Poilievre Pledges New Law to Block Arbitrary Gun Bans Via OIC

Reading Time: 3 minutes

TheGunBlog.ca — Pierre Poilievre, the leading candidate to become Canada’s next prime minister, pledged to pass a new law to prevent politicians from ordering arbitrary firearm prohibitions that criminalize honest citizens.

  • The leader of the Conservative Party, should he win the next election, said he aims to block politicians from using an executive decree known as an “order in council” (OIC).
  • He also said he would change Canada’s system of arbitrary and made-up firearm categories.
  • Justin Trudeau, the current Liberal prime minister, has used a series of OICs to arbitrarily and suddenly criminalize hundreds of thousands of honest Canadians and wipe out billions of dollars in personal and family wealth.

‘Take Away the OIC Power’

“In fact, we’re going to take away the OIC power altogether so that ministers can no longer arbitrarily designate a firearm as illegal,” Poilievre said in a video published today on his personal account on the X website.

  • He was responding to an audience question at what appears to be a public meeting.
  • The video doesn’t mention a date, location, or context.

Why It Matters

  • This is the first time TheGunBlog.ca is aware of Poilievre saying he intends to change important sections of Canada’s anti-gun legislation.
  • Poilievre is consistently and repeatedly speaking up for gun users, in contrast to Trudeau who consistently and repeatedly acts to suppress, harass, and criminalize them.
  • Today’s video suggests Poilievre might change Criminal Code Section 84(1), which defines the three arbitrary firearm categories, and Section 117.15, which the Liberals use for their arbitrary crackdowns.

New ‘Empirical’ Gun Classifications

Poilievre said in his video he would amend Canada’s arbitrary categories for firearms. He wants “empirical standards” to make the labels clear, consistent and predictable, and no longer subject to the changing whims of politicians and regulators.

The arbitrary, made-up, and misleading gun categories currently in law are:

  • “Prohibited”
  • “Restricted”
  • “Non-Restricted”

Hoping for Overhaul

  • Although many gun users hope a future Poilievre government will scrap the anti-gun regime entirely and restore justice for firearm users, he hasn’t said he intends an overhaul.
  • It’s also early in the process, and Poilievre may wait to present more complete plans until an election is called.
  • The current authoritarian Liberal administration could remain in office until October 2025 as the most-hostile political force against honest Canadians.

Poilievre’s Full Comment

In fact, we’re going to take away the OIC power altogether so that ministers can no longer arbitrarily designate a firearm as illegal.

In fact, what we’re going to do is create empirical standards that determine which firearms are “Restricted,” “Unrestricted,” and “Prohibited” based on what the gun does, not on how it looks.

Then we’re going to embed that in the law, and that law will be frozen in, crystallized, so that when you buy a firearm you don’t risk that the next day, some political pollster or propagandist is going to tell the minister that it would be good politics to ban such-and-such firearm because it looks scary, which is effectively what happened.

They banned a bunch of firearms for no reason, unrelated to what the gun does, but because it looked like a Hollywood G.I. Joe gun, and therefore it looked like good politics to ban it.

But what I’m going to do is, we’re going to create a task force — First Nations hunters, farmers, border guards, police officers, military veterans — to define which firearms would be “Prohibited,” like the machine guns that have been “Prohibited” since the 70s, which should be “Restricted,” like handguns, which should be “Unrestricted,” .22 rifles and other similar weapons and tools.

That’s a common-sense approach. We’re going to put it into law so you don’t have to worry about an OIC coming along to confiscate your value and turn your property into a worthless piece of government-confiscated machinery.

That’s what they’ve done. And they’ve turned honest people into criminals, while allowing criminals to run rampant in our street.

—Pierre Poilievre, X, 26 January 2023

Related