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[u/Agonizing-Stroke1812]

Question about the Supreme Court case. Can the LPC not just ram through an actual legislation with their majority gov in order to kill the case?

[u/FunkyFrunkle → u/Agonizing-Stroke1812]

I mean, they can. They can do anything they want. They could have done it before they had a majority because they already had the handful of votes they needed from other party MP’s who subscribe to gun control. They could have gotten them from a scattered NDP, BQ or Green MP. The liberals were only a few seats away from a majority anyway.

Legislation doesn’t do anything to address the issues this program faces, and wouldn’t do much to boost support and it certainly wouldn’t do anything to address how unenforceable all this is.

All they would really do is legislate themselves into a corner unless they add a grandfathering clause which I do not see happening.

Poly didn’t seem too happy that the government chose to extend the amnesty and wait for the court decision. If they were quiet I would worry more, but the fact they were freaking out about it suggests that they don’t have as firm a hand on the helm as we might think. I don’t know, time will tell.

I don’t think it’s impossible, but I do think it’s unlikely that we’re going to see the government attempt to legislate before the court decision. They might after, but depending on the ruling I still don’t think it’s crazy to wonder if the government is looking for an avenue to exit without harming the political value in gun control.

Which leads me to another point.

People say that the government had lots of opportunities to abandon this without losing face, but what people don’t understand is that it’s not so much about losing or saving face. They lose face every single day on any given issue. It’s about losing or saving value.

Every opportunity the government had to take an off ramp came with having to more or less concede that this was a poorly executed idea and too costly which would bury any hope of ever revisiting gun control in the near future. Look at what happened to the long gun registry after it was scrapped. It left such a lasting bad taste that nobody has ever suggested it again.

Gun control is usually done in increments, slowly encroaching. The Trudeau government overplayed their hand and essentially blew their shot when they want all in on hard and fast gun bans which is about as far as you can go. The government is likely hoping for an outcome which they can dial this back while preserving the core message so they can creep ahead again down the road.

Gun control is an important core pillar for the Liberal party, and when you live next to the U.S., you want to preserve any and all means to hammer the conservatives while capitalizing on public sentiment if you’re the liberal party.

They know they can’t afford to buy back all these guns. They know there are way more than the numbers they published. They know the SKS represents a nightmare by itself. They know they overcommitted themselves but they also can’t afford to lose the value in gun control which is why they haven’t taken any of the “off ramps”. None of them made sense to take if you approach this from a “preserving the message” standpoint.

I’m not defending the guy, but objectively speaking, Carney hasn’t shown anywhere near the same amount of enthusiasm for this program as Trudeau did. It’s the people around him that are in full-throated support for this.

This was part of Trudeau’s core strategy to curtail violent crime and he mentioned it as such every chance he got. Carney by contrast hardly mentions it and if he has an opportunity to skirt around it, he does. He completely sidestepped the idea of banning the SKS when asked about it. He’s routinely neglected to mention the buyback as a core strategy. Trudeau got to live in the glamour of announcing the bans, but Carney has to work with the reality of enforcing them.

The government cannot escape the fact that there are millions of SKS rifles in the country. It’s been talked about at length in the media and they’d have to budget for millions of SKS rifles in a standalone buyback which would bankrupt the country. They also can’t really openly strong-arm people into surrendering them because of the optics involved, not to mention First Nations people. The SKS is a lose-lose situation which is why they’ve been so non-committal about it. They’re struggling enough with this program as it is, the SKS will cause more issues for them, not fix them.

Poly keeps demanding they ban the SKS but the government is already in an untenable position with the current buyback logistics. The SKS is not just another gun to ban, it represents an entirely new level of fuckery to an already huge, expensive, logistically impossible program. This is why Poly changed their language to “prohibit new sales”. They were probably told that a complete SKS ban isn’t realistic or likely.

This is why I think they wouldn’t be heartbroken if they lost this one.

[u/InitialAd4125 → u/FunkyFrunkle]

"It’s been talked about at length in the media, and they’d have to budget for millions of SKS rifles in a standalone buyback. It would bankrupt the country."

I think this is likely a major reason. See even if the supreme court affirms everything the lower courts said the government still has to deal with the fact that every lower court said they could ban and take away only if they provided fair compensation which the supreme court has amble evidence to see that the government is not providing that. (Also pretty sure there is another CCFR court case over that but that's besides the point). And if they were forced to do so well that would cause there ideology to hit hard reality. The reality that they don't have the budget for this. Likely to the point where it would have to be like the long gun registry and be extended overtime slowly yet surely paying people out as the program got paid little by little so the government doesn't go bankrupt in one go. Which also doesn't look great for them that they've added yet another expense to our debt payments for no actual gain whatsoever.