OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s looming federal gun grab legislation is on hold until well into next year after pushback from opposition MPs.
While Liberal Party MPs on the House of Commons public safety committee had tried to ram Trudeau’s gun grab legislation, Bill C-21, through before the Christmas break, opposition MPs on the committee voted 6 to 5 Tuesday to block the effort.
The effort to rush the passage of the bill was led by committee chair and Liberal MP Ron McKinnon, who said MPs were “out of time” to get the legislation passed before the break for the holidays.
However, due to a joint effort by committee MPs from the Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), and the Bloc Québécois, the bill will first have to go through no less than eight public hearings in the new year.
According to one MP, the reason for the public hearings is for the committee itself to travel “across Canada as soon as possible to rural, northern, and Indigenous communities to hear from impacted individuals.”
In response, McKinnon said that any public hearings would mean the bill would be delayed until at least April 2023, as this is the earliest the committee would be able to travel.
Canada’s Parliament is now in recess for the Christmas break and will not return until January 30, 2023. As a result, Bill C-21 like all others is on hold for the time being.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Bill C-21, if passed, would stop all used handgun sales and severely restrict new sales.
Initially expected to pass, controversy arose when after the debate period of the bill had finished, the Trudeau government hastily added new gun models to Bill C-21, including long guns used by hunters.
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.
The Trudeau Liberals amendment read that the government was looking to ban, “a firearm that is a rifle or shotgun that is capable of discharging center fire ammunition in a semi-automatic manner.”
Conservative MP Raquel Dancho said Tuesday that she found the last-minute additions “offensive,” and the proposed amendments could even ban classic “wood stock hunting rifles…”
“That’s really the problem we’re coming down to. I don’t necessarily see a path forward,” she noted.
Bill C-21 was even recently blasted by a Liberal MP for the Yukon, Brendan Hanley.
Being from a rural, northern and heavily-indigenous territory, Hanely noted that many of his constituents “regularly hunt, either as a food source or for the recreational aspects of hunting,” and that Trudeau’s bill is “really upsetting.”
Bill C-21 adds to Trudeau’s first large gun grab that was announced after a deadly mass shooting in Nova Scotia in May 2020, in which he banned over 1,500 “military-style assault firearms” with a plan to begin buying them back from owners.
If that ban in enforced, even legal gun owners in possession of the federally regulated Possession and Acquisition License (PAL) would be barred from buying, selling, transporting, and importing a slew of guns the government has categorized as “assault-style” rifles.
On top of this ban and adding more fuel to the fire, the Trudeau government in May quietly enacted what is in effect a new long-gun registry system, despite saying in 2015 that he would never bring back the system after it was scrapped in 2012 by former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.