Canada’s previous registry for shotguns and standard rifles was maintained by the federal government rather than by sellers. That long-arms registry, plagued with technical difficulties but supported by most police forces, was scrapped in 2012 by Stephen Harper, then Prime Minister of the Conservative government.
“Conservatives now very much associate themselves with the opposition to gun control, but that wasn’t always the case,” Blake Brown, a history professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, told me. He said liberals and conservatives passed gun control measures in the 1950s and 1960s, and both sides tightened Canada’s gun laws in the years following the 1989 Montreal massacre.
In his book “Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada,” Professor Brown wrote that Canada’s cultural attitude toward firearms diverged from that of the United States as early as the 1860s.
[Read: Other Countries Had Mass Shootings. Then They Changed Their Gun Laws.]
“There have certainly been periods in American history when they have been more aggressive in gun control than Canada,” he said. “But overall, the trend has been for Canada to see itself differently when it comes to firearms.” That has led to stricter gun laws for fear of importing American gun violence.
Despite these historical differences, the weapons debate raging south of the border often reverberates here. While it was far from the limelight in our federal election last September, candidates in the Conservative Party’s ongoing leadership race have once again made it to the front.
[Read: Debate Over Guns Is Muted as Canada’s Election Nears]
In our coverage of the federal election in September, my colleague Ian Austen reported that there were 12.7 million legal and illegal weapons in Canada, or 34.7 civilian firearms per 100 people in 2017, the most recent data. (These figures come from the Small Arms Survey, a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland, which estimates that there are more than 300 million guns in the United States and 120.5 firearms per 100 people.)