Conservatives and Liberals are both missing the biggest danger from guns

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/09/2021 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s been a rather difficult few days to keep up with Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole’s evolving position on guns.

His election platform says a Conservative government would repeal the Trudeau government’s ban on 1,500 assault-style firearms and, after making all those weapons legal again, conduct a review to figure out what to do next.

But in a French-language debate last Thursday, O’Toole suggested he would maintain the ban on those semi-automatic weapons. Then he bobbed and weaved for a few days, during which time the gun lobby tried to help him out by explaining that O’Toole was really talking about keeping a 1977 ban on fully automatic rifles.

Finally he issued one of his increasingly common “to be clear” policy clarifications.

O’Toole’s new position, which presumably overwrites the Conservative platform, given he’s “the man with the plan” on the cover, is that he would leave the ban in place while conducting a review on firearms legislation.

What this means is that no one — not the gun lobby and not the gun-control lobby — can really know what measures on military-style assault weapons they could expect from an O’Toole government.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, can we please move on to talking about the gun problem that matters most in Canada? That, of course, is handguns.

As we’ve said many times before, if we want to tackle gun violence in our communities, and every party should, we need to stop the proliferation of handguns — and that includes a handgun ban.

The shootings that have become all too common in Toronto and other Canadian cities are perpetrated, almost all of them, by people wielding handguns.

So instead of going after the Conservatives for having a “secret deal” with the gun lobby or debating the semantics of “assault weapons” versus “assault-style” firearms, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau should be raising the issue of handguns.

Of course, to do that he would need to face up to the fact that his own plan on handguns is woefully inadequate and an abdication of the federal government’s responsibility.

His government proposed downloading the job to individual municipalities across the country. Cities would be given the ability to restrict or ban handguns within their own borders, assuming the provinces would allow it, and many, including the Ford government in Ontario, said they would not.

The Liberals’ election platform adds a “a minimum of $1 billion to support provinces” in implementing such bans. It’s a bribe to try and bring onside unwilling provinces.

It won’t work and it makes no sense. The power and responsibility for banning handguns properly rests with Ottawa. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous.

In fact, the only thing more ridiculous is that the Conservative platform ignores handguns entirely. It promises to “tackle the gang violence that causes too many Canadians to live in fear” without once mentioning handguns, the weapon of choice for gangs. The closest it comes to mentioning handguns is noting that, unlike the Liberals, Conservatives won’t harass “sport shooters.”

The Trudeau Liberals have already advanced gun control in Canada and their platform upgrades their buyback program for banned assault weapons. They should get credit for that.

But they should also be willing to go farther and properly ban handguns. Despite O’Toole’s recent gun control pivots and flip-flops, there’s nothing to indicate his Conservatives would even contemplate a handgun ban.

There are stark differences between the Liberals and Conservatives on gun control, both in tone and specifics. That’s an issue worth attention and debate.

But like so much in this election, the version of the debate we’re getting misses the mark.