The federal government is banning even more firearms as it seeks to fulfill a long-standing promise to enact the tightest gun restrictions in a generation, and is also finally getting its much-delayed buyback program off the ground.

The announcement Thursday that 324 additional makes and models of assault-style firearms are now prohibited in Canada was made on the eve of the 35th anniversary on Friday of the shooting at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.

In 1989, 14 women were killed and 13 people injured in an attack that sparked a national conversation around firearm regulation in Canada and set off a polarizing debate around how to combat gun violence in the country.

“Our goal is to ensure that no community, no family, is devastated by mass shootings in Canada again,” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said in making the announcement Thursday.

The government said 14,521 firearms are affected in total, and all future variants of the listed firearms are prohibited, even if they are not named outright in the regulations.

The new regulations are an echo of the 2020 order-in-council banning 1,500 makes and models of firearms.

At the time, the government said the firearms were not reasonably used for hunting or sporting purposes, a determination that hunters disagreed with while proponents of tougher firearms policies said the list didn’t go far enough.

To date, more than 2,000 models and variants are now prohibited under those regulations.

The government said the new list of banned guns share similar characteristics to those made illegal in 2020. They all have semi-automatic action with sustained rapid-fire capability, which was described in a press release as “tactical/military design, with large magazine capacity.”

In 2022, the Liberals had tried to make more guns illegal than on the 2020 list via a bill known as C-21. The bill initially laid out a handgun freeze and raised criminal penalties for gun crimes, among other measures.

But, as the bill proceeded through the House of Commons, the government attempted to amend it to add hundreds of pages worth of more makes and models to the banned list, a move greeted with an immediate outcry.

Among the critics were Indigenous leaders and northern residents who said the guns they used to hunt would now be illegal – a criticism that undercut the Liberals’ long-standing claims that their policies would not hurt those who legally use firearms to hunt or for sport.

Ultimately, the political blowback was so fierce that the amendment was pulled.

The bill did, however, create a new technical definition for what constitutes an illegal firearm, but it only applied to products designed and made after the law came into force. That created what some called the “gap list” – guns still legal because they weren’t captured in the 2020 regulations nor in the forward-looking definition.

Some but not all of those firearms are now illegal with Thursday’s announcement. The RCMP said there are still 230 others under review, and whether they’ll be added to the list should be decided by February.

The government said even with the new ban, there are approximately 19,000 firearms still able to be purchased and used in Canada for hunting or sporting pursuits. The number of firearms now illegal ranges from the government’s estimate of 150,000 to industry suggestions it could be as many as half-a-million.

After the 2020 regulation, the government promised to buy back suddenly illegal firearms from businesses and individuals but that program has been repeatedly delayed.

On Thursday, however, it announced that it was ready to open only to businesses, and more information for them would be provided in the coming days.

The buyback program would have seen the guns destroyed but the government is now looking at sending some of them to Ukraine instead – a move meant to underscore Ottawa’s position that the banned guns have no purpose other than war.

The government made Thursday’s announcement flanked by gun-control advocates, including Nathalie Provost, a survivor of the École Polytechnique shooting. She listed the names of all the women killed that day before she heralded the government’s move, calling it another step forward to the total ban on assault-style rifles that she and others have called for since 1990.

“I really believe that what remains to be done will be done,” she said.

Others said they disagree.

The Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights, which is in court next week with the government over the 2020 regulations, called Thursday’s announcement “divide and conquer politics,” and an effort by the Liberals to politically change the channel knowing that the Conservatives will just repeal the entire program if they form government.

Conservative public-safety critic Raquel Dancho did not specify that in her response to the announcement, but said the Liberals’ approach will do nothing to stop crime.

“Trudeau’s latest underhanded attack against lawful Canadians and his continued blind eye to actual gun criminals is an insult to the thousands of victims of gun crime who continue to be terrorized and lose their lives as a result of Trudeau’s catch-and-release policies,” she said.

Police associations have said that illegally obtained guns, many smuggled from the United States, are the main source of gun crime, as the Toronto Police Association did earlier this fall when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau highlighted two years of a handgun freeze in Canada.

Stephanie Levitz
The Globe and Mail, December 5, 2024