47% in Sask. want gun laws to stay same
SASKATOON More than half of Saskatchewan residents believe laws covering the sale of guns in Canada should stay the way they are or be relaxed, new public-opinion research suggests.
The data was collected by the University of Saskatchewan’s Social Sciences Research Laboratories (SSRL) as part of the Taking the Pulse initiative, which involves SSRL researchers calling a representative sample of Saskatchewan residents four times a year and asking for their views on hot-button topics in the province. The results are published by Postmedia News.
Researchers randomly called 401 Saskatchewan residents this month and asked for their views on laws regulating the sale of guns. Nearly half — 47 per cent — said laws should stay the way they are; nine per cent said laws should become considerably or somewhat more lenient. Forty per cent of respondents said legislation should become considerably or somewhat more strict. The remaining respondents were unsure or refused to answer.
“The province is quite divided over this issue, but certainly there are more people who think that the status quo is fine,” said Daniel Beland, a professor of public policy at the University of Saskatchewan.
There was no difference in responses between rural and urban residents.
Men were more likely to support more lenient laws than women (16 per cent of men supported relaxed laws versus three per cent of women).
Survey participants aged 55 and older were more likely to support stricter laws than those younger than 55 (56 per cent of older participants supported stricter laws, compared to 29 per cent of younger respondents).
Beland said he was interested to see that Saskatchewan’s urban and rural residents had similar views on gun control.
“In other jurisdictions — anywhere in Canada — in general there’s a lot of talk about the urban-rural divide; that people in rural areas are much less in favour of gun control than people in the cities,” Beland said. “But it seems in Saskatchewan there is not this strong urban-rural divide.”
Greg Illerbrun, firearms chair for the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation, said he expects Saskatchewan is an outlier in Canada in that regard. “Even us urban guys are usually only one or two generations from the farm,” he noted.
Illerbrun said he wasn’t surprised by the public opinion results, but he believes more people would be in favour of relaxed gun laws if they understood what the existing legislative framework is.
“A lot of people that don’t own guns don’t really know what the laws are today, how restricted things are,” he said. “There’s a lot of hoops we have to jump through.”
The federal government is in the process of passing tougher firearms legislation, which it has touted as a series of “common sense” measures to improve public safety. When passed, Bill C-71 will subject gun owners to more rigorous background checks, create more restrictions around transporting restricted and prohibited firearms and require more documentation around the gifting and selling of firearms.
Public Safety Minister and Regina MP Ralph Goodale said the SSRL data are “quite encouraging from the government’s point of view.”
Despite the high support the survey found for status quo gun laws, Goodale said the most “striking number” he saw in the results was that just nine per cent of surveyed Saskatchewanians said they wanted gun laws relaxed.
He said it shows politicians arguing for more relaxed gun laws “are way offside.”
“That is clearly contrary to the views of 90 per cent of Saskatchewan people. That’s the startling thing that comes out of these statistics,” he said.
Meanwhile, Conservative MP Glen Motz, who sits on the public safety committee, said the survey suggests to him that people are not in favour of legislation that will make it tougher to purchase firearms.
Like Illerbrun, he said he wonders if the 40 per cent of people who said they wanted stricter laws understand existing firearms legislation. He said most Canadians have a limited knowledge of existing gun control legislation and that this hasn’t been helped by the months of debate around Bill C-71; Motz argues the government has portrayed existing gun laws as weaker than they are in order to garner support for the bill. “(The results) demonstrate to me that, really, the public isn’t as fully informed as they could be,” he said.
Motz’s biggest beef with C-71 is that it makes things more inconvenient for law-abiding gun owners while not doing enough to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals.
Goodale describes the bill as “practical” and says it enhances public safety and assists law enforcement while “not imposing any unreasonable burden on lawabiding firearm owners.”
Bill C-71 is now before the Senate.
Each iteration of Taking the Pulse has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 per cent, 19 times out of 20, which means researchers expect their results to reflect the opinions of Saskatchewan adults to within 4.9 per cent 95 times out of 100.