Alberta CFO Calls for Feds to Cancel Gun Ban

The recently appointed CFO for the province of Alberta, Dr. Teri Bryant, has penned an open letter to the federal Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino, asking the federal government to rescind the Orders in Council prohibiting some 1,500+ varieties of firearms.

The letter draws attention to the lack of evidence supporting the ban, and the notion that the ban is simply ineffective. The letter also calls into question the expenditure of significantly more money in a program that's quite literally demonstrated its inability to meet its stated goals: Reducing gun crime.

For gun owners, some of the letter's content defines the term "oddly familiar;" with the CFO mentioning "The federal policy measures contemplated for dealing with the firearms in question are also manifestly unfair. Requiring mandatory confiscation or deactivation represents an unacceptable intrusion into the personal lives of Albertans and other Canadians and a serious infringement on their property rights. Owners of the affected firearms acquired them in full conformity with the law at the time. They have not done anything wrong, yet they are to be forcibly deprived of their property or forced to effectively render it useless through compulsory deactivation."

This feels both odd and familiar as the reality outlined by Dr. Bryant thusly is the cold reality Canadian gun owners have been facing since 2020, but until now remained a perspective that felt exclusive to gun owners. Even former CPC leader Erin O'Toole preferred to ignore the reality of a government giving taxpaying civilians the option of having thousands of dollars worth of their property either seized or rendered useless, while NDP and Liberal representatives in the House have stalwartly ignored the comments and concerns of any constituent that happens to have a firearms license. Were gun owners in Canada still capable of optimism where the Federal government is concerned, this letter would probably provide some, if only for its disconcerting pairing of simple honesty and a government letterhead.

Guns: Canaries in a Political Coal Mine

And this is precisely why perhaps the most important part of Dr. Bryant's letter, the part that certainly should resound with Mssrs. Mendicino, Trudeau, Blair et al. is also perhaps the part that has the least to do with firearms: "Even more important, however, will be the loss of confidence in our firearms control system and government in general, when a community is singled out by such unjust and undeserved actions. We should be acting to build confidence in our systems, not bringing them into disrepute."

For years we at Calibre have referred to gun owners as the canary in the political coal mine. The logic behind this theory is simple: No other file in federal purview is subject to such sweeping reforms on a political whim as firearms. The ban discussed in Dr. Bryant's letter is all the proof that's required of that: The federal government is attempting to seize property from hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Canadians and is doing so without casting a single vote in the House of Commons. I defy any pundit to come up with any other product a Canadian civilian could possess that we would, as a country, be alright with our government forcibly seizing on this scale with so little oversight or insight. There isn't one.

And this ban, the one being opposed by Alberta's firearms safety czar in this letter, isn't the only evidence of this; it's merely the most current evidence. This government has done nothing but use firearms, and those that own them, as a wedge to divide this country. But wedges feel pressure; that's their role, and Canadian gun owners have never felt more than they do today. The constant anti-gun and anti-gun owner rhetoric required to support the passage of this ban has made many Canadians irrationally hateful towards gun owners in very real, very literal ways. And we weren't exactly starting from an unbiased position: 7 years ago a Fedex employee threatened to lose $18,000 worth of my magazines because they were gun magazines. But that wasn't the worst.

In a testimony where I attempted to raise the issue of privacy and security around sales records required by Bill C-71, Trudeau-appointed Senator Marliou McPhedran opened her questions for my testimony by framing it as if I might have been paid by the American NRA to represent gun rights in Canada. Unrelated to the subject matter at best, and extremely reductive of a decade-long career covering gun politics at best, that particular line of question led directly to a host of threats levelled against me on social media such that I, and my immediate family, no longer maintain social media accounts under our real names under the advice of security experts.

Let me put that another way: As a result of accusations levelled by a Liberal-appointed senator trying to discredit me because she didn't like what I had to say, people have threatened to kill me and my family.

And so, as a gun owner but more importantly as a father, husband, and Canadian who is tired of watching our nation rent asunder by partisanship over pragmatic policy - Dr. Bryant, thank you. Sincerely. To Minister Mendicino: Please listen. Canada doesn't need more disenfranchised Canadians.