Justin Trudeau will not be announcing a sweeping handgun ban when he appears next month at the big Women Deliver conference in Vancouver.

The Prime Minister’s Office dispelled any such speculation after the prospect of such an announcement was floated in the Commons this week by Tony Clement, the former Conservative and now independent MP.

It turns out that there were a couple of holes in Clement’s very plausible-sounding theory. First, Trudeau will not be joined at the conference by Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s outspoken anti-gun prime minister, as Clement alleged.

Second, it would be unusual for this government to make gun control a centrepiece of a feminist event of this size and prominence. While you can rely on Trudeau’s team to frame many of their programs and policies as ultra-friendly to women, their gun-control efforts haven’t generally been cast that way.

And that’s odd, because it’s not only a big departure for this government, but also for the whole idea of gun control in this country. It was the mass shooting of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 that really ignited the gun-control movement in Canada, and much progress was made in the 30 years since precisely because the issue is so important to women.

But in the current Liberal government, gun control is more usually presented as a matter of generic crime and safety.

The two lead ministers on firearms measures are Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and Border Security Minister Bill Blair — the law-and-order guys in Trudeau’s cabinet. Women ministers, who famously make up half the cabinet, have not been overly vocal or outspoken about anything the government has been doing on the firearms front.

Goodale barely mentioned women’s concerns when he introduced Bill C-71, the gun-control legislation in the Commons a little more than a year ago. Most of the citizens and experts cited in his speech — from mayors to police to gun-shop owners — were men.

Women also weren’t a huge feature of a 30-page report issued a month ago by Blair, the result of his consultations on a potential handgun ban. In the report’s list of “key themes” that came up in written submissions to Blair, “address impact of gun violence on women” was number nine on the list. Women’s groups weren’t overwhelmingly part of the in-person consultations either, and overall there were as many mentions in the report of women as there were of gangs.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, or the context in which we’re now talking about gun control. While the Polytechnique massacre was a galvanizing moment for the federal government 30 years ago, today’s calls for handgun bans and more gun controls follow incidents like the 2018 Danforth shootings, in which women were among the victims but not explicitly targeted.

After the Danforth shootings, we’ll remember, it was Mayor John Tory, not women’s groups, who served as the lead voice for a handgun ban.

Still, one assumes that there’s an element of political calculation — if not outright caution — in the gender-neutral way the Trudeau government has been approaching gun control. Past Liberal governments lost a lot of support, particularly among men, for firearms-control initiatives. Trudeau has repeatedly said he doesn’t want to revisit the idea of a gun registry, which became a flashpoint for Liberal critics in the 1990s.

It could be that the Trudeau team is aware that all this pro-feminist rhetoric of the past four years has been interpreted in some quarters as being unfriendly to men, and that it doesn’t want gun control falling into that polarized, men-versus-women atmosphere. Gun control, historically, has been polarizing enough already.

The legislation that is now winding its way through Parliament is essentially a boost to current laws covering firearms. It extends the background-check requirements for would-be gun owners and requires retailers to keep records of inventory and sales.

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There have been some tense back-and-forth efforts in the Senate over amendments to the legislation — some of which would have gutted the bill — but it now looks on track to face its final vote, and will probably pass, by the end of this month.

As for the idea of a handgun ban, that’s still up in the air. But we do know one thing — it won’t be announced in Vancouver at the Women Deliver conference.

Susan Delacourt is the Star's Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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