Still 19,000 Firearms Available for Hunters, Says Minister on Plan to Expand Prohibited List

Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino and Minister of Rural Economic Development Gudie Hutchings speak to reporters in the foyer of the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Dec. 14, 2022, regarding Bill C-21. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Canada’s Minister of Rural Economic Development Gudie Hutchings said on Dec. 14 the waters need to be calmed over her government’s plan to expand the list of prohibited firearms, since there will still be plenty of guns available for hunters.

“Here’s the fact you need to know: there are still 19,000 firearms available for hunters and sport shooters, and indigenous hunters. So there’s lots of firearms still available in Canada legally,” Hutchings said during a scrum on Parliament Hill.

“If you want to shoot ducks, moose, deer, partridge, ptarmigan, there are plenty of legal firearms available.”

Hutchings is herself a hunter and said that people in her province of Newfoundland and Labrador rely on hunting for sustenance, yet she said her party’s bill is necessary to reduce violent crimes committed with firearms.

Hutchings was addressing reporters along with Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and other Liberal MPs on the last day of sitting in the House of Commons before the holiday break.

The Liberals brought amendments to their gun control Bill C-21 in late November, attempting to add a high number of hunting rifles to the prohibited list and to establish an evergreen definition that would capture weapons designed to fire in a semi-automatic fashion.

The Trudeau government calls these weapons “assault-style” or “guns which were designed for the battlefield,” as Mendicino said during the scrum.

Firearms designed for the battlefield are typically not available for civilians. Service rifles can fire in automatic mode and have been tested extensively for reliability and durability, at a level not normally found on the open market.

Mendicino said his party would be looking carefully at some of the firearms listed in the amendment after receiving feedback from hunters.

He also said the language from the evergreen provision needed to be “absolutely” “correct.”

“What that provision does is it takes a look at a number of objective characteristics and tries to capture those guns which have no place in our communities, while at the same time obviously being in full respect of those who hunt and indigenous communities.”

Resistance

The Liberals’ amendments have faced stiff resistance from the Conservatives, but also from the NDP and the Assembly of First Nations.

Conservative MP and public safety critic Raquel Dancho was expelled from the House of Commons over her refusal to apologize after saying that Liberal MP Vance Badawey was lying when he said the Conservatives were obstructing work at the public safety committee around Bill C-21.

NDP MP Alistair MacGregor took the microphone right after Mendicino and Hutchings and said his party was fully supportive of Bill C-21 before the Liberals brought last minute amendments.

Bill C-21 seeks to legislate on a national freeze on handguns transfer (already in place through regulation) and to implement red flag provisions to be able to remove firearms from an individual deemed a threat to others or himself.

“The mess that we’re in, the delay that C-21 is experiencing, is a mess that is entirely of the Liberals making,” said MacGregor, who serves as his party’s public safety critic.

He said the amendments were tabled without any consultation, which contributes to the frustration from Canadians.

“They did not do their homework, and as a result, you’re seeing this kind of outrage, and you’re seeing the committee trying to pick up the pieces from the government’s own mess.”

MacGregor says the public safety committee will probably now have eight meetings to study the amendments, with the Liberals wanting originally “far too few” meetings and the Conservatives wanting 20.

Scrapping Mandatory Minimum Sentences

At the same time that the Trudeau government is trying to remove a wide array of long guns from circulation to address violence with firearms, its Bill C-5 received royal assent on Nov. 17.

The bill amends the criminal code to remove mandatory minimum sentences for a number of firearms offences, including robbery and extortion with a firearm.

The Liberal government passed this bill as an “anti-racism” measure to reduce the proportion of indigenous and black people incarcerated.

Other concerns raised about the federal government’s gun control agenda is that it is heavily focused on lawful owners.

The vast majority of homicides with firearms are committed by individuals without a possession and acquisition license, according to Statistics Canada.

Also police says the vast majority of firearms used in crime in Toronto are illegal and smuggled from the United States. Most of the guns used by the killer in the 2020 mass casualty tragedy in Portapique, Nova Scotia, were also sourced from the U.S.

The public safety minister said his government is doing enough to stem the flow of these weapons by providing additional funds to the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), and said there has been a record amount of seizures over the last two years.

The agency reported the seizure of 1,203 firearms in the 2021 to 2022 fiscal year, up from 548 the previous year.

Mendicino said the ultimate goal of his government was to take away the guns that were used in Portapique and the Polytechnique massacre in 1989.

Both killers had the Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle, which was declared a prohibited firearm on May 1, 2020, immediately after the Portapique tragedy.

The federal government intends to buyback these and other firearms added to the prohibited schedule at the cost of over $700 million.