Like public health care, Canada’s tight gun-control laws help distinguish the country from its powerful neighbor to the south. But as Canadians commemorated the 20th anniversary of one of the country’s most notorious shooting rampages on Sunday, their parliament was on course to eliminate one of its most significant gun-control measures.
The long-gun registry, which requires the registration of rifles and shotguns, emerged largely from public revulsion over a massacre in 1989.
A decade before the Columbine high school shootings set off a national debate on gun violence in the US, an angry, unemployed 25-year-old armed with a semiautomatic hunting rifle stormed the Ecole Polytechnique, an engineering school in Montreal. Shouting “I hate feminists,” the gunman separated the female students from the men and killed 14 women before killing himself.
The crime was the sort that, even then, most Canadians thought could only happen in the US. The anniversary was observed on Sunday, as it has been every year since, by ceremonies across the nation. In Montreal, hundreds of people linked arms around a park near the school and about 1,000 people attended a vigil at Notre-Dame Basilica.
Parliament’s response to the crime was passage of the long-gun registry, and few issues since have so divided rural and urban Canadians. The law’s looming demise has revived the national debate over gun control and, with the wounds of 1989 still tender, raised deep questions about Canadian identity.
“Canada is suddenly changing into a place that loves guns and armies and war,” said Gerald Caplan, a prominent academic and former campaign director of the liberal New Democratic Party. “I don’t know how we got there but I don’t like it.”
The law has been controversial since its approval in 1995, and there are competing theories as to why it suddenly appears doomed. While Caplan cites a political shift signaled by the election of a Conservative government in 2006, many analysts credit an obscure parliamentary maneuver by gun-control opponents that allowed them to assemble a voting majority.
GOVERNMENT VS POLICE
Perhaps most surprisingly, the debate has pitted the Conservative government, which generally promotes a law and order agenda and wants to get rid of the law, against the police, who resoundingly favor keeping it. Arguments on both sides have been emotional, with opponents of the law adopting what Canadians consider to be US-style personal attack ads against gun-control advocates.
“This is so vicious, it’s amazing,” said Suzanne Laplant-Edward, whose 21-year-old daughter, Anne-Marie, was killed in the Montreal shooting. “The gun-control law is a monument erected to the memory of our daughters.”
The current debate does not involve handguns, whose registration has been required since 1934. Nor does it involve military-style weapons like assault rifles and sawed-off shotguns, which are banned outright. And the law’s repeal would not alter the requirement that gun buyers take safety courses and obtain a license.
But what it would do is hotly contested.
The current law requires the registration of the weapons themselves, rifle and shotguns, which account for 6.7 million of Canada’s 7.4 million registered guns, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said.
Many police forces say that registry data, which they consulted 3.4 million times last year, prevents killings by allowing them to seize guns from homes where serious domestic disputes have been reported.
And many police officials warn that without mandatory registration, their officers will lose the ability to seize illegal guns found in the possession of criminal suspects.
William Blair, the Toronto police chief and president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, said that information from the registry allowed his force to seize 58 illegal guns in October alone.
Killings involving guns have declined significantly since the gun registry began but it is unclear how much of that the registry is responsible for. Homicide rates have been dropping in Canada since the 1970s. And the registry itself, delayed for years by bureaucratic and software problems, has only been operational for a few years, limiting the data available for analysis.
Many recreational hunters, farmers and Native Canadians who hunt for food consider the law a useless and intrusive burden.
“From the beginning and still today the feeling has been that it’s going to do absolutely nothing about reducing crime,” said Dale Garnham, the president of the Manitoba Wildlife Federation, a hunting and fishing group, who added that his members have felt “unduly harassed” by the registration process, which is similar to applying for a passport.
Greg Farrant, a lobbyist for the Ontario Federation of Hunters and Anglers, said that gun license records are sufficient for the police to determine if guns are likely to be in, say, a home that is about to be raided. And, like many critics, he cites the cost of the registry, nearly US$1 billion to set up, as a reason to dismantle it.
PARLIAMENTARY SUPPORT
Previous efforts to abolish the registry were defeated because the Conservative government did not have enough votes to pass the bill alone and the registry had the support of all opposition parties. But the current bill has won two preliminary votes, exploiting a procedure that in certain cases frees opposition members from the requirement of voting along party lines.
The government waged an advertising campaign in rural areas represented by opposition parties, and in the end, eight Liberals and 12 New Democrats voted with the government at the bill’s second reading.
Early next year the bill will begin the process toward a third and final reading. While opposition leaders could change course and demand that all their members vote against it, observers on both sides expect it to pass.
And in one more way, Canada will resemble its larger neighbor.
“While Canada has not always been perfect on not having a gun culture or not being at war, it was on the whole a handsome, different kind of reality,” Caplan said. “I’m guessing there is still more support out there for the old values out there than the political elite reflects, but that may have slipped.”
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