Matt Gurney: Carney had a choice. He chose to own one of Trudeau's dumbest ideas

The gun confiscation plan is doomed that even the minister responsible knows it'll fail. The PM has chosen to proceed, anyway. To please Quebec.

The Canadian Press.

By: Matt Gurney

The federal gun confiscation program that will be announced in a few hours is illogical. It won’t save lives or make the public safer. The federal government doesn’t really even expect it to work, and is only going ahead with it because they’ve been stuck with a dumb proposal the Trudeau government made almost five years ago. If they could do it all over again, they wouldn’t, but they feel like they’ve blocked themselves in and have no choice but to proceed so that they don’t anger part of their electoral coalition, mainly voters in Quebec.

That might sound like a blistering criticism of the program, the kind of thing you’ve read in any number of my columns before. It’s actually what the public safety minister thinks about it. He just didn’t know he was being tape recorded when he said so. In a 20-minute conversation Gary Anandasangaree had with a firearms owner he rents a home to, which was recorded and then leaked, the minister says all of the above things. (He has also confirmed the recording is legitimate.)

Awkward for the minister, clearly, but I actually give him credit. The minister’s comments on tape are a confession, and an admission of defeat. They’re also, hands down, the most honest thing a Liberal government official has said on the gun control file in five years. Given that the minister responsible is freely telling people the program is a bad idea he’s stuck with and that won’t work, a sensible government would probably take this opportunity to walk away from the program.

Unfortunately, that’s not what this PM has chosen. It’s full speed ahead with an idea so bad Anandasangaree wishes he’d never been saddled with it.

Let’s talk about what this program is for a second. And forgive me, there’s quite a bit of history here. During Justin Trudeau’s first term, his only majority, his government had proposed a series of fairly moderate changes to the gun control laws they had inherited from Stephen Harper. As I’ve written often since, the proposals were a mixed bag. Some were okay. Some were bad. But they more or less left the well-functioning Canadian gun control system intact. They nibbled around the edges enough so that they could tell their voters that they had gotten tougher. But they generally didn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken.

But then politics got in the way, as it always does. Trudeau lost his majority in 2019 and became ever-more dependent on voter efficiency and wedge issues. And then in 2020, there was a horrible massacre in Nova Scotia. That catastrophe had nothing to do with our gun control laws; the weapons used were brought in illegally from the United States, as is typical of guns used in gun crime. But the Trudeau government seized on the opportunity — never waste a crisis, right? — to announce that they were “banning” “assault rifles.”

A lot of quotes above. So let me explain. First of all, there really wasn’t much of a ban. Anyone who owned one of the newly banned rifles was allowed to keep them. And as for assault rifles, actual assault rifles — rifle-calibre weapons that use high-capacity detachable magazines and can fire in fully automatic mode — have been banned in Canada for decades. This isn’t a problem that we actually had. And the government tacitly admitted as much when they began fudging the words they used to describe them. In acknowledgement that there were no actual assault weapons to ban, they started talking about assault-style weapons.

“Style” is a tell. You wouldn’t take medicine-style pills, or munch on a food-style snack. Because you’d know better. Trudeau et al knew better. It didn’t stop them. They needed something to announce, and by God, they were going to announce it!

As was typical for the government, after the announcement, they didn’t really do that much. Remember, this all started more than five years ago. And in that entire time, the government has only been able to get around to taking physical custody of newly banned firearms that were held by retailers — store inventory that hadn’t been sold. And even that took years. Absolutely no effort has been made to get the banned rifles out of the hands of people who already own them. What happened instead was that every year or so the government would decide to go talk about its tough-on-guns credentials and would add more guns to the list of banned weapons. They would simultaneously and very quietly also then extend the timeframe for when they actually intended to do anything about this.

Ever longer lists, ever further delayed timelines. Bit of a summary of the last government, eh?

We seem to finally be getting to the end, of sorts, of this ridiculous process. The Carney government is set to announce today that the confiscation will begin with a trial project on Cape Breton Island. In theory, that will then be extended to the rest of the country.

I say in theory because it doesn’t look likely that many police forces are actually going to participate in this. While some have kept silent, other forces right across the country have proactively stepped up and said they will refuse to participate in this. Some provinces have said they’ll ignore the order entirely.

So what we are left with here is a proposal that was made for entirely political reasons, never acted upon, and then basically ignored for five years, finally inching its way toward some kind of resolution that even the minister responsible is acknowledging isn’t going to work and isn’t logical, and that will be enforced (or not) wildly differently depending on one’s postal code. And it’s all only being done for purely political reasons, to appease a segment of the Liberal voter base, and that it wouldn’t be attempted again if the Carney government could start over.

Again, guys. This isn’t just another Matt Gurney column where I’m trying to make a political point here. The above isn’t rhetoric. This is the minister’s version. No embellishment is required on my part — it’s enough for me to agree with Minister Anandasangaree’s views, as expressed on the tape.

The minister responded to the release of the audio by saying his comments were misguided. That’s cute. But the minister hasn’t disavowed anything he said. Because he can’t. The truth, once spoken, has a way of lingering. Especially when it’s an uncomfortable one for the speaker.

In a healthy government led by serious people, in the aftermath of the minister’s confession, there might have been a moment of reflection. Instead of going ahead with a multi-hundred-million-dollar program that will not accomplish its stated public-safety objectives, will drive law-abiding citizens into noncompliance with nonsensical laws that cannot be enforced, that will produce unequal outcomes based on geography, that the minister responsible for the effort agrees is illogical and wasteful, and that the government wishes it wasn’t saddled with, you might think that that program would simply be ended. Maybe they wouldn’t announce that it was ended. But there are lots of ways a government can simply smother something to death with bureaucracy or starve it with neglect.

Both of those options were available to Prime Minister Mark Carney and his officials. But they’re proceeding, for exactly the reason anyone who has studied this file understands, and that the minister has now acknowledged: politics. What the Carney government is going to announce today is bad public policy. But actually ending the program, overtly or subtly, would cause Carney some political problems on his left flank, particularly in Quebec. So he’s decided to sign his name to this completely ridiculous fiasco because he doesn’t have the backbone to simply admit that this was always a stupid idea that his predecessor saddled him with.

That would be the honest thing to do. It would be the honourable thing to do. And it would be the right thing for the Canadian public. But the PM, in his wisdom, has mulled the issue over and decided to do the opposite of all those things.

I understand fully that Carney has probably spent less than five minutes total of his entire life thinking about the nuts and bolts of gun-control policy in Canada. It’s a very niche issue that falls well outside his areas of expertise and interest. I have no doubt whatsoever that this is just one of a series of dumb, half-baked, announced-but-abandoned policy initiatives left to him by his talk-much, do-little predecessor. I can understand, politically speaking, how Carney would’ve gotten briefed on this, thrown his hands up in the air and said, well, whatever, just go ahead with it, I don’t need a problem with Quebec right now. That is what a politician would do. As dumb as this policy is, it’ll probably help the Liberals more in places they value more than it’ll hurt them in places they don’t.

But wasn’t the appeal of Carney supposed to be his experience with making businesslike decisions, unencumbered by political baggage and bureaucratic inertia? Wasn’t that kind of the sales pitch? That he was going to be a more serious, results-oriented prime minister than the guy he replaced?

The Mark Carney Canadians were promised would have seen this program for what it is. Off target, wasteful, counterproductive, and frankly, doomed before it began by widespread refusal of police services to enforce a plan they know is a complete waste of everyone’s time. Experts in Canadian crime and gun policy know what the problem is, and what it isn’t. They know what good solutions to our actual problems would be, and they know what wasteful political symbolism would be … and they know this is the latter. They are rightly choosing to focus on what actually matters.

If businessman Mark Carney had been shown a corporate proposal that was this stupid, I have no doubt that he would have shot it down in a picosecond. And it is incredibly disappointing, and deeply disheartening, to see how quickly that Mark Carney is transforming into Mark Carney, politician. The gun confiscation plan is, and always has been, a textbook example of the worst of Justin Trudeau’s brand of politics.

And Carney is running with it, exactly as it was left to him.

He’s made that decision despite ample opportunity to change course. Anandasangaree’s comment, resistance from police and provinces, a review of Trudeau-era duds that should be abandoned — he had tons of offramps here. But he’s putting his foot on the gas and doing it anyway. I hate to borrow a campaign slogan from the Conservatives here, but on this file at least, Carney really is just like Justin.

This is a bad portent. Carney is not going to get more political capital as time goes on. It’s not going to get easier for him to make tough decisions about what Trudeau-era failures should be abandoned, even if the Liberals’ urban base voters like the sound of them. If Carney’s not willing to take some political damage now to do the right thing, even after his own minister has gone out and done us all the favour of telling the truth about how big a train wreck this program is, imagine the kind of dumpster fires Carney will be wearily signing off on in a month, or six months, or a year. Because, like, gosh. It would just be too hard to fix it.

Sorry, Prime Minister, sir. The last guy saddled you with a dumb program. It sucks. I get it. But you had every chance to walk away from it. You declined. This bad Trudeau idea is yours now. I hope it goes the way you’re hoping it will, and that it’s not a sign of the kind of PM you’ll become.

But I’ve got a bad feeling on both of those scores. Time will tell.

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