It is now official. Beyond the world of speculation.

Justin Trudeau wants a handgun ban in Canada.

More specifically he wants to take away handguns from law abiding target shooters because he doesn’t know what to do about gang members shooting up Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa or Montreal.

Whispers have been coming out of the prime minister’s office about this idea for some time now. Those whispers were dutifully reported by the reporters that get PMO access without putting any critical thought or assessment to the idea.

Now it is in the mandate of one of Trudeau’s newest cabinet ministers, Bill Blair.

Blair is officially the Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction. It is a ministry without a department and no one reports to him.

Still, Trudeau wants him to come up with a plan to ban handguns.

“You should lead an examination of a full ban on handguns and assault weapons in Canada, while not impeding the lawful use of firearms by Canadians,” the letter reads.

The idea of a complete handgun ban across Canada picked up steam after the Danforth shooting in July. That shooting was carried out with a stolen gun. According to a single report it was stolen from a gun shop in Saskatoon at the same time as the shooter’s criminal brother was there dealing drugs.

Police used the idea of the gun stolen in Canada to push their false claim that 50% of guns used in crimes in Canada are sourced in Canada as opposed to smuggled in from the United States.

As I document here, this is a claim based on a false premise. It is also not supported by Statistics Canada nor the Canadian Firearms Information System.

When police forces, be they the RCMP, Toronto Police or Ottawa Police are asked for data to back up the claim, they can’t provide it. In fact Chris Doucette at the Toronto Sun did just such a story recently.

In fact, only about 20% of the crime guns seized last year were domestically sourced and less than 9% of all the firearms seized in 2017 were sourced to Canada. The misleading 50% figure is based on the total number of traceable “crime guns” seized by cops between 2014 and 2017, which on average accounted for 31% of all firearms seized.

Those would be facts.

But we all know that despite claiming to be “evidence based” the Liberals are all about feelings. Whether it is a tanker ban on the West Coast, a ban on expanding Toronto Island Airport, blocking Energy East, pick an issue, they care about feelings and emotions, not facts.

So in order to deal with the problem of criminals shooting up Canada’s streets Trudeau will look for the only solution he can think of. He will take away your handguns because he knows where they are.

He can’t get at the criminal guns.

As Trudeau himself famously said, “Hard things are hard.”

Trudeau, Butts and the rest of the team might know that a handgun ban won’t reduce crime. They won’t care.

This move is also part of their re-election plan to secure left wing votes. It is following the culture war advice laid out years ago by pollster Frank Graves.

In 2010, Graves told the Liberals to launch a culture war based on, “cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy. If the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad. Go south and vote for Palin.”

Combine this with everything else Trudeau is doing, including his politics of division, and it would like they are listening to Graves this time.