Trudeau and Blair lied to Hunters and Sport Shooters about the Gun Ban

Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when they announced the Order In Council (OIC) “assault-style” rifle ban on May 1 of this year, tried to reassure hunters and sport shooters that the ban would not affect them.

The federal government stated that the ban would only affect the “most prevalent assault-style firearms that are not suitable for hunting or sports shooting purposes,” and Trudeau himself during his announcement speech said, “Our government is also committed to protecting public safety while ensuring hunters, farmers, and law-abiding recreational firearms owners are also treated respectfully and fairly.”

Brad Manysiak, the creator of a past petition that gathered 175,310 signatures calling for firearms regulations and bans not to be rammed through parliament with an OIC, says that the notion that the Liberals were not going to hurt hunters and sport shooters with their firearms ban is an absolute lie.

Manysiak laid out his case to The National Telegraph on how the government has been clearly contradicted their own rhetoric on the gun ban from the start:

Joel Lightbound, the Parliamentary Secretary of Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness posted a response to e2341 on the House of Commons Petitions website. In it he states “We have been clear that our prohibition will not impact the activities of law abiding hunters and sports shooters. This is in conflict with what the actual OIC says. The OIC states that “…1.3 million Canadians participate in legal hunting. These owners may also be affected if they have been using a newly prohibited firearm that was previously non restricted.” The OIC also states: “An estimated 1.4 million Canadians participate in legal sports shooting. These sports shooters may find themselves temporarily unable to participate in the sport if their primary means of participating is with a new prohibited firearm”. The Liberals are lying to Canadians & we need to shine a light on this.  

Manysiak has demonstrated a large hole in the case Trudeau and Bliar had been trying to make for the gun ban. When Trudeau, Blair, and MP Lightbound are all getting what their own OIC ban said wrong it does raise questions of whether or not any of them read the actual text of the ban, or did they all know what it said and chose to lie in order to try and reduce public scrutiny? 

It was pointed out by Manysiak that when the Liberals had claimed that banning 1,500 rifles would not be affecting hunters and sport shooters it should have been seen as blatantly false from the start. It would be nearly impossible to ban 1,500 rifles and not overlap with the sorts of rifles some hunters and sport shooters use.

Manysiak said: 

Sports shooters can’t simply change to a different firearm. Many of the shooting sports are governed by national & international bodies that set out which firearms can & cannot be used in competition. It’s not a temporary inconvenience, it ends the ability to compete in the sport completely.

Tracey Wilson, VP of Communications for the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights (CCFR), concurred with Manysiak that the Liberals’ claim that they were treating hunters and sport shooters “fairly” and their ban not affecting them was false from the outset.

Wilson told The National Telegraph:

Minister Blair has been consistently lying to his cabinet and to Canadians. The only guns affected by the May 1 OIC gun ban are strictly those used by licensed, legal, RCMP vetted gun owners for sporting and hunting purposes. To say that these guns serve no purpose to hunters and sport shooters is a blatant lie, since they have been deemed appropriate for exactly those reasons by the experts at the RCMP firearms lab previously to the gun ban. Canadians have used and enjoyed these firearms safely and without issue for decades, proving this ban is purely political in nature and fails to address the source of crime guns entirely.

The Liberals were already wrongly targeting law abiding gun owners as somehow being responsible for gun crime in Canada in a significant way when it is almost entirely an issue with gangs. But now that the Liberals have been shown to be lying about trying to not target hunters and sport shooters it will be extremely difficult for the federal government to ever deal with firearms owners without an assumption of dishonesty being present.

What is most concerning today though, is that despite the opponents of the OIC gun ban being able to objectively show the Liberals claims their gun ban would not to be affect hunters and sport shooters is blatantly wrong, the mainstream Canadian media has yet to bring a single questions to Prime Minister Trudeau on his government’s false claims.