(OTTAWA) New Democrat Leader Jagmeet Singh says his party will introduce amendments this week to ban assault-type weapons to replace those scrapped by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government amid public outcry.
“We are going to have laws that target manufacturers for the first time and which clearly say that manufacturers cannot continue to use the loopholes they are using,” he promised in a press briefing on Tuesday.
The day before, the groups PolySeSouvient and DanForth Families for Safe Communities urged the New Democratic Party (NDP) to act in this file and accused the political formation of inaction.
Mr. Singh remained vague on the form that the amendments to Bill C-21 will take that would make permanent a ban already in force, since 2020, on assault-type firearms.
He did not want to specify if these would include a list of prohibited models, but he mentioned that a definition would be there.
He argued that the approach that had been advocated by the Liberals with their amendments withdrawn in February was the wrong one and in no way targeted arms manufacturers.
” [Ces derniers] change the name of a particular firearm to avoid regulation [ou] a small component of a firearm. […] We are going to put an end to that with the amendments that we are going to propose,” said the leader of the NDP.
The Trudeau government, more than two months ago, backtracked on two amendments aimed at enshrining in law a definition of prohibited assault weapons.
The provisions withdrawn were intended to reinforce a ban decreed in 2020 for around 1,500 models and variants of this type of weapon. Their addition to C-21 – made during clause-by-clause consideration – sparked outrage among hunters and members of Indigenous communities fearing that weapons used for hunting were being targeted.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino is scheduled to testify in committee about the bill later Tuesday.