Canadian progressives see themselves, in contrast to conservatives, as being swayed by evidence. Best practices. Data. Last summer, a long-running Canadian public policy debate was turned on its head by new information. The new data reshaped national and local debates in Canada — we saw this again in the recent Throne Speech by the governor-general.
The new information was wrong.
It related to gun control. Gang-related violence has surged in Canada in recent years. Much of the violence involves firearms. Where the gangs get their guns is a matter of obvious concern. If Canadian criminals are getting their guns from legal Canadian sources, that indicates that our gun control laws are insufficient. If they’re getting them from external sources — primarily smuggling from the United States, which is awash in guns — then it’s not a gun control problem, and changing our gun control laws won’t help.
Data and police experience had long shown that Canadian crime gangs were arming themselves with guns sourced to the U.S., sold here at massive markups. But in the summer of 2018, The Canadian Press wire service ran a story that told the public that this long-observed trend was no longer true. It reported that the number of crime guns that were sourced in Canada had “surged dramatically,” according to a detective with the Toronto police, and that Canadian guns were now roughly equal with smuggled American guns on Toronto’s streets — basically a 50-50 split.
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See Also:
(1) The Liberals blow another fiscal promise. No one is surprised
(2) Facing expenses probe, Scheer says taxpayers weren’t charged for his ‘partisan travel’
(3) Right Now: The Liberals aren’t liberals anymore — but the Conservatives can and must be
(4) Appeal Court finds mentally ill ‘lone wolf’ who attacked Canadian soldiers not a terrorist
(5) Hopefully Trudeau doesn’t embarrass us while vacationing in Costa Rica
