Nathalie Provost, graduate of l’École Polytechnique and survivor of the 1989 mass shooting, right, and Martha Jackman, with the National Association of Women and the Law, listen to Suzanne Laplante-Edward, centre, mother of Anne-Marie Edward who was shot and killed at Polytechnique, speak about the government's plans for assault-style weapons, in Ottawa, on May 1.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Correction: An earlier version of this article omitted the word not in this sentence: But not all of the models that gun-control advocates considered to be assault weapons were covered, and new models, or tweaked variants, come on the market all the time.
On Monday, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino put forward a gun-control package with a hole in the middle.
The hard part of the Liberals’ attempt to outlaw “assault-style” guns, as Mr. Mendicino found out in December, is putting forward a ban of guns already on the market without raising a roar of complaints that commonly used hunting rifles are being outlawed, too.
He put out a new version of his gun legislation on Monday, but that politically tricky part isn’t in it. It is to follow later, supposedly based on recommendations from a still-to-be-formed committee. It’s been punted. But, according to the government, it’s still coming.
It has to come – that is, if the government’s gun bill, or at least the parts that purport to deal with assault weapons, are to make sense.
The leaders of PolySeSouvient, the gun-control group formed after the 1989 mass shooting at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, where 14 women were killed, took the decision to punt it as a flat-out broken promise.
“It’s a betrayal,” Nathalie Provost, who was injured in the Polytechnique shooting, told reporters on Monday. She later told The Globe and Mail that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is no longer welcome at the group’s annual memorials.
She pointed out the glaring gap: The bill sets a definition of assault-style guns that will be banned in the future, but it does nothing about 482 gun models already on the market that the Liberals were planning to ban in December. As it stands, Ms. Provost said, the government’s planned gun buyback would allow a gun owner to collect compensation for a banned “assault-style” rifle and use it to buy an unbanned “assault-style” weapon.
Unless the government sets about the business of classifying those 482 guns – defining which will be listed as banned assault weapons and which are considered hunting rifles – the assault ban will be pretty toothless. But making decisions about banning guns that are on the market is the politically difficult part of the operation. That’s the controversial thing the Liberals are trying to dance around.
The ban will almost surely be watered down, and if you didn’t like it in the first place, that might please you. But Mr. Mendicino’s Liberals still have to come back for Round 2. That’s what he is promising. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet made it clear he expects that, and said that’s why his party can support a weaker gun bill.
In December, the first version of the ban on assault rifles, and especially that list of 482 current models to be banned, became a political millstone. Hunters complained that widely used rifles were caught up in the legislation; the Assembly of First Nations opposed it; rural MPs were showered with complaints. The NDP, the Liberals’ partner in a parliamentary alliance, balked.
Mr. Mendicino’s new bill smooths over some of the political problems, for example, by including a caveat to reinforce Indigenous hunting rights. But it punted the trickier question of deciding which guns that are already on the market should be banned.
In 2020, the government moved to ban about 1,500 guns by order in council. The Liberal cabinet used a broad power under legislation that allows them to ban guns that are reasonably considered hunting rifles. But not all of the models that gun-control advocates considered to be assault weapons were covered, and new models, or tweaked variants, come on the market all the time.
So the government proposed to set a definition of legislation “assault-style” weapons that would be banned. But there isn’t one generally accepted definition of assault-style guns. The criteria can leave some out, or capture too many. So the first version of Mr. Mendicino’s bill also included a list of existing models to be banned. That is more or less where the political uproar began.
The new version of the bill still sets a definition of assault-style weapons that will be banned in the future. But it scrapped the list. The decision on which guns currently on the market will be outlawed, which are assault-style and which are hunting rifles, is TBD.
It seems likely that in the end, the government will not include popular models from the list of guns to be banned. Mr. Mendicino’s task this week, after all, was to back the government away from political danger.
But the Liberals were stung by the criticism of Ms. Provost and PolySeSouvient. They like to sell the Liberal Party as the party of gun control, and Mr. Mendicino still has to decide how far he will go to fill the hole in his gun control bill.