliament – Canadian lives were at stake – which is why his government had to implement gun control changes immediately through an order-in-council. With essentially a stroke of his pen, Mr. Trudeau banned the sale, import, transfer and use of 1,500 of what he called “military-style assault rifles” (a made-up designation; he might as well called them “scary looking monster guns”).
The announcement came in the wake of the horrific mass shooting in Nova Scotia, where a gunman killed 22 people – notably, with weapons he obtained illegally. The government’s announcement, however, was about prohibiting the legal ownership of certain semi-automatic firearms.
“There’s no place for these weapons. They’re the choice of people who engage in mass murder,” then-public safety minister Bill Blair said. “Banning assault-style firearms will save Canadian lives.” (In practice, firearm-related homicide actually increased 23 per cent in Canada from 2020 to 2022.)
The government gave itself two years to develop a buyback program, which would offer owners fair compensation for their newly prohibited weapons and grant them amnesty for their possession in the interim. (The buyback was actually a 2019 campaign promise.) The government extended that deadline first in March, 2022, to “address issues that have been identified since 2020,” and then again in October, 2023, for another two years.
The status quo, then, is that these deadly weapons, for which Mr. Trudeau said there is “no use, and no place” in Canada, and which needed to be banned immediately, can remain in Canadians’ hands and homes until October, 2025. The ban is still technically in place, meaning that legal gun owners can’t actually use the prohibited weapons in any way, but that won’t affect – and hasn’t affected – rates of firearm-related violent crimes, which reached record levels in 2022. But that makes sense when most of the crimes committed with firearms are committed by those who obtain them illegally. Indeed, according to Statistics Canada, “the firearms used in homicides [in 2022] were rarely legal firearms used by their legal owners who were in good standing.”
The government’s 2020 order-in-council appeared to be modelled after a similar move made by New Zealand following a tragic mass shooting there, at two mosques in Christchurch in 2019. New Zealand’s government, unlike Canada’s, acted swiftly: Its buyback program began just four months later and it ran until the end of the year, at which point the government said it had collected more than 60,000 guns and nearly 200,000 illegal parts. The cost was considerable (initial compensation was the equivalent of about $84-million) and gun crime continues to be a problem (proponents of the buyback say it could take a decade to see its effects), but the execution of its buyback demonstrated, at the very least, a genuine desire on the part of the government to act – and a capacity to do so.
The Trudeau government, by comparison, excels at making announcements, and trips over its laces when it comes to implementation (see: pharmacare, defence procurement, appointing judges, vaccine development, dental care). On the gun file, it already fell on its face trying to defend a couple of amendments to its gun control legislation, tabled in November of 2023, that would have outlawed a number of popular hunting rifles. Then-public safety minister Marco Mendicino insisted that the Conservatives were engaging in “disinformation” about the amendments, since, according to him, they only targeted “assault-style firearms, not hunting rifles.” The government later acknowledged that, whoops, the amendments would’ve actually banned a number of guns frequently used by hunters, and walked the changes back.
Now the government is facing another obstacle with its very-much-still-theoretical buyback program. According to reporting by CBC News, Canada Post said in a recent letter that it will not participate in the collection of prohibited weapons out of concern about potential conflicts between its staff and gun-owners. Federal sources told the CBC that using Canada Post would be the easiest and most cost-effective option, though there are still other methods to consider; New Zealand set up collection points all over the country, but that route obviously comes with security concerns, which invariably hike up costs.
The good news for the government is that it has given itself two more years to figure it all out, even though there wasn’t a moment to spare back in 2020. Indeed, it was too risky to allow these deadly firearms to remain on our streets (though technically, they were never allowed on the streets), but apparently not risky enough to actually find a way to confiscate them. This is another job well done for this government, if the job was making an announcement and then flailing aimlessly for the next several years.