At just after 10:15 a.m. on January 23, 2024, a 28-year-old man wearing a black security guard uniform exited his vehicle in the Edmonton City Hall parkade and headed into the elevator armed with four Molotov cocktails, 150 rounds of ammunition and a semi-automatic rifle. Upon reaching the second floor, he headed toward the mayor’s office, then the councillors’ office. Finding these locked, he lit his explosives, threw them, and began firing his rifle, hitting walls, windows and the ceiling. Edmonton’s mayor, several councillors, the fire chief and some staff were in a meeting nearby. One councillor thought a caterer must have dropped a tray of cookies. Another imagined a stack of chairs had tipped over. Then a real security guard ran into the room, saying: “This is—we’ve got a live shooter.” The door was locked from the inside. Within minutes the gunman was subdued by an unarmed on-duty security guard.
It’s impossible to say why the incident ended as it did—why, in the words of Edmonton Police Chief Dale McFee, “We are incredibly lucky that there are no reported injuries and no lives have been lost,” including those of a visiting class of Grade 1 students. It’s impossible to say why, 10 months after the fact, we’re not talking about downtown Edmonton as the site of a mass murder, or about how “Edmonton City Hall” has become synonymous with “Sandy Hook” and “Columbine” and “École Polytechnique,” or living with the knowledge that Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi was the first Canadian politician in over 50 years to be assassinated. City police and the RCMP have released no details about why the incident ended so quickly. Gun users speculated online, based on watching security footage, that the shooter’s rifle jammed. “He’s using a higher capacity magazine, but for some reason… stops shooting at the third or fourth pull,” one man writes. “[This] indicates a malfunction. He fiddles with the handle but then drops the rifle.”
If we hadn’t been “incredibly lucky”—if the gun (perhaps) wasn’t a cheap SKS variant and hadn’t (probably) jammed, or if the shooter had brought a second gun—Alberta today would be different. We might be remembering front-page photos of blood streaked across the marble zigzags of Edmonton City Hall’s foyer, or mourning the murders of a dozen Edmontonians, or sickened at the thought that a class of schoolchildren witnessed everything. And almost immediately after the massacre we’d have become livid at our provincial government.
One of the first things most civilized people do after hearing about a mass shooting in their country is demand a ban on the type of gun used. This is what happened after mass shootings in Port Arthur, Australia (1996: 35 dead), and Dunblane, Scotland (1996: 17 dead, most of them kindergarten students), and Utøya, Norway (2011; 68 dead), and Christchurch, New Zealand (2019: 51 dead). The public in each case was strongly in favour of tougher restrictions, as were police, and support came from across the political spectrum. A wide array of guns—automatic, semi-automatic, “military-grade” and, in the UK, most handguns—were eventually banned. Close to a million guns were surrendered through buybacks. Norway already had some restrictions but added the Ruger Mini-14 model used to slaughter dozens of children at a summer camp to its list of prohibited weapons.
“We are incredibly lucky that there are no reported injuries and no lives have been lost.”
Canada is not so different. After the massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, when a gunman murdered 14 women, our federal government reacted to the public’s horror by passing legislation that included mandatory registration and licensing for gun owners, a national registry, background checks, and verification processes and controls on ammunition sales. The legislation had support across party lines. It took years to create, however, and didn’t preclude Canadians from owning the semi-automatic rifles still associated today with mass shootings. (Canada in 1977 had banned fully automatic guns: those “with the capability of discharging projectiles in rapid succession during one pressure of the trigger.” Think machine guns or the Rambo movies.)
Canada has now banned “assault weapons” as well—or is trying to. Our federal government, borrowing from the US Department of Justice, defines these as “semi-automatic firearms with a large magazine of ammunition…designed and configured for rapid fire” (i.e., the trigger must be pulled repeatedly, but an experienced shooter can get off at least one shot per second). It announced its ban in the aftermath of our country’s worst mass shooting, April 18–19, 2020, when a 51-year-old man impersonating an RCMP officer and armed with two semi-automatic rifles roamed rural Nova Scotia from Portapique to Shubenacadie and murdered 22 people, including a pregnant healthcare aide and a 23-year-veteran RCMP constable.
For nearly 50 years advocacy groups and police in Canada have been calling for a ban. As far back as 1977 the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police had argued “semi-automatic firearms are basically designed as an instrument of war” and have “no sporting use either in the cultural or the recreational sense.” And the federal Liberals had already promised more gun controls following the 2019 Danforth shooting in Toronto (two dead; 13 injured). Portapique jolted them into action. On April 20, 2020, then-public safety minister Bill Blair declared his government would prohibit “military style assault weapons.” “There have been far too many incidents of gun violence in our country,” he said, promising “measures… that significantly reduce those incidents and keep people safe.”
The public was behind him. According to an Ipsos poll that May, compiled after Portapique, 82 per cent of Canadians supported a ban, including 77 per cent of Albertans. A concurrent Angus Reid poll put support across the country at 78 per cent for “a complete ban on civilian possession of assault weapons.” That survey found 60 per cent of conservative voters supported a ban, as did 70 per cent of former gun owners and even 45 per cent of current gun owners. And Portapique didn’t much change public opinion. A year before that mass shooting, Angus Reid had found 75 per cent support among Canadians for an assault weapons ban.
On May 1, less than two weeks after the rampage in Nova Scotia, Blair announced a ban on “over 1,500 models and variants of assault-style firearms” as well as certain components and magazines. The list included the Ruger Mini-14 used at École Polytechnique, Utøya and Portapique, and the AR-15 used in hundreds of US shootings, including Sandy Hook and Columbine. These can no longer be legally used, imported or sold in Canada.
The restrictions came with a two-year amnesty (until 2022) and a promised buyback to be overseen by the RCMP in which owners would be compensated when surrendering their weapons. Gun control advocates celebrated. It looked like Canada was belatedly following the lead of countries that outlawed weapons used in mass killings. But four years later the ban is in limbo.
On the same day that Canada banned assault weapons, then-premier Jason Kenney issued a statement. “The Government of Alberta is concerned about all crime, including the illegal use of firearms,” he said. “[But] today’s order by Ottawa does little to target criminals. Instead, Ottawa is singling out law-abiding Canadians who purchased their property legally, have owned these items safely for years, and who have committed no crimes.” In the years since then, the UCP government has continued to oppose federal efforts to ban guns—which Kenney has called “legally purchased inanimate objects.”
Advocates on all sides of the debate have long argued about what constitutes an “assault weapon” or “military style.” Owners of these guns dismiss such terms as fear-mongering akin to referring to chef knives as “stabbing tools.” But no one disputes that these “inanimate objects” were first designed for soldiers to use to kill other soldiers (e.g., the AR-15 was mass produced for American troops in Vietnam). And ads in archived newspapers remind us that gun shops in Edmonton and Calgary were advertising the likes of AR-15s as “assault weapons” only a few decades ago. Gun advocates in Canada pivoted to calling them “sporting rifles” after École Polytechnique.
For nearly 50 years advocacy groups and police have called for an assault weapons ban.
The Alberta Chief Firearms Office (ACFO)—created by Kenney in June 2020, and which has taken on much of Alberta’s pro-gun advocacy work—responded to questions about the ban by saying “ ‘assault-style’ is not a type of firearms classification for the purposes of regulation under any federal or provincial legislation that governs firearms such as the Criminal Code or the Firearms Act.” This is true. So, in addition to banning 1,500 specific makes and models, the federal government is trying to restrict “assault-style” guns based on a certain level of muzzle energy (thus encompassing sniper rifles) and bore diameter (the threshold captures the most powerful shotguns).
Unlike Americans, Canadians have no enshrined right to keep and carry guns. This has been so since Canada’s founding, and the distinction has been upheld many times by our courts. In summer 2024 a group of UCP members from Medicine Hat, calling themselves the Black Hat Gang, asked premier Danielle Smith to add the right to keep and bear firearms to Alberta’s Bill of Rights. In October Smith said she’d introduce legislation to do just that. Canada’s Charter, however, is unclear.
Gun proponents’ strongest objection is that some guns Canada would ban are used by hunters, including Indigenous people. Even as the ACFO is advising Albertans about how to comply with a ban, it will “continue to stand up for Alberta’s law-abiding hunters.”
Canada’s list of 1,500 “assault weapons” was made by executive order. Four years later it isn’t finalized. Facing opposition from Alberta and other provinces, hunters, gun makers, gun collectors, property rights advocates, various MPs and the Assembly of First Nations, in March 2022 the federal government extended the amnesty until October 2023. In November 2023 it extended the amnesty again, until October 2025. It has withdrawn amendments to legislation that would have clarified which guns are banned and why. Today our politicians are still arguing over which guns are uniquely well suited to killing moose at a distance and which can too easily slaughter a crowd of civilians up close.
Guns seized by police at the Coutts border blockade in 2022, including a semi-automatic rifle modified to shoot 30 rounds in nine seconds.
The debate doesn’t fall neatly along partisan lines. Some NDP MPs call the list overkill. The federal NDP says Canada can’t impede “those who use long guns for hunting and farming, and can’t hinder the treaty rights of Indigenous peoples.” But former federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole supported the ban. “I want to make my position on firearms perfectly clear,” he said during the 2021 election. “First, the ban on assault weapons will remain in place. Second, the present ban on a number of other firearms that were reclassified in 2020 will remain in place.” He called for “taking the politics out of” the discussion. The Trudeau government in May 2023 said it would re-establish an independent committee to review gun classification. Then-public safety minister Marco Mendicino said this would “take the misinformation out of these debates.”
The federal Conservatives, now under new leadership, might kill the ban. Pierre Poilievre calls the policy a failure, saying last spring about the prime minister: “He has spent 40 million tax dollars that could have secured our ports and our borders, and he has not taken in a single, solitary gun.” (He didn’t elaborate on who’s responsible for delaying the buyback.) At a rural Ontario rally last June, Poilievre, asked by a gun owner his intentions should he become PM, said “We [will] just reverse everything Trudeau has done.”
Regardless, the UCP government says it will prevent the RCMP in Alberta from taking part in an assault weapons buyback. If need be, it will replace the RCMP with a provincial force, and prevent local police from taking part by stopping them from making funding deals with Ottawa.
In the meantime, gun-control advocates are frustrated. “Instead of working on the law, we find ourselves fighting about details and disinformation and procedures,” said Heidi Rathjen, coordinator of PolySeSouvient, whose organization formed in response to the École Polytechnique massacre. Gun owners are in limbo. And some gun makers are proceeding as though the ban isn’t real. “While sales were no doubt initially dampened by the Liberal government’s [changes], the Black Creek Labs SRV2 Siberian semi-auto rifle is in production,” reported Calibre magazine in 2023. “Now, with the Liberals removing those amendments… presumably more shooters are emboldened to put their money down on one of these made-in-Canada rifles.”
Other complications include that no one can say how many guns might be affected by Canada’s ban. According to a 2018 federal report, “Because ‘assault weapon’ is not a legally defined term, providing a count of how many are held in Canada is not possible. However, there are about 100,000 legally owned non-handgun firearms—usually rifles and shotguns—registered to individuals. Some of these could have features consistent with what is described as an assault weapon.” ‘Features’ is a telling word. Guns can be made more powerful, or modified with aftermarket parts, potentially turning a legal gun into an illegal one. Even gun-control advocates acknowledge that an “assault weapon” is not so much a standalone, standardized item, like a baseball bat, but a collection of integrated parts, not all of which are easily controlled or banned. (Magazines and ammo are regulated separately.) Similarly we don’t know how many “assault weapons” are in Alberta. The ACFO says, “[We have] received estimates from the federal government that approximately 30,000 firearms in Alberta meet this criteria.”
A further twist is that the federal government hasn’t only banned “assault weapons.” On December 15, 2023, Bill C-21 received royal assent. The law toughens penalties for gun smuggling and trafficking, adds new offences for “ghost guns” (which lack serial numbers and are 3D-printed or made from parts) and creates new “red flag” laws and licence revocation provisions to address domestic violence or self-harm. Most notably the bill bans the sale, purchase, import or transfer (but not ownership) of handguns in Canada.
Shotguns and hunting rifles may have “historic and cultural importance.” AR-15s do not.
Even the UCP government can get behind tougher smuggling penalties or a crackdown on ghost guns. But a handgun freeze—whatever its merits or drawbacks—is another kettle of fish. Canadians seem to believe that handguns represent less of a threat to them or their kids than do the weapons used in Canada’s worst mass shootings. The people who responded to pollsters after Portapique declared overwhelming support for ridding the country of AR-15s. They didn’t feel quite the same way about pistols and revolvers. Ipsos and Angus Reid both found at least 10 per cent less support for a handgun ban than for an assault-weapons ban, with support falling to as low as 43 per cent in Alberta.
An ordinary Canadian, following the debate through headlines and soundbites, could easily conflate efforts to ban “assault weapons” with a push to eliminate other guns. Handguns are more commonly used in gang violence, domestic and intimate partner violence, suicides and accidental shootings. Compelling arguments can be made for banning them, but reducing mass shootings isn’t on top of the list. When the UCP says “Trudeau’s policies won’t stop gangs,” they’re talking about handguns.
For that matter, when the UCP evokes the “historic and cultural importance of firearms” to our province, they mean shotguns and bolt-action hunting rifles, not AR-15s or their equivalents. Indeed, while something like a quarter of Canadians own a gun (mostly traditional rifles and handguns), few have owned anything resembling an “assault weapon.” But everyone is a potential target for the man who would use an assault weapon for its original purpose.
The arguments opposing a ban on assault weapons are that the federal government’s “ridiculous firearms agenda”—in the words of Kenney—is an affront to law-abiding property owners, including hunters, and that we’ll waste a huge amount of money buying back 100,000 scary-looking but otherwise harmless inanimate objects. If the ban goes ahead, many hundreds of collectors in Alberta will be made to surrender treasured property, even guns that don’t work or haven’t been removed from a locked cabinet in years. Heirlooms handed down from parents will be caught in a gun-grabbing driftnet. Some collectors will choose to keep contraband, becoming criminals with the stroke of a pen, left to worry about when the RCMP will come to inspect their collection.
Many recreational shooters—those who don’t use handguns or smaller shotguns—will have to change their hobby. Some gun ranges will lose business. At Calgary’s Shooting Edge, for example, four of 16 ranges were dedicated to “centrefire rifles,” which include AR-15s and AK-47s (specifically, a Chinese-made descendant of Russia’s famous Kalashnikov). The Shooting Edge shut down in October, blaming the federal ban.
Many hunters will find that weapons they have used safely for years are now illegal to own. They’ll lose lawfully acquired property. They’ll be forced to surrender trusted tools in exchange for compensation they believe is unfair. Some of their new guns will be different—more expensive, harder to operate, less powerful.
Indigenous groups—who know a bit about government mass confiscations—haven’t been assuaged by promises that the final list of banned guns won’t impact subsistence hunting. Nunavut Tunngavik vice-president Paul Irngaut told Canadian senators in 2023 that Inuit hunters face unique dangers and can’t always access search and rescue services. “Semi-automatic rifles are effective and necessary as a humane method to quickly dispatch animals, and as defence against polar bears, grizzly bears and wolves,” he said. If the federal government gets its way, some Indigenous Canadians will be forced to trade higher-powered guns for traditional rifles and deterrents such as bear spray.
The argument for a ban on assault weapons, however, is more compelling: Canada could prevent a mass shooting.
Surveys show that many gun owners support an assault-weapons ban. Some even argue in online forums that a ban on AR-15s is neither a slight on law-abiding gun owners nor the start of a slippery slope toward outlawing hunting or sport shooting. Canadians—Indigenous and otherwise—will continue to hunt, albeit some with new guns and different precautions. Following their assault weapon bans, people in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Norway continue to hunt, using guns. Shooting ranges will sound a bit different, but many will survive.
When most of Canada’s assault weapons have been carted away and destroyed, Canadians will not only feel safer, they will in fact be safer. The correlation between lower rates of gun ownership and less gun violence is backed by research. A 2000 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery concluded: “Across [26] developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides.” Other factors such as the effectiveness of mental health supports and gun-owner screening contribute. But the simple fact is that where there are more guns, there are more deaths from guns.
Australians appear to have less to fear from gun violence today following their 1996–1997 buyback, when over 650,000 guns were taken out of circulation (by a conservative government). From a 2006 article in the journal Injury Prevention: “In the 18 years before the gun law reforms there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the 10.5 years afterwards.”
The rate of gun crime has fallen in the UK since its government banned civilians from owning most guns, and the country’s homicide rate is the lowest in the OECD (and one-sixth of Canada’s rate).
“[One] thing to remember is that the people who are shot, injured or killed have rights too,” said Calgary-based surgeon, hunter, self-identified conservative voter, and assault-weapons-ban proponent John Kortbeek in a 2021 interview with Cold Steel: Canadian Journal of Surgery Podcast. “They didn’t ask to be shot, they didn’t ask to be killed, and they didn’t ask to be disabled. And that’s a pretty stiff price to pay for ready access to handguns and military style assault weapons.”
Shotguns and hunting rifles may have “historic and cultural importance.” AR-15s do not.
last January at Edmonton City Hall, premier Danielle Smith appeared onstage at events in Calgary and Edmonton with former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. Carlson owns guns, including an AR-15, and has likened gun control in the US to “class warfare.” As he told the NRA, “The Left hate that guns are tools and that millions of normal people own them. They hate that guns are also a metaphor for true individual freedom.” Neither Smith nor Carlson mentioned the previous day’s incident in Edmonton, nor did Smith’s government issue a statement.
That shooting is largely forgotten. In March the gunman was charged with two terrorism offences and nine other charges. In July he pleaded not guilty. City Hall was closed to the public for two months, then was reopened with metal detectors and other new security measures. Albertans moved on.
Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi is now doubtless safer. But that city also has the Legislature. Alberta has other government buildings, and malls, nightclubs, country music festivals, political conventions, church gatherings. It has schools and daycares and children’s camps. Both my 10-year-old daughter’s public elementary school and my 5-year-old’s preschool in Calgary now do lockdown drills, where they bolt the doors, turn off the lights and take silent cover under desks and tables “in case the bad guys come” (my 5-year-old’s words).
A mass shooting leaves a permanent scar on society. “Certain dates are written into our country’s story as defining days,” Norway’s King Harald said on the 10th anniversary of Utøya. Then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern called the Christchurch massacre one of her country’s “darkest days.” “We are suffering,” said Colchester County, NS, mayor Christine Blair in spring 2024, four years after Portapique. “It’s huge here, and it has affected everyone.”
But the flipside is true too. Gun restrictions reinforce and shape cultural values and norms, in the same way other legislation has long-term effects (e.g., seat belt laws). If mass shootings can traumatize a society, reasonable gun restrictions can inspire a more peaceful one.
The Mass Casualty Commission that was struck following the 2020 massacre in Nova Scotia recom-mended in its exhaustive report a ban in Canada on “all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that discharge centre-fire ammunition and that are designed to accept detachable magazines with capacities of more than five rounds.” It did so after concluding that mass shootings pose a “significant though rare” threat to Canadians.
But a mass shooting almost did happen in Alberta last January. It may have been prevented only by dumb luck. If a mass shooting does happen here, and three or seven or 22 people are killed, including schoolchildren, a horrified Albertan and Canadian public will immediately demand a ban on the assault weapons used in the massacre. And then we’ll find out that we already did ban these guns—or tried to, before opponents, including Alberta’s government, decided that the chance to prevent a mass shooting wasn’t worth the price.
Evan Osenton is the editor-in-chief of Alberta Views.
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