While there are profound similarities between Canada and the United States, we would do well to remember that those cultural similarities simply hide the profound differences. And, of course, there are governmental differences as well.
For example, they don’t have a Second Amendment. There is nothing there to limit the government and preserve the right to keep and bear arms.
More than that, though, in the wake of Nova Scotia, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that he needed to unilaterally do something about guns. It was an emergency.
An op-ed at the Canadian publication The Globe and Mail, however, is questioning that now.
The situation was urgent, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said four years ago, nearly to the day. There was no time to go through Parliament – Canadian lives were at stake – which is why his government had to implement gun control changes immediately through an order-in-council. With essentially a stroke of his pen, Mr. Trudeau banned the sale, import, transfer and use of 1,500 of what he called “military-style assault rifles” (a made-up designation; he might as well called them “scary looking monster guns”).
The announcement came in the wake of the horrific mass shooting in Nova Scotia, where a gunman killed 22 people – notably, with weapons he obtained illegally. The government’s announcement, however, was about prohibiting the legal ownership of certain semi-automatic firearms.
“There’s no place for these weapons. They’re the choice of people who engage in mass murder,” then-Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said. “Banning assault-style firearms will save Canadian lives.” (In practice, firearm-related homicide actually increased 23 per cent in Canada from 2020 to 2022.)
And yet, four years later, the ban is technically in place–those who have them can keep them for the time being, but they can’t use them for literally anything, even a trip to the gun range, apparently–but those who own these weapons can keep them until at least 2025, at which point the government may kick the can down the road.
The good news for the government is that it has given itself two more years to figure it all out, even though there wasn’t a moment to spare back in 2020. Indeed, it was too risky to allow these deadly firearms to remain on our streets (though technically, they were never allowed on the streets), but apparently not risky enough to actually find a way to confiscate them. This is another job well done for this government, if the job was making an announcement and then flailing aimlessly for the next several years.
What happened was simple and it’s why we should never allow law to be created by fiat. Trudeau needed an emergency to justify something he’d already been trying to do without success, so he just declared it an emergency.
Let’s remember, as noted above, that this followed the horrific shooting in Nova Scotia where the killer used illegally acquired firearms to commit mass murder. New gun laws wouldn’t have stopped him in the least, particularly since he skirted enough existing ones as it was. As such, there really wasn’t an emergency.
But anti-gun voices don’t mind lying about reality to justify their jihad against the right to keep and bear arms–a right that isn’t unique to the American people, only unique in that it protects us while no one else enjoys that protection.
Trudeau pushed the narrative that he had to act then because that’s what lawmakers do.
Make no mistake, President Joe Biden doesn’t see the stupidity in this–granted, I’m not sure he can recognize stupidity at all simply because he’s around it so much. I mean, it stares back at him in the mirror each morning–and would love to do it himself. He can’t.
Yet he and our other domestic gun grabbers all claim we need to act without delay. We shouldn’t even debate the efficacy of gun control legislation, we should just jump and do it.
But unfortunately, I don’t think we can count on being as lucky as our Canadian friends and be shielded by incompetence.
