Misfire on firearms amnesty expiration risks alienation of pro-firearms and gun-control groups alike

Uncertainty about what happens after October 30th with hundreds of thousands of legally obtained firearms in Canada is yet another a looming problem for the Liberals

Albeit for different reasons, all sides of the firearms ownership debate in Canada have their eyes set on October 30, 2023. In less than a month, the federal Liberal government’s amnesty for firearms owners to surrender over 1,500 different types of legally obtained firearms, made illegal to own by the Liberals in a 2020 Order in Council, will expire. 

However, even with time rapidly running out, the Liberals have failed to provide details about, let alone implement, a system to facilitate surrender or compensate Canadians who legally obtained these now-outlawed firearms.

As recently as this week in Parliament, Jennifer O'Connell, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety, refused to provide any details regarding the situation (you can watch her back and forth with me here). This uncertainty has left hundreds of thousands of Canadians who legally purchased these firearms before the change in policy with legitimate concerns about the prospect of facing criminal sanctions and anti-firearms lobby groups frustrated with a lack of governmental progress on their file.

To understand the degree of mess the Liberal government now finds itself in with this issue, a little background is essential.

In May 2020, days after one of the worst shooting attacks in Canadian history, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a ban on over 1,500 firearms. This ban was imposed during the height of pandemic restrictions using an Order in Council (OIC). As such, Parliament didn't debate the list of firearms that the OIC deemed prohibited. Canadian firearms owners and advocacy groups heavily criticized the measures in OIC due to this lack of Parliamentary debate and the fact that the firearms listed in the OIC appeared to be focused more on appearance than function. Many stakeholders viewed the OIC as a policy measure that targeted firearms legally obtained and subject to Canada's already strict licensing, storage, and use rules as opposed to being a measure that focused on cracking down on the firearms more typically used in violent crime in Canada - firearms illegally smuggled into the country from the United States.

As time progressed, further problems with implementing the OIC emerged for the Liberal government. 

First, new details about the April 2020 Nova Scotia attacks suggested the murderer involved in those killings had illegally obtained firearms and had never held a Canadian firearms license. Then, later, a recording was leaked to media that opened the door to allegations that Brenda Lucki, the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) at the time, had politically interfered in the investigation into the attacks due to a potential desire by the federal Liberal government to use the murders as justification for outlawing certain types of firearms (both Lucki and the federal government denied these allegations). These reports served to bolster arguments from firearm owner advocacy groups that the Liberal government should focus their efforts on cracking down on illegally obtained firearms, as opposed to confiscating firearms legally obtained under Canada's already incredibly strict licensing and use regime (a system far more restrictive than the comparatively lax rules that govern firearms ownership in the United States).

Then, more time passed, and the federal Liberals failed to develop a plan to, as promised, offer compensation for the mandatory surrender order outlined in the OIC. Part of this issue included public outrage over the anticipated cost of the buyback program, as doubts mounted over whether or not this enormous expenditure of public funds would have any material impact on the reduction of firearms violence in Canada. Further challenges arose as some provinces stated they would not order the RCMP within their jurisdictions to seize legally obtained firearms impacted by the federal OIC. 

So, with no framework to offer compensation to affected owners and no system in place to receive the affected firearms even if a compensation policy was in place, the federal government in March 2022 extended an amnesty that had been in place for affected owners to come into compliance with the OIC from late spring 2022 to October 30 of this year.

But today, with less than a month on this extension, the federal Liberals still haven't made any public progress. If anything, they've created even more challenges for themselves on the file.

Last year, despite making zero progress in confiscating the legally obtained firearms listed in the 2020 OIC, the Liberals pushed to expand their list of prohibited firearms through amendments to new legislation. This attempt, which included several firearms routinely used for hunting, was criticized by a much broader group of stakeholders, including the Assembly of First Nations. By spring 2023, the political backlash faced by the federal Liberals forced them to climb down from this proposed expansion of the list of prohibited firearms. This move, in turn, angered Canadian firearms control advocacy groups, including prominent Quebec-based PolySeSouvient, who had been promised by the federal Liberals that such measures would be undertaken.

The federal government is also now facing legal challenges on the issue. Pro-firearms advocacy group the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights (CCFR) filed a court challenge against the federal government in May 2020 regarding the OIC, arguing that it was unconstitutional. This was one of several lawsuits filed against the government on similar grounds. Late last month, the CCFR also filed for an injunction against the expiry of the October 30 amnesty, given that the government has, to date, failed to implement the systems needed to execute the measures contained in the OIC safely.

Worse, the federal Liberals are now onto their third Minister of Public Safety since they produced the OIC in 2020. Bill Blair, the Minister at the time, was turfed from the Public Safety role after the 2021 federal election in favour of Liberal MP Marco Mendocino, who was dumped from cabinet over the summer. Today, it’s unclear as to whether the newly minted Minister of Public Safety, Dominic Leblanc, appointed to the role over two months ago, has received a mandate letter from the Prime Minister.

This lack of direction from the Prime Minister's Office hasn't done much to assuage fears from all sides of the debate that the Liberals can wrest this policy from the dumpster fire they threw it into. Further complicating the matter is that Bill Blair, now the Minister of Defence, is having to answer to the Canadian public for reports that Canada's military budget will be slashed by at least $1 billion, while the highly unpopular and yet-to-be-implemented buyback program that he failed to implement will have a price tag roughly in the same ballpark.

All the while, Canadian shootings involving firearms illegally smuggled into the country from the United States continue to increase.

From a political perspective, as the clock winds down on the October 30 amnesty, the federal Liberals find themselves having walked deep into a trap of their own making. Voters in urban areas, which the Liberals hoped to secure with the initial OIC and messaging falsely conflating the American gun debate to Canada's already rigorous firearms licensing requirements, likely have considerable doubts about the Liberal's ability to make progress on the issue. Hunters, many rural Canadians, and sport shooters who hope to get those same urban voters on their side of the debate now have plenty of evidence to make the case that the Liberals care less about taking action to reduce firearms violence in Canada and more about trying to make political hay out of an important issue.

All this considered, if the Liberals have any political sense left, they will likely come to the logical conclusion that it would be both political suicide and patently irresponsible to allow the October 30 amnesty to expire. That’s because pressing forward while some provincial governments are refusing to enforce the OIC's measures, with no system to facilitate the surrender of hundreds of thousands of prohibited firearms, and no public details and little support for the buyback process, would be disastrous for a federal government facing multiple other scandals, a national affordability crisis, and lagging ten points behind a resurgent Conservative Party in the polls.

Instead, the Liberals should be doing what they should have done all along. That is, they should publicly acknowledge that Canadian firearms licensing ownership rules are already far more stringent than those found in the United States and apologize for purposely conflating that fact for political gain. They should work hard to bring provinces, hunters, sport shooters, and First Nations to the table with gun-control activist groups to work together to support a policy that reduces the importation of smuggled firearms into Canada, gang violence, and violent crime in general. If they did this under a constructive, unifying approach, the Liberals would probably find little daylight among these groups in terms of that end goal.

But as October 30 approaches, the Liberal government continues to obfuscate and alienate everyone, having made no material progress on any of these issues.

And that misfire won't just cost the Liberals votes - it will cost Canadian lives.