Without warning, milestones were laid this week to ban many semi-automatic weapons in Canada: the Liberals tabled amendments to federal Bill C-21 on firearms to move in this direction.
Opponents of firearms rejoice, while Conservative MPs fume, as do gun owner advocacy groups such as the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights.
Bill C-21, tabled in May, is going through the parliamentary process and has reached the stage where the members of the Public Safety Committee are studying it clause by clause after hearing numerous witnesses calling for changes. . This is also the time when these elected officials can propose amendments to modify the initial version of the legislative measure.
This is what Liberal MP Paul Chiang, a former police officer, did on Tuesday.
It proposes to modify the definition of “prohibited weapons” provided for in the Criminal Code to prohibit in particular those which are “capable of discharging a projectile whose energy is greater than 10,000 joules”, capable of discharging center-fire ammunition (centerfirein English) semi-automatically and which can accept a detachable magazine with a capacity of more than five rounds of the type for which it was originally designed.
assault weapons
“As a police officer for years, I have witnessed first-hand the harm that assault weapons can do in our communities,” Chiang said by way of introduction.
For him, a new definition of prohibited weapons is needed – which would establish the parameters governing what is legal or not, rather than listing all the prohibited models of weapons – because manufacturers are constantly creating new ones which circumvent the current definition, he says.
However, he also subsequently introduced another amendment that offers a list of firearms — an entire schedule, with dozens of makes and models — that will be prohibited if the measure passes.
Prohibition of these weapons, which some call “assault-style semi-automatic weapons,” was not in the original bill, which was most talked about for its handgun freeze.
The amendment is the delight of groups who have campaigned for these weapons to be banned, such as PolySeSouvient, even if some vagueness remains as to which weapons exactly would be prohibited.
“Today marks another critical step towards a complete and permanent ban on assault weapons in Canada. Although we have yet to analyze the measure as well as its actual impact on the assault weapons market, our preliminary assessment is that the definition is straightforward and self-explanatory (like New Zealand law) and covers most , if not all conventional assault weapons,” wrote Nathalie Provost of PolySeSouvient this week.
But the Conservative members who sit on this committee are outraged.
Hunters targeted, say the Conservatives
Notably because the Liberal government made this “major” change at the very last minute (during the amendments stage) and “through the back door,” said Conservative MP Glen Motz in committee.
“It has nothing to do with public safety!” he exclaimed.
“The Liberals have repeatedly said that C-21 was concerned about the safety of the population, but we see that their repeated promises not to attack the hunters have been shelved”, denounced the Conservative MP Raquel Dancho, who sits on the same committee.
She led the charge, denouncing what she called “a war” against hunters: if this amendment is adopted, she argues, almost all rifles and semi-automatic rifles will be banned, weapons whose are used by bird hunters and farmers to protect their flocks from wild boar.
False, a retort on her Twitter account Liberal MP Pam Damoff: “Let’s be clear: hunters will always have the weapons they need to hunt. It is weapons made for the battlefield that will be banned, she adds.
Many of those weapons that will be reclassified as “prohibited” are currently in the “restricted weapons” category and were not used for hunting anyway, an email to the To have to Public Security Minister Marco Mendicino, sponsor of C-21.
The prairies oppose
Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba released a joint statement on Thursday expressing their opposition to the Liberal proposal.
MP Dancho also noted that no program to buy back these weapons accompanied it. However, it could be presented later, when the members elected to the committee are far from having finished their study of C-21.
Minister Mendicino refutes the accusations that he acted underhandedly and at the last minute: he maintains that he was clear, from the tabling of the bill, that he intended “to introduce a permanent classification system for assault-type firearms”.
The Liberals will need the support of MPs from other parties to push through these changes, given the — overt — opposition from the Conservatives.
In May 2020, Ottawa had already implemented a ban on more than 1,500 models and variants of what it called “military-style assault weapons” because, according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it was These are guns intended to “kill as many people as quickly as possible” and not to hunt, he argued at the time.
With information from Marie Vastel