FIRST READING: As Trudeau touts handgun ban, police say it’s doing nothing

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As police unions pillory federal gun bans for doing nothing to address skyrocketing gun crime, an Ontario police department revealed this week that virtually all its crime guns are now illegal imports from the United States.

“Approximately 90 per cent of (the) firearms that we seize are directly traced back to the U.S. And I can say in reality the remaining 10 per cent are likely also from the U.S.,” Peel Regional Police Chief Nishan Duraiappah said at a Monday press conference. The 10 per cent referred to guns that have been modified or had their serial numbers removed, making them harder to trace.

Duraiappah was announcing the results of Project Sledgehammer, the breakup of a gun smuggling ring that included the seizure of a shipment of so-called “giggle switches” — black market devices that can turn a regular handgun into an automatic machine pistol.

But during the press conference, police revealed that both gun crime — and the number of illegal guns in the community — is unlike anything they’ve ever seen.

The Peel Regional Police cover an area immediately to the west of Toronto that includes Mississauga and Brampton. Duraiappah said that only 10 years ago, if a criminal in the Peel Region wanted an illegal gun, “it was doable, but it required a lot of work.”

Now, Peel Police are seizing an illegal gun about once every 30 hours — an 87 per cent increase over the year prior. Illegal guns are now so ubiquitous that they often show up in unrelated investigations, such as an impaired driver having one in his glove compartment.

“The availability of firearms has just saturated the community,” said Duraiappah.

This has all occurred in tandem with a nationwide spike in gun crime, including fatal shootings.

Earlier this year, Statistics Canada published 2022 data showing that “firearm-related violent crime” was at the highest rate recorded since they started tracking it in 2009.

York Regional Police, who cover an area to the east of Toronto, reported in August that shootings were up 92 per cent as compared to the year before.

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put out a social media statement marking the second anniversary of the “handgun freeze,” a sweeping federal crackdown on the legal ownership of pistols.

In Canada, handguns have long been classified as “restricted firearms,” a category subject to far stricter ownership requirements than “non-restricted” firearms such as rifles and shotguns. For one, a restricted firearm can only legally exist in one of three places: Locked up at home, at a licensed gun range, or being transported between those two places.

The October 2022 “handgun freeze” toughened the measures even further by immediately banning the “sale, purchase, and transfer” of handguns.

“We choose your safety over the gun lobby — every time,” Trudeau said in a statement posted to X.com last week.

The post spurred open condemnation from two major police unions, both of whom accused Trudeau of trumpeting a policy that had little to no effect on gun crime.

“Our communities are experiencing a 45 per cent increase in shootings and a 62 per cent increase in gun-related homicides compared to this time last year,” wrote the Toronto Police Association in a response on X. “What difference does your handgun ban make when 85 per cent of guns seized by our members can be sourced to the United States?”

They were soon joined by the Surrey Police Union, whose members work in the particularly high crime municipality of Surrey, B.C. “The federal handgun freeze fails to address the real issue: the surge of illegal firearms coming across our borders and ending up in the hands of violent criminals,” they wrote.

In addition to the spiking numbers of illegal guns making their way over the border, Statistics Canada recently published numbers showing that legal gun owners represented a small proportion of those using firearms illegally. In their analysis of 2022 gun crime data, the agency wrote that “the firearms used in homicides were rarely legal firearms used by their legal owners who were in good standing.”

Monday’s Peel Regional Police press conference also touched on another longstanding point of contention between police and the Trudeau government: The ease with which violent, recidivist criminals are given bail or early release.

“Something is fundamentally wrong … when we keep putting citizens and police officers in harm’s way because of bail, the revolving system of justice,” Nando Iannicca, chair of the Peel Police Service Board, said in response to a reporter’s question.

He added, “half the people that we pick up for a crime are known to us and have done another crime or are on bail.”

Kimberly Murray has one of the longest titles in the federal government, the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools. She was appointed in the wake of Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc announcing in 2021 that they’d discovered 215 unmarked residential school graves – a claim that remains unverified three years later. But Murray did not mention this latter point in her final report, published just as her two-year term comes to an end. Instead, she mentions “settler-colonialism” 86 times, demands that Ottawa criminalize “denialism” of residential schools and proposes a Commission of Investigation to chase down “disinformation and misinformation about Indian Residential Schools.” She also proposes that Canada pay reparations and surrender to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. 

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