Last Friday, a newspaper article broke the story that the Liberal Party has finally decided what it will do about the thorny issue of legal access to handguns and assault weapons.

Regrettably, Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction Minister Bill Blair announced that his party has ruled out a ban on handguns, arguing that “we’d still have a problem with them being smuggled across the border.” Yet the solution to the smuggling problem is to better equip border control agents, not to dismiss controls on the legal market where handguns remain far too accessible.

Indeed, the number of privately owned handguns has skyrocketed to close to a million. Legal handguns can also be used to commit crimes — like the Quebec Mosque massacre. They can be stolen or sold illegally to criminals through “straw purchases.” Homicides committed with handguns have sharply increased in recent years.

On Monday, Minister Blair specified that instead of a ban, his party will allow municipalities like Toronto and Montreal to enact additional restrictions on handguns, like stricter rules on storage. Such a measure is not only wholly inadequate, considering the risks involved, it would also be inefficient. Can the Liberals not see the glaring disaster resulting from a patchwork of state and local gun laws south of the border?

Meanwhile, the minister did confirm that his party plans to prohibit new sales of military-style firearms and buy back existing ones, essentially amounting to a total ban on assault weapons.

In this case, the Trudeau government has committed itself to legislate according to the values ​​and the will of the vast majority of Canadians who want to get semi-automatic assault weapons — the same ones that have been used in most mass killings here and south of the border — off our streets and out of our communities, once and for all. This is a significant and positive development for gun control in Canada, as it makes a ban on assault weapons a real possibility in the near future.

The problem, unfortunately, is that they will only do this after the next election, and only if they get reelected.

A complete overhaul of the classification system is necessary to ban assault weapons for good, and that definitely requires legislation — which means it’s an appropriate election promise (at least this late in the current mandate).

However, if they chose to, the Liberals could immediately prohibit specific assault weapons by Orders in Council under the regulatory authority introduced back in 1995 by the Chrétien government. That system was specifically designed to allow governments to rapidly prohibit new models similar to those already banned, without requiring the drawn-out process of pushing legislation through the House of Commons and the Senate for each weapon.

In fact, regulations containing lists of restricted and prohibited models as well as certain accessories (like large-capacity magazines) were supposed to be updated on a regular basis, but never were. Updating these lists is particularly urgent given gun manufacturers’ well established practice of circumventing the legal framework through minor changes to formerly restricted or prohibited military-style weapons in order for the new models to enter the Canadian market and even earn a less severe classification.

The RCMP has attempted to draw the attention of consecutive public safety ministers to the growing threat of readily available “military and paramilitary” weapons resulting from the failure to update the regulations — to little or no avail.

Moving now to update the list of prohibited weapons and accessories would be a logical first step toward implementing a more comprehensive ban as it would, at the very least, block future sales of existing models of assault weapons, including the current rush by gun enthusiasts to stock up on weapons like the infamous AR‑15.

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It would also confirm the sincerity of the Liberals’ determination to prioritize public safety and to complete the job once reelected. Given the current (2015) Liberal platform that already pledges to “take action to get … assault weapons off our streets,” Canadians would be convinced that, this time around, the promise to get rid of assault weapons is more than just words on paper.

If the Liberal government truly believes that the legal availability of assault weapons puts the public at risk, then why not enact measures that are available to them right now, while they are still in power? Why make an urgent public safety measure completely contingent on the chances of being reelected if it’s not necessary?

Nathalie Provost, survivor of the 1989 massacre at the École Polytechnique; Boufeldja Benabdallah, president of the Quebec Mosque, and Heidi Rathjen, École Polytechnique graduate

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