The federal government announced new gun control measures Thursday, adding several hundred models and variants to its list of banned weapons.
“These firearms can no longer be legally used, sold or imported in Canada,” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc told reporters.
The announcement comes one day before the 35th anniversary of the massacre at École Polytechnique de Montréal. Radio-Canada first reported the news earlier Thursday.
The new measures, which are effective immediately, list more than 300 makes and models of assault-style firearms as prohibited weapons.
There will be an amnesty period until Oct. 30 of next year for current owners to comply with the ban. The new models will be part of the government’s planned buy-back program — the program still has not collected a single gun.
Edit: According to Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc, the list of newly banned guns is currently unavailable and its exact date of release is undefined.
The RCMP stated that the list of banned guns would be available “very shortly”. Exactly where the list of banned guns would be available to read was not disclosed.
Edit 2: List of banned guns is at this link
If they banned guns based on specific well-defined criteria, presumably nobody would need to wait for a list to know which ones were affected? It’s sort of amazing to think that this government could fail to do so for a second time after the way it went down last time.
I don’t believe the Liberal government truly wants to make transformative change on this file, they’re simply acting to balance optics and pressure from interest groups. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that this current effort seems disorganized and destined to fail.