Tony Bernardo is the Executive Director of the CSSA.

Yes, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is the worst government for Canadians in at least a generation, and we’re not even talking about guns.

Yes, he’s terrible for Canadian gun owners, but our saving grace is that he’s utterly incompetent. While other countries confiscated guns quickly after mass murders, there’s an argument to be made that Justin Trudeau’s incompetence is our saving grace.

Look at Great Britain, for a start.

On March 13, 1996, a mass murderer walked into Dunblane Primary School near Stirling, Scotland, and killed 16 students and one teacher. Fifteen others were injured in the deadliest mass shooting in British history. In response, Conservative Prime Minister John Major in 1997 banned all handguns except for .22 rimfire, and semi-automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns.

Same rapid response in Australia.

On April 28, 1996, a mass murderer killed 35 people and injured 23 more in the tourist town of Port Arthur in the deadliest massacre in modern Australian history. Australian Prime Minister John Howard banned semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and in the resulting mandatory confiscations, more than 643,000 firearms were seized from their lawful owners.

In New Zealand on March 15, 2019, a mass murderer live-streamed his atrocities on Facebook as he killed 51 people — 44 at the Al Noor Mosque and 7 at the Linwood Islamic Centre — and injured 40 more. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern banned “military-style” semi-automatic firearms and imposed a mandatory firearms confiscation on lawful owners. Nicole McKee, then the spokeswoman of the Council of Licensed Firearms Owners and today’s Associate Minister of Justice (Firearms), said that the “buyback” was a colossal failure. Seizing and destroying "50,000 [guns from licensed owners] is not a number to boast about," she said then.

But here in Canada... On April 18 and 19, 2020, a lone mass murderer killed 22 people and injured three others at 16 locations across Nova Scotia before he was shot and killed by RCMP members in Enfield, NS.

The killer used gasoline, matches and firearms to commit his atrocities. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau capitalized on these murders by imposing a nationwide ban on “assault-style” firearms in the May 1, 2020, gun bans by Order in Council.

The RCMP later admitted the murderer used two guns smuggled from the United States to commit his atrocities.

While Justin Trudeau ordered the confiscations of those banned firearms from their legal owners, he and his succession of Public Safety ministers are too incompetent to implement those confiscations, despite wasting more than $40 million on the scheme without confiscating a single firearm.

Meanwhile, Saskatchewan and Alberta passed legislation protecting their citizens from the federal government’s overreach, making it extraordinarily difficult for Trudeau to turn his confiscation dreams into reality.

So, the future looks bright. Every indicator is that Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party and Jagmeet Singh’s NDP will be decimated in the next federal election.

While Trudeau claims his Firearm Confiscation Compensation Scheme will move forward next year and be completed by the 2025 election, he hasn’t managed to confiscate a single firearm in four long years. Odds are good that Trudeau’s incompetence on this file will continue unimpeded for the next 14 months.

Odds are also excellent that our next prime minister will focus on getting illegal guns out of the hands of violent criminals and leave licensed firearms owners alone.

Tony Bernardo is the Executive Director of the CSSA.

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