Liberals and gun lobby remain at standoff

Latest legislative effort satisfies nobody, writes A.J. Somerset.

Last week, after months of promises and much fearful speculation among Canada’s gun owners, the Liberals opened Al Capone’s vault to reveal a used paper clip, three startled mice and Bill C-71 — in short, not much. No sweeping prohibitions, no AR-15 ban, nor any other Monster at the End of This Book. Instead, it does more or less what the Liberals promised, and much less than gun control activists had hoped. No one is pleased, neither Canada’s fractured and fractious gun lobby nor its few dedicated gun-control activists. The bill goes too far; the bill does not go far enough. Bill C-71 is innocuous, as gun bills go, which is no surprise. In the 2015 election, the Liberals steered well clear of the long-gun registry question, recognizing their vulnerability in northern and rural ridings. They made moderate promises: to tighten background checks; to make sellers verify a buyer’s gun licence; to reinstate the requirement for dealers to keep records of gun sales; to reverse changes to transportation permits; and to restore the RCMP’s original role in classifying guns.

None of these promises is sexy. Most involve tedious explanations of finer points of the Firearms Act, which is slightly less interesting than the Fireplace Channel. On guns, people hold strong views, often based on little more than cheap sloganeering. And consequently, the Liberals are vulnerable to fables concocted by activists — fables that began taking shape, in this case, long before the bill was even tabled. Consider the idea that the Liberals intend to create a new long-gun registry by stealth. Conservative MP Candice Bergen is already warning that to keep sales records is to create a “backdoor registry.” Last year, her colleague Bob Zimmer — a man who seems to have been elected purely for comic relief — found a backdoor registry lurking in minor changes to the Export and Import Permits Act; in fact, the same record-keeping was in the existing law. And it was fear of a backdoor registry that led Vic Toews, then public safety minister, to eliminate sales records in the first place, in 2012.

This fable gets its power from a 1968 NRA slogan, “registration leads to confiscation,” and from the success of a years-long communications barrage the Harper government laid down before sending its registry abolishers over the top. Every Canadian knows that the long-gun registry cost $2 billion, and achieved little. Nobody much wants a new registry. But gun owners are sure it is at the top of the Liberals’ nefarious plan.

Also contentious is the RCMP’s power to classify guns. Restoring that power will prohibit the CZ-858 and Swiss Arms families of rifles. The Liberals will grandfather owners of these guns, but the prohibition destroys their resale value — and a Swiss Arms rifle is worth more than $3,000. Owners are not at fault: They bought their rifles legally and in good faith, before the RCMP discovered they were wrongly classified. As Blair Hagen of the National Firearms Association put it, “To us, this is confiscation.” Gun owners fix their wrath on the RCMP. The Mounties, they say, have been given the power to make the laws they enforce and we live in a police state. Also, the force has a deep-seated anti-gun agenda, and is secretly in league with its Liberal party masters. And so on.

The RCMP is deeply steeped in police culture: it places itself above the sway of public opinion, answerable only to The Law. Decisions on firearms come down in turgid officialese. Answers are opaque, explanations difficult to extract. As it stands, there is only one way to dispute firearms classification: defy it, and then fight it out in court at a cost of lifetime debt, with a criminal conviction on the line. That gun owners feel frustrated and powerless is understandable.

The state of gun politics in Canada is due chiefly to a deep distrust of the Liberals and the RCMP. Bill C-71 comes from the Liberals, so it is bad; it gives power to the RCMP, so it is worse. Gun activists energetically read the worst possible outcomes into the bill’s language, trying to crack its nefarious code. No matter what the Liberals do, the gun lobby will play its wellrehearsed tunes; the Liberals, in turn, will shy from tough political fights on guns. And the result will satisfy no one. A.J. Somerset is the author of Arms: the Culture and Credo of the Gun. He lives in London, Ont.