Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canadians shouldn’t have to fear being in the wrong place at the wrong time so his government is moving ahead with “the strongest measures to fight gun violence our county has ever seen.”
He’s right that Bill C-21 is the strongest set of gun control measures to date. If passed, it will create a buy-back program for banned military-style firearms, increase penalties for gun trafficking and do more to protect women from domestic violence where firearms are involved.
Unfortunately, the legislation tabled Tuesday is still not strong enough to do the job that’s so desperately needed to tackle gun violence in this country.
Off the top, there are serious questions about whether the government’s voluntary buy-back program is the best way to incentivize legal owners to turn in their banned military-style firearms so they can’t fall into the wrong hands.
And it’s hard to feel the government has fully thought things through when it takes multiple questions about the cost before Public Safety Minister Bill Blair can manage to cough up an estimate of $300 million to $400 million, with a slew of asterisks attached.
But the biggest problem with this legislation is that the federal government has left the most important part of the job of gun control in Canada — banning handguns — up to thousands of individual municipalities across the country.
Trudeau says Ottawa will “support municipalities to ban handguns through bylaws” and back them up with federal penalties that include jail time.
Municipal bylaws are good for plenty of things — enforcing rules around pets, parking and property standards, for example — but they’re not meant for banning handguns. This is a federal responsibility and Ottawa needs to own it.
Even if municipalities were the right level of government for this task, which they’re obviously not, the federal government doesn’t control what cities and towns can do; that’s provincial jurisdiction.
So the federal government can say it will support municipalities that want to “create safer communities” by banning handguns, but it comes with a caveat — “if allowed by their province/territory.”
That makes it all but meaningless in many parts of the country. It leaves Toronto, which is plagued by gun violence and has wanted a handgun ban for years, at the mercy of Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has repeatedly said he doesn’t believe in such a ban.
And Ontario is far from the only problem. Saskatchewan passed legislation to specifically prohibit municipalities from placing any restrictions on firearms. Alberta created a government committee to support firearm ownership.
Canada’s gun problem is overwhelmingly a handgun problem. So if the government wants to limit gun violence in this country, it can’t just take on the multi-shot, rapid-fire weapons that are too often the instrument of death in mass shootings, it must also tackle the issue of proliferating handguns.
Bill C-21 falls well short. It’s an ineffective gesture on handguns at a time when cities desperately need help to curb rising deadly gun violence. Worse still, it will provide endless fodder for conservative politicians and the gun lobby to rage about gun-owning rights as though we were Americans.
Canadians will see too much of that already with Ottawa’s buy-back program for banned military-style firearms, we certainly don’t want mini-battles playing out in towns and cities across the country over handguns.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, whose party last year said it opposes the ban “on principle,” weighed in Tuesday accusing the government of ignoring the real problem — illegal guns being smuggled across the U.S. border.
O’Toole is mistaken. It’s not a ban on problematic legal firearms or tackling illegal ones; it’s both that are needed. Along with other measures to address the root causes of gun violence.
Banning military-style firearms and handguns — which Ottawa still needs to ban — won’t magically rid us of the illegal ones. But it drastically reduces the number that can fall into the wrong hands by accident, theft or intent.
Gun violence is a scourge that must be tackled decisively on all fronts. Only then will we have the safer communities that all political parities say they want to see.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2021/02/16/still-not-the-handgun-ban-canada-needs.html
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