A Walther PDP pistol is shown by a vendor that provides weapons to government, military and law enforcement clients, at the CANSEC trade show in Ottawa, on June 1, 2022.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was solemn and determined when, in the days after the 2020 mass murder of 22 people in Nova Scotia, he announced that his government was banning 1,500 military-style semi-automatic weapons and their accessories.
“Canadians deserve more than thoughts and prayers,” he said. He expressed urgency: the sale and possession of the listed weapons and their parts would be banned immediately, and the government would implement a buyback program to take them out of commission for good.
Four years later, there is no buyback program, and yet the government has still managed to spend $67-million on it, according to its response to a written question on the matter from Conservative senator Donald Plett.
The whole thing is such a boondoggle that even a major gun-control group has turned against it.
PolyRemembers, formed after the mass murder of 14 female students at École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, this month called the buyback program “a waste of money,” because it will leave semi-automatic weapons on the market and in the hands of Canadians that are just as deadly as the ones it take out of commission.
“If our safety is important to politicians, we have to do this buyback program,” PolyRemembers spokesperson Nathalie Provost told Radio-Canada. “But if we do it, we have to do it efficiently, not just for appearances. And right now, it’s just for appearances.”
It’s hard to disagree that the government is all talk. Since that horrible moment in 2020, it has used gun control as a wedge against the Conservative opposition, which opposes most such measures, while taking little concrete action.
The 2020 announcement of the buyback program came with a two-year amnesty during which owners and sellers would be allowed to hold on to their newly illegal weapons while the program was being set up.
The Liberals subsequently extended the amnesty period twice, the last time in October, 2023. Now, and this time they really mean it, the amnesty will end on Oct. 30, 2025 – a date that falls rather too conveniently just after the general election scheduled for 10 days earlier.
The minority Liberals says the buyback program will start next spring and target some 150,000 weapons – if their government survives that long.
If that’s the case, Ms. Provost says people who take part could conceivably use the compensation they receive to buy another semi-automatic rifle styled to look like something a commando would carry, and which is just as unsuitable for hunting as any of the banned weapons and just as dangerous in the wrong hands.
To date, the government has refused to add more weapons to the list of banned ones.
The government was also called on the carpet this month when multiple groups sent it a joint brief urging it to implement key parts of Bill C-21, the Liberal gun-control law first promised in 2020 that received royal assent nine months ago. The Liberals still haven’t taken the regulatory steps needed to activate measures designed to keep guns out of the hands of violent domestic partners, the group said.
The fact the government nearly derailed Bill C-21 last year when, at the last moment, it tabled confusing amendments that appeared to ban many popular hunting rifles is another testament to its mishandling of gun control. It had to drop the amendments to save the bill (which, for the record, the Conservatives voted against).
Four-and-a-half years after the Nova Scotia massacre, little has changed in Canada, except maybe on paper. Ottawa could easily have had a buyback program in place if it wanted; look how fast it moved during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The most concrete action it has taken has been to freeze the sale and import of handguns as of Oct. 21, 2022, but that falls short of the outright ban on handguns that is needed, and which this space continues to call for.
Other than that, the Trudeau government has postponed and delayed, and it hasn’t listened to groups imploring it to move more quickly and to close obvious loopholes.
Its only accomplishment, if you can call it that, is to have ensured that the survival of its theoretical buyback program will be an issue in the next election, whenever it takes place.
It’s just more evidence that, for the Liberals, gun control is as much about electoral politics as it is about public safety.