Police attack workers during the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. Credit: (The Canadian Encyclopedia/Google Images)

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Written by: Alex Corbett

The first of May is international labour day. A day when the entire working class celebrates the hard won accomplishments of the past, and organises for a better future.

Last year, this day brought us a little closer in a time of crisis, with online rallies due to COVID-19. While many of us were celebrating the achievements of working people, the mainstream media was dominated with a quite different story; a sweeping Order in Council banning thousands of commonly possessed, legally acquired firearms. On February 16, 2021, the Government proposed further restrictions to civilian firearms ownership in Canada.

Asking what a left perspective on these measures might look like, seems appropriate right now.

If you reacted with a “finally, It’s about time!” to the announcement of the Order in Council, what you’re missing, is a theory of the state, in line with reality. The ruling class isn’t dragging their feet on this issue at all. They, along with their media allies, have been manufacturing consent for the disarmament of the working class for decades. The ruling class are simply using this moment, when everyone is stuck inside, to enact these measures without parliamentary oversight, in the form of the May 1, 2020 Order in Council.

The left should be scientific about this. This isn’t happening in the context of everything getting better; of us progressing towards a better world, as many supporters of this ban seem to imagine. It’s being enacted by a settler-colonial government with a history of repression towards Indigenous Nations and the working class, here, and abroad.

The Canadian government tramples organised labour, sells arms to Saudi Arabia, lies about reforming the electoral system, accelerates climate change and is complicit in genocide. A government like that, telling its citizens that its new disarmament policies are “for their own safety” ought to elicit some concern.

Without a theory of the state, Ideologically liberal or “progressive” observers see politics in part, as a series of individual policy decisions made by elected technocrats that can be judged on their specific merits, case by case.

“Hey, well I might not like Trudeau trying to foment civil war in Venezuela or refusing to condemn fascism at the UN but this gun ban is ok!”.

Contradictory takes like this are still common in otherwise progressive Canadian spaces, since ideologically liberal political conceptions remain dominant. The Canadian government acts in its own interest, and its interests, aren’t our interests.

Ideology and Historical Context

Illumination of this issue requires us to take up the ideological and historical context that these regulations are being enacted in, and the class nature of the Canadian state.

It’s important to recognise before discussing any of this, that firearms can and do, cause some harm in civilian hands. Domestic violence and suicide, are very real, very serious problems. No sane analysis of these multifaceted problems can seriously leave out gun safety measures as, at least partially, part of the solution.

Gun law is a difficult topic to discuss in Canada for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the maze of existing regulations, license types and firearms classifications, model specific exemptions, grandfathering and other complexities. This serves to make those who understand the regulations sound like pedantic technocrats, especially to liberals, (who “know everything they need to”, namely that Guns are bad) so, as a society, we just end up talking past each other. Furthermore, it’s in the media's interest to paint all RPAL holders as predominantly white, right wing loons, and report widely every single shooting that does occur.

The simplicity of the “if it bleeds it leads” narrative perpetuated by news outlets, and the conflation of illegal firearms activity, with legal gun owners, serves to obfuscate and mystify the nature of the problem in the mind of the general public. The media’s complicity in this confusion and obfuscation is so deeply ingrained that Trudeau is able to say, in a recent press conference "We are not targeting law-abiding citizens who own guns to go hunting or for sport shooting. The measures we're proposing are concrete and practical." when any reading of the order in council or bill C-21, demonstrates that is exactly who is being targeted.

The thing that RPAL holding Canadians know, is that If more people understood how the existing regulations work, It would suck a lot of air out of the room for those in favour of this, what is being called, an “assault weapons” ban.

This an absurd and propagandistic name, given that anything that could reasonably be called an “assault weapon” has been banned in Canada since the 1970s. The restrictions currently in place are much more stringent than those who have not completed an RPAL course, imagine them to be.

The gulf in understanding between firearms license holders regarding the types of firearms that the May 1, 2020 OIC bans, and what the general public imagine is out there, is huge. This lack of understanding of firearms, and existing gun control measures, fomented by the media and state disinformation campaigns is itself weaponised by our class enemies, in the form of fear. The fear created around this issue is in part, the means by which consent for new state measures is garnered from the general public. Simply put; they want you to fear your neighbor, and trust Trudeau’s RCMP.

Gun control measures aren’t designed to help us achieve our goal of inculcating, solidarity and class consciousness. Gun control measures are, quite intentionally designed to set us back, and always have been.

Just about a year ago, the progressive left was rallying behind #shutdowncanada, and condemning the structural racism of the RCMP was entering into mainstream discourse. We were acting in solidarity with indigenous communities, marching, blockading, drawing attention to the role of the Canadian state’s repressive apparatus, and its ongoing history of brutality.

Quite a shift occurred with the announcement of the OIC, with many “progressives'' championing this new RCMP enforced gun ban. A measure presented to the public, by Public Safety Minister Bill Blair. Bill Blair. Yes, the same former Toronto police chief Bill Blair, who locked up and violated hundreds of our comrades at the G20.

Without an understanding of the class nature of the capitalist state, without a sense of history, it is sadly possible for well meaning people to believe a figure like Blair or Trudeau could be justified in some instances, but not others. Historical context provides some illumination here, as we’ll see, gun control measures are most often enacted by the state in times of crises of its own legitimacy.

The History of Gun Control in Canada

The history of gun control in Canada, parallels instances of indigenous and working class resistance. The Canadian state has been enacting arms control measures along class and racial lines, in response to challenges to it’s authority, since its inception. Even before confederation, laws were passed barring Irish people from possessing firearms, due to supposed fears of their unruly disposition and disloyalty to the crown.

The 1886 North West Territories Act specifically prohibited “improved arms” in an effort to dissuade indigenous people and “disloyal” white settlers from inciting another North West Rebellion. The 1919 Winnipeg general strike got the government worried enough to pass legislation restricting handguns and newly acquired arms. In 1934, handgun registration was passed due in part to ruling class fears of increasing communist party membership. Starting as early as 1940 Japanese Canadians had their firearms seized, via an order in council prior to their internment. Automatic firearms were banned shortly after the FLQ situation in the 1970s. AK-47 pattern rifles were banned after the Oka Crisis and so on.

The commonly accepted narrative of gun control measures is that the state implements them in response to incidents of mass shootings and other firearms related tragedies. Most people believe that these restrictions are good faith measures put in place with the intention to protect the public.

This idea, put forth by the mainstream media, is in fact ahistorical and counterfactual. Incidences of mass gun violence and terrorism in Canada are rare opportunities for the ruling class to justify the further restriction of freedoms in all areas, including firearms rights.

Present Politics
Overall Canada doesn't have a gun violence problem that involves licensed gun owners in any meaningful way. Of the already low number of firearms related homicides in this country, license holders make up a small fraction of the perpetrators. The Liberals can make it seem that licensed gun owners are responsible for violence though, by continually proposing restrictions on them in 'response' to illegal activity. This conflation of legal and illegal firearms activity in the media, and ultimately in the mind of the public, is the main mechanism through which consent for bills like C-21 is garnered.

The low rates of firearm related injury and death in Canada are actually a problem for the Liberals politically. Consider that a problem solved, would no longer be a problem they could run an election on solving. The Liberal party and ideologically liberal gun control advocates thus have great incentive to inflate the problem in the mind of the public, and have done so using dishonest and questionable means.

For the Liberals, C-21 makes a lot of sense as a bludgeon against the NDP. The NDP has a significant challenge on this issue given that, unlike the Liberals, they have to satisfy both rural and urban constituencies. Selling gun control policies in rural ridings like those of Charlie Angus or Nikki Ashton, is a tall order. Urban NDP supporters more readily acquiesce to liberal gun control policy. There’s no broad agreement on this issue within the New Democratic Party. The Liberals have thus forced the NDP to engage in triangulation on gun control, which leaves NDP leadership sounding haplessly contradictory. The Liberals are outmaneuvering the NDP on this issue, even though their proposed laws are terrible.

Fun thought experiment: Imagine if CP24 and the Canadian media reported on evictions, with the same intensity and frequency as they did gun violence. Can you picture it? We might just be talking about the very real and urgent housing crisis in Canadian cities, instead of the largely imagined gun violence problem.

With more Canadians unemployed than since the great depression due to COVID-19, in addition to looming ecological collapse, the Trudeau government's deeper motivations for this latest order in council should be clear. Massive anti-police protests in the summer of 2020 coupled with a growing consciousness of the Canadian state’s complicity in genocide are a determining factor here. We are in a period when the state’s legitimacy is being challenged, and the Canadian state is responding the way it always does.

A further political dimension to this issue is that these new restrictions don’t make right wing gun owners, less right wing. Quite the opposite.

In preparation for writing this, I joined a few of the firearms groups that popped up after the news of the OIC dropped on Facebook. Things aren’t looking good. The misogyny, racism and trafficking in conspiratorial right-wing loonacy is pronounced. In the absence of class analysis and historical context, we find reactionary regressive and anti-communist views festering.

The announcement of this gun ban has actually pushed more apolitical PAL holders into these sorts of groups, looking for answers, which is surely having a radicalising effect in a rightward direction. Rightwingers don’t play gatekeeper, they take people as they are. Many confused and frustrated firearms owners, distraught at being turned into criminals overnight, are currently finding themselves accepted by some of the most insidious forces on the Canadian right.

There are models for combatting this, Socialist Rifle Association, Armed Equality, Redneck Revolt as well as many others have been engaging in an ideological battle south of the border. There is just no way around the hard work of politics. We should be using this moment to clearly explain what is happening. The Canadian firearms community is not a site of ideological contestation that the left can abandon, just because it’s a little problematic.

I am not suggesting that every leftist in Canada run out and get a gun immediately. Joining a socialist organisation, organising with your neighbors, forming mutual aid groups, campaigning for police abolition and other left policies is certainly more important right now. But we should never let our present reformism, preclude or inhibit the possibility of a revolutionary break with capitalism.

While the immediate solutions to the problems we face certainly don’t require leftists to arm themselves at present, there might come a time when that’s what’s needed. For some people on turtle island, dealing with violent dispossession of their land at the hands of the state, that time might be closer than we think. We shouldn’t give the state the power to make these decisions for us without all the resistance that deserves.

Alex Corbett is a Toronto-based activist with a degree in Political Science from York University. He has been an active participant in struggles ranging from Indigenous Solidarity, Anti-Imperialism, Climate Justice, Housing Justice and more.