Gun Rights

OTTAWA—Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss?

The Liberal government vowed once more in the April election campaign that it will finally complete its long-delayed plan to buy back more than a 100,000 long guns it has banned across the country. But Prime Minister Mark Carney is all but certain to need one more deadline extension.

Ottawa appears to be moving ahead with efforts to get police forces, or anyone else, to take on the task of collecting the weapons from gun owners, but with no plan announced yet and a looming deadline, stakeholders and insiders expect the government to push back for a third time the amnesty order that protects the owners of more than 2,000 variants of “assault-style” weapons that were banned in 2020.

When Ottawa spends billions attacking the people who already obey the law, you have to wonder if public safety was ever their goal.

From Victoria, British Columbia, to St. John’s, Newfoundland, law-abiding Possession and Acquisition Licence (PAL) holders watch Ottawa waste more resources, strip more rights from lawful Canadians, and protect more violent criminals from prosecution and incarceration while calling it, in true Orwellian fashion, “public safety.”

The numbers don’t lie. In 2024, more Canadians than ever earned their Possession and Acquisition Licences (PALs,) and that’s good news for public safety, no matter what the politicians say.

“The number of adults in Canada with a government-approved gun licence rose to a new high in 2024,” writes Nicolas Johnson, “again defying the Liberal Party-led administration’s actions to criminalize gun users and confiscate our gear.”

There’s a very specific kind of mass shooting story the media doesn’t like to cover… it’s the kind that doesn’t happen because a good guy with a gun stopped it cold.

Roughly a month ago, a man stormed into a Michigan church during Sunday worship and opened fire. It could have ended in total carnage. But it didn’t. Because a legally armed, everyday churchgoer took him down. No military training. No law enforcement background. Just courage, quick action, and a gun.

A new report from the RCMP reveals that the number of Canadians holding a government-issued firearms licence reached an all-time high in 2024.

In Dec. 2024, there were 2,412,122 Possession and Acquisition Licence (PAL) holders in Canada, representing a 2.5% increase from 2,352,504 in December 2023.

While headlines scream about the rising cost of groceries, power bills, and climate policy flops, something subtler is brewing in Ottawa: a quiet retreat from the Trudeau-era firearms ban.

The 2025 Liberal Pre-Budget Consultation survey offers Canadians an opportunity to influence the Mark Carney government’s public spending priorities.

When it comes to Canada’s often tense debate around gun laws, most Canadians likely will not have heard of an RCMP database called the Firearms Reference Table, or FRT.

But to people like Melody Philistin, unexpected updates to this database have a personal impact.

“Yeah. It really sucks,” she said.

Philistin is a competitive shooter who recently represented Canada at an international event in the Czech Republic.

A Calgary-based firearms company says one of its rifles being classified as prohibited by the RCMP has thrown his business into “crisis mode.”

“Right now, I’m all riled up, because I get very frustrated. I’ve been in the industry now for like 28 years,” said J.R. Cox, head of Sterling Arms International. “It’s these rulings that, to me, completely devalue and delegitimize the RCMP technical identification team.”

On June 18, 2025, President Javier Milei significantly shifted Argentina’s firearms policy.

For the first time in three decades, civilians are permitted to buy and possess semi-automatic firearms. President Milei also lowered the minimum age for firearm ownership from 21 to 18.