Ottawa’s buyback program marks another round in the political battle over gun control

OTTAWA—Get ready for another round of political fighting about gun control in Canada.

The Liberal government is getting set to make good on promises to toughen gun laws at the same time the Conservatives are in the midst of a leadership race in which candidates’ positions on gun restrictions will be an essential question — and likely provide new attack fodder for the Liberals.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said Wednesday that a mandatory buyback program will be launched as soon as this spring for the upwards of 1,500 kinds of firearms banned by the government in 2020.

The controversial order-in-council announcing the ban of what Ottawa called “assault-style” weapons was accompanied by a two-year amnesty for owners, in part to allow for a buyback program to be set up.

That amnesty was set to expire next month. With no buyback program yet in place, the government will now extend the amnesty to October 2023.

“We’re not saying it’s going to take 18 months at all to launch this (buyback) program,” Mendicino said Wednesday at an event in Markham to announce funding to combat gang violence.

“We hope to have a launch much faster than that… certainly we hope this spring, if not as quickly as possible.”

The original buyback program was voluntary, but in the 2021 election the Liberals promised to make it mandatory as part of a suite of promises to get tougher on gun crime.

Those promises were also used as a wedge in that campaign, with the Liberals seizing on Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s promise that if elected, he’d repeal the 2020 order.

O’Toole walked back that promise over several confusing days on the campaign trail that knocked the Tory team off message and ultimately became one of the issues cited by Conservative MPs when they voted to oust O’Toole as leader last month.

With the race to replace O’Toole now underway, candidates have until April 19 to register and until June 3 to sign up the number of new members required to join the contest. The winner will be selected by Sept. 10.

Interim Conservative Leader Candice Bergen is one of the party’s long-standing champions of a less-restrictive approach to firearms — as an MP, she was chosen by prime minister Stephen Harper to champion his Conservative government’s successful legislative quest to kill the long-gun registry .

At that time, Jean Charest was the premier of Quebec, and opposed a provision of the bill that required all information collected in that registry to be destroyed.

Today, Charest is running for leadership of the federal Conservatives, and his support of the old registry is already being held against him by at least one rival candidate, as well as by firearms organizations whose members often play an active role in leadership campaigns.

“Charest is a Liberal who campaigned against Stephen Harper. He supported the long-gun registry,” Jenni Byrne, a longtime Conservative strategist working with Pierre Poilievre’s campaign, wrote on social media even before Charest had formally launched his campaign.

In an interview Monday with True NorthCharest defended his past position, noting that as the leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives in the 1990s, he had also warned against the creation of the long-gun registry.

“We wouldn’t be putting in any new restrictions for sure,” he told host Andrew Lawton, “and we would look seriously at what has been put in to make sure it makes common sense for Canadians.”

Meanwhile, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown, who formally entered the leadership race on Sunday, counts among his campaign team Fred DeLorey, who for many years was a firearms industry lobbyist.

That DeLorey played a role in O’Toole’s leadership and general election campaigns was among the facts the Liberals previously used to poke holes in any promises Conservatives have made to reduce gun crime.

In the federal election, the Conservatives promised to redirect funding to focus on preventing illegal firearms from entering the country, as well as on gang violence, an issue Brown has also raised many times as mayor.

On Wednesday, the federal government also followed through on promised funding for that purpose, finally announcing the rollout of $250 million first committed in 2020 to help divert people from joining gangs. Of those funds, $7.3 million is going to York Region, Mendicino announced.

That’s where the government should be focused, Conservative MPs Raquel Dancho and Pierre Paul-Hus said Wednesday. “The Liberals should scrap their arbitrary firearm ban and their plans for a buyback program and provide those resources to our police officers, border officials, and grassroots youth diversion programs,” they said in a statement.