Ottawa has officially ruled out a countrywide ban on handguns, but the Liberals will be running in the next federal election on a plan to prohibit and buy back some military-style assault weapons that are currently legal in Canada, minister Bill Blair said.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, the former Toronto police chief said months of consultations on gun control have led him to reject the possibility of a full ban on handguns, despite official requests from the cities of Toronto and Montreal.
“I believe that would be potentially a very expensive proposition but just as importantly, it would not in my opinion be perhaps the most effective measure in restricting the access that criminals would have to such weapons, because we’d still have a problem with them being smuggled across the border,” said Mr. Blair, Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction.
Gun control is one of the most divisive issues in the country, but Mr. Blair said the campaign leading to the Oct. 21 election will be the right moment for Canadians to decide whether additional measures are needed to improve public safety.
The Liberal and Conservative parties have been battling for decades on this issue, and Mr. Blair’s recommendation to prohibit some types of weapons stands to put the debate at the forefront of the political agenda in the coming months.
“There are some weapons that are currently available in our society that represent an unacceptable risk,” he said. “They have been used tragically in a number of incidents in which a large number of people have been killed, because these weapons were designed to be efficient in the taking of lives.”
Mr. Blair said the government should not simply prohibit new sales of these weapons and allow current owners to keep them under a form of grandfathering. Instead, he said the Liberals will propose to buy them back.
