Nearly six years later this summer, I’m not sure we’re going to hear Prime Minister Trudeau waxing on similarly about guns. Toronto is definitely not in the mood for that conversation. In fact, I think you could fairly say that Toronto has never been more anti-gun.

Gun control has never been one of Justin Trudeau’s favourite issues. But prime ministers don’t get to pick their controversies and like it or not, Toronto’s gun problem is fast becoming Trudeau’s gun problem.

Well, to be precise, gun control at this very moment is Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale’s problem, the only minister who was in cabinet in the early 1990s, the last time Liberals tackled tighter restrictions around firearms — with massive political consequences. If he’s having any nightmare flashbacks, Goodale is keeping those to himself for now.

Goodale told reporters Tuesday that the current Liberal government was looking into tightening up the Criminal Code provisions around handgun ownership — a process that was already under way before the tragic shooting on the Danforth in Toronto on Sunday night.

New firearms-control legislation, Bill C-71, was already introduced to Parliament earlier this year and Goodale said that Ottawa is still talking to the provinces about beefed-up laws surrounding gun storage in commercial facilities and keeping firearms out of the hands of people with mental health issues.

Those may seem like eminently sensible ideas right now, while Toronto is reeling from not just the latest tragedy but a summer of gun violence in the city. Right now, the pro-gun lobby in Canada — though not as powerful as the one in the U.S. — has been sensibly silent.

But are Liberals willing to risk reawakening that political giant? Through the years, gun control has proven to be one of the biggest fundraising draws for the federal Conservatives and one of the largest political liabilities for the Liberals.

It’s been said, perhaps mythically, that whenever Conservatives saw the coffers getting sparse, they’d churn out another letter to supporters, warning that Liberals were coming to take away people’s guns. Gun control, the story went, was so lucrative a fundraising source for the Conservatives that Stephen Harper’s government was reluctant to kill the Liberals’ long-gun registry when it got to power in 2006, wanting to keep it alive.

What is not a myth is that Jean Chrétien’s old gun registry seriously damaged Liberal prospects in rural Canada for nearly a generation. Someone, in fact, once called that very registry an abject failure.

That someone? Justin Trudeau, circa 2012, when he was running for the leadership of the party and campaigning in Hawkesbury, Ontario.

“The long-gun registry, as it was, was a failure and I’m not going to resuscitate that,” Trudeau said at the time, even going on to talk about how guns had always been a part of his life. This was when Trudeau was trying hard to demonstrate that he was not going to follow the same path as previous Liberal prime ministers, including his father, but also Chretien.

“Yes, the RCMP guarding me had handguns and I got to play with them every now and then,” Trudeau said about his years growing up as the PM’s son. “I was raised with an appreciation and an understanding of how important in rural areas and right across the country gun ownership is as a part of the culture of Canada. I do not feel that there’s any huge contradiction between keeping our cities safe from gun violence and gangs, and allowing this important facet of Canadian identity which is having a gun.”

Nearly six years later this summer, I’m not sure we’re going to hear Prime Minister Trudeau waxing on similarly about guns. Toronto is definitely not in the mood for that conversation. In fact, I think you could fairly say that Toronto has never been more anti-gun.

It was striking to hear Mayor John Tory flatly asking in the wake of the Danforth shooting why anyone in Toronto needed a gun. Politicians in Canada, especially conservative ones, are usually more careful about whipping up the gun advocates with questions like that.

Had Tory, or any other politician mused aloud like that during the days of the gun registry controversy, that might have cost him or her a future election.

Earlier this year, one of Chrétien’s former communications chiefs, Peter Donolo, wrote a piece in The Globe and Mail saying that Canada couldn’t afford to be smug about gun violence, and that this new wave of Liberal politicians had to be ready to tackle firearms control again.

Moreover, Donolo said, Liberals had to undo all the damage the Conservatives had done to gun-control measures while Harper was in power — scrapping the registry and expanding the market and the culture around gun ownership.

Easy for a past Liberal government spokesperson to say, perhaps, but not so politically easy for the current Trudeau government to declare. Gun control has so far been very low down on the agenda.

But events in Toronto this summer are not going to permit the government to keep the firearms talk on the back burner. Currently vacationing in British Columbia, Trudeau has so far said little beyond a brief statement of sympathy and promised support for Toronto. He’s going to be expected to say more — lots more — soon.

As the government does start thinking about how to deal with Toronto’s summer of the gun, it will surely be wondering whether this will end badly — politically speaking. Will the gun-filled summer of 2018 lead to trouble for Liberals in the election a year from now?

Or, more intriguingly, have we reached a point where even the old, powerful gun lobby feels the backlash for speaking out against firearms control? Will we see more politicians, as courageous as the Toronto mayor, speaking out against gun ownership altogether?

What is clear is that guns are back in the Liberals’ political sights, even if the Prime Minister didn’t aim them there.

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