Trudeau’s Liberals lie as they fundraise off gun legislation

It’s bad enough that the new Liberal gun bill is being sold as action when it is nothing more than political theatre, but to have Justin Trudeau’s team fundraise off the bill while lying is another story.

In an email that went out to supporters on Tuesday, the Liberal Party claimed that they were bringing in “common sense” gun legislation while the Conservatives were described in terms that the Liberals would only use to brand them as extremists.

“They’re taking orders from Canada’s NRA,” read the email.

Now that is a false statement, an outright lie, because there is no NRA in Canada. The National Rifle Association is based in the Untied States. It a a lobby group for firearms owners and a bogeyman for Liberals that want people to be scared of gun owners.

There are several gun lobby groups in Canada, all of which were invited to a briefing by the Liberal government to explain the legislation. Then that same day they send out an email trying to raise money and get email addresses on a petition by making people scared of the groups they had just asked to Ottawa for briefings.

Odd is one way to describe it.

The email also points to what the Liberals claim will make us all safer including making it mandatory for a seller to validate someone’s licence before a gun is sold. While Liberals claim this is not required by law, several sections of the Criminal Code including 91, 92, 99 and 101 all deal with transferring a firearm to someone not authorized to posses the firearm.

You could go to jail for five years for doing this.

The Liberals also claim that the new legislation will make it harder to transport firearms around town. In the last election they actually claimed that changes brought in by the Conservatives meant someone could store their handgun in their glove box while going to the grocery store.

That was a completely false claim and so is the claim that they are fixing this.

What the Liberals are doing is reversing the automatic authorization to transport a gun that the Conservatives said were affixed to the gun licence automatically. The Liberal’s said this change would endanger people and they would reverse it but in fact, they haven’t. Any licenced gun owner still has the authority to transport their handgun or restricted firearm to their home and to their local gun club to shoot it.

Officials in the technical briefing told reporters that this accounted for 97% of such authorizations under the old system.

So essentially the Liberals only reversed the Conservative change for people taking their guns to the gunsmith for fixing, people taking their guns to the border or gun shows. Or for three percent of the transport permits.

As I keep saying, this bill is nothing but political theatre.

We can go through this legislation point by point and one thing is perfectly clear, this is about optics rather than public safety. This is the ultimate, make the public think we are doing something so they feel safe kind of legislation.

Unfortunately too many in the media are too cowed by the Liberals or too incurious to ask if their claims are true. Facts matter and on this file, they are sorely lacking.

 

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