OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) — Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau has admitted that his much-panned gun grab legislation will indeed ban certain types of hunting rifles, despite earlier claiming it would not.
“Our focus now is on saying okay, there are some guns, yes, that we’re going to have to take away from people who were using them to hunt,” Trudeau admitted during a preview of a soon-to-be released interview on CTV News with its chief news anchor Omar Sachedina.
Attempting to assure those outraged by his government’s gun grabs, Trudeau told Sachedina that his government is going to “make sure that you’re able to buy other guns from a long list of guns that are accepted [and] that are fine for hunting, whether it’s rifles or shotguns.”
Trudeau maintained that his government is “going at” some hunting guns, which have been legal for years, because they are “too dangerous in other contexts.”
Trudeau’s apparent about-face comes after he had earlier blasted the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) which strongly opposes his gun grab legislation, Bill C-21, and accused the party of spreading “disinformation” in an attempt to “scare everyone as much as possible.”
He also said in the House of Commons on December 13, during the question period, that his government was “not interested in going after guns that are typically used for hunting and protecting farms.”
In speaking with Sachedina, Trudeau claimed that the extra hunting guns being banned “fall on the wrong side of the line,” adding some of them are “slightly overpowered or have too large a magazine capacity or technical reasons like that.”
The full CTV News interview with Trudeau and Sachedina will be released in full on December 31.
A spokesperson for the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR) Tracey Wilson blasted Trudeau for his about-face, saying Trudeau’s new law is a hunting gun ban plain and simple.
“They called it ‘gun lobby disinformation’ or Conservative fear mongering,” noted Wilson in a recent interview with True North.
“Yet here they are admitting we were right the whole time…It’s a hunting gun ban, the largest in Canadian history.”
While the Trudeau government is standing by the controversial bill, C-21 is not without backlash, and has even been placed on hold until well into next year after pushback from opposition MPs.
Much of this controversy arose because Bill C-21 was initially introduced by the Trudeau government under the guise of restricting handgun sales, and the Trudeau government only added certain hunting rifles to the list of banned firearms under C-21 after the debate period of the bill had concluded.
The last-minute additions were blasted by Indigenous Canadians, hunters, farmers, and opposition MPs as a crass attempt to try and ban most guns and take them away from their legal owners.
Beyond rhetoric, a total of five Canadian jurisdictions have announced their opposition to Trudeau’s federal buyback schemes.
The province of Alberta and Saskatchewan have gone as far as introducing legislation that will ensure that their governments alone are responsible for enforcing federal gun laws.
Trudeau’s gun control efforts have sparked immense controversy across the political aisle, with some of his own MPs recently breaking rank to come out against the bill.
Liberal MP for Yukon, Brendan Hanley, recently said he is not “happy” with the legislation, adding in clear terms that he cannot support the pending law as written.
Another Liberal MP, Michael McLeod from the Northwest Territories, similarly said that there are aspects of Bill C-21 that are a bit “blurry” and “concerning” for him, and he does not fully support the bill as written.
Even the NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who has an informal agreement to support bills introduced by the Trudeau government, said he would not support Bill C-21 as written.