So, what happened to Canada’s gun control emergency?
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...”
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