Face of Nation : A weekend of violence in Canada’s largest city has led to renewed calls for a ban on the sale and possession of handguns, but the federal Liberals say that no such action will be taken until after the fall election.
In an interview Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the government is weighing the results of last year’s public consultations on tougher gun control measures and will put forward its proposals as part of the upcoming campaign.
“It’s appropriate for the political parties to lay out for Canadians where they would go with this particular issue,” said Goodale, noting that any legislative changes will have to wait for Parliament’s return.
Toronto city council first asked Ottawa to enact a handgun ban more than a year ago in the wake of a shooting spree in the Danforth neighbourhood that killed two people and injured 13 others. The request was repeated in June after a shooting incident during Toronto Raptors’ victory celebration wounded four people. And it was made again this past holiday weekend, after 14 separate shootings injured 17 people across the city — a spasm of violence that Toronto Mayor John Tory described as “heartbreaking.”
Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction Minister Bill Blair, who was charged with overseeing the public consultations, more or less outlined the government’s thinking in a series of media interviews in June.
He signalled that he was in favour of a national ban on assault-style weapons, but not handguns, citing both the high cost of compensating owners — an estimated $1.5 billion to $2 billion — and the challenge of making it work. What Ottawa seems to be preparing to do is create some legislative framework to allow major cities to enact local gun control measures on things like the sale, storage or transportation of handguns.
How that will work exactly remains to be seen, particularly in Ontario, where the Premier Doug Ford has already rejected the idea of a ban in Toronto, saying it would punish law-abiding gun owners rather than criminals.
According to data from Statistics Canada, handguns were used in 59 per cent of all violent gun crimes in 2017, while a rifle or a shotgun was used in 17 per cent of the reported offences and a fully automatic firearm in six per cent.
Canada needs to learn from its neighbour’s failings and ban handguns before it’s too late, argues Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist who heads the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “I grew up in the States during the worst period of urban violence; I saw America’s great cities turn into killing fields,” he said. “Things can go bad — and fast.”
While Toronto and other large Canadian cities still aren’t experiencing the levels of gun violence seen in places like Chicago or Los Angeles, Florida said the country is now on that trajectory, with the shootings no longer contained to less-advantaged neighbourhoods.
