A leader of one of Canada’s most high-profile advocacy groups for tighter gun control is questioning the Public Safety Minister’s claim the government has been considering a ban on handguns in Canada since last May.

Ralph Goodale was reported to have made the comment in response to media questions Tuesday about statements by Toronto Mayor John Tory in the aftermath of a deadly shooting in Toronto’s Danforth neighbourhood Sunday that left one young woman and a young girl dead and 13 injured. The gunman also died, after a shootout with police.

“Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?” a frustrated and angry Tory burst out as he was answering questions from journalists the morning after the Sunday night attack.

When asked about Tory’s comment Tuesday while entering a special Commons committee meeting on the Trudeau government’s response to the influx of asylum seekers entering Canada from the U.S., Goodale referred to a request from members of a Quebec City Mosque who were attacked by a lone gunman on Jan. 29, 2017.

Six worshipers died in a fusillade of bullets from a handgun the shooter used after a semi-automatic rifle he first pointed at the crowd leaving the mosque jammed after the first shot.

Members of the mosque, led by the president of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec, wrote Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to plead for a federal ban on assault rifles.

The cultural centre president, Boufeldja Benabdallah, was later invited to testify at a Commons committee study of Bill C-71, the government’s new firearms legislation that focuses primarily on tighter restrictions and records for sales of non-restricted rifles and shotguns.

In response to the media request for a comment on Tory’s suggestion no one needs guns in Toronto, Goodale recalled the mosque’s request regarding assault rifles.

“A number of groups and organizations made representations to that effect earlier this year,” he said. “I said that we would be prepared to consider their arguments and we will do that,” Goodale said.

“We’ll examine the proposal to see if it can be effective,” he said.

The statement sparked at least one news headline claiming the government was already planning a crackdown on handguns before the Danforth shooting.

Heidi Rathjen is a spokesperson for Poly Remembers, an advocacy group founded after a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle shot and killed 13 women at the Polytechnique engineering school in Montreal in 1989.

Rathjen also testified at the Public Safety Committee hearings into Bill C-71 last May 22, when she shared a one-hour time slot for brief statements and MP questions with Benabdallah and two other witnesses.

“If there is one thing I want to ask of you today—just one thing—it is that civilians should be prohibited from owning assault weapons,” Benabdallah said at that time. “They are weapons of war intended to kill people and not for training or recreational shooting in the woods.”

In an email interview Tuesday, Rathjen recalled that Goodale’s response to the mosque’s request for an assault rifle ban was not enthusiastic.

At his first media response to the idea, Goodale said an assault rifle ban would require a sweeping overhaul of the Criminal Code and regulations governing the classification of restricted and prohibited rifles.

“We would like to be optimistic in reaction to the minister’s comments, but he said the same kind of thing in response to the Mosque victims’ plea to ban assault weapons last Spring, that it would be complicated, but he welcomes their legislative proposals,” Rathjen said in answer to Goodale’s comments this week.

“We found it rather disingenuous of him to expect victims of a massacre to come up with complex technical proposals, while it’s the job of the Public Safety Minister to protect the public, not to mention the teams of legal experts and other bureaucrats at his disposal to come up with solutions,” Rathjen said.

Rathjen and other gun control advocates welcomed some aspects of Bill C-71, including lifetime background checks before qualification for a firearm acquisition licence, but criticized the legislation for not going far enough.

Goodale, who has served as the MP for Regina—Wascana since 1993, was put in charge of delivering the Liberal party’s headline gun promise from the 2015 election – getting handguns and assault rifles off Canadian streets.

As he steered Bill C-71 through the Commons, Goodale has had to reinstate controls eliminated by the previous Conservative government, while making good on a promise not to bring back a registry for hunting rifles and shotguns.