POLITICAL GUNSIGHTS

The Liberals want to tackle handguns. Or do they?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government took its first solid steps this week toward a total, national ban on handguns.

But will such a ban be in place by next year’s election? Don’t bet on it.

While all eyes were focused south this week at the down-to-the-wire trade negotiations with the U.S., Trudeau directed Border Security Minister Bill Blair to start looking into the handgun ban that Toronto’s city council demanded in a vote in July.

“You should lead an examination of a full ban on handguns and assault weapons in Canada,” Trudeau said in his mandate letter to Blair, “while not impeding the lawful use of firearms by Canadians.”

The first part of that directive comes directly out of events this summer, notably the mass shooting that took two lives on the Danforth. The second part of the order comes directly out of events 20-plus years ago, when another Liberal government touched off a fury in the land by introducing a national long-gun registry.

Conservatives profited immensely from that fury — politically and financially. Historically, whenever Conservatives tell their supporters that Liberals are coming to take away their guns, loyal partisans seem happy to open up their wallets. In fact, it’s said that guns and the CBC (as in abolishing it) are the most lucrative pitches In the Conservatives’ fundraising arsenal.

We’re about to see another wave of such pitches, no matter how much Trudeau and his ministers insist they’re not interested in sequels to fights of Liberal governments past.

The handgun-ban conversation is a relatively new one in Canada, but the language opposing it borrows heavily from hot-button phrases from the battles over the long-gun registry in the ’90s, particularly the idea of the government picking on law-abiding citizens.

“Whenever Liberals attempt to crack down on gun violence, they end up going after law-abiding firearms owners,” two Conservative MPs, Pierre Paul-Hus and Glen Motz, said this week in a statement reacting to Blair’s mandate letter.

The same sentiments turned up this week in a segment on the National Rifle Association’s online broadcast, NRATV, featuring a commentator from the far-right Rebel Media in Canada.

“This is pretty big news here,” NRATV host Cam Edwards said to Canadian contributor Sheila Gunn Reid, who explained to Edwards that she, as a lawful gun owner, was now seen as one of the “bad guys” in Trudeau’s Canada.

So yes, the U.S.-based gun-rights colossus seems to be paying a lot of attention to the handgun debate here — and one can only assume that attention will heighten as Blair’s study continues and the federal election gets ever closer. Let’s not forget either that new Ontario Premier Doug Ford, in his evolving role as Trudeau’s biggest headache at the first ministers’ table, said he isn’t in favour of a handgun ban.

Trudeau didn’t put anything about timing into his mandate letter to Blair. On CBC’s Power and Politics broadcast this week, Blair himself wasn’t giving many answers either, running out the clock with canned talking points on how great the process would be. Perhaps, when you’re the minister in charge of everything the Trudeau government wishes it didn’t have to handle — border challenges, cannabis legalization, etc. — you get a lot of practice in saying nothing with conviction.

At any rate, Blair’s main goal seems to be to keep a lid on the gun conversation over the next year, giving cities like Toronto and Montreal enough assurances that the issue is on the agenda, but not giving the Conservatives ammunition (pardon the pun) for a revival of the old gun debates of the 1990s.

On that score, Donald Trump did Blair a favour this week, keeping the nation’s political attention focused on trade talks between Canada and the U.S.

When that drama subsides, though, Canada may be headed for a big debate — one that Liberals will insist is a new conversation and one that PCs will treat as a 20-plus-year-old fight. This is the last regular Insight column for Susan Delacourt, who takes over as the Star's Ottawa bureau chief. Her columns will generally appear in the news section. sdelacourt@thestar.ca