Alberta Justice Minister Tyler Shandro said his province will not participate in any attempts to seize firearms the federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has recently prohibited, including so-called “assault rifles.”
Justice Minister Shandro explained that he did not want to see the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Alberta go around confiscating firearms after claiming to have received a letter from the federal minister of public safety Marc Mendicino asking for resources to aid in confiscation efforts set to begin in the Autumn.
“Alberta taxpayers pay over $750 million per year for the RCMP and we will not tolerate taking officers off the streets in order to confiscate the property of law-abiding firearms owners,” Shandro said, the CBC reports.
The expected seizures of firearms originate from May of 2020 when the Trudeau government prohibited 1,500 different kinds of firearms from being either sold or used in Canada, all of which were supposed “assault-style firearms.”
However, closer examination of the firearms on the ban list revealed that many of the guns on the list were not even self-loading semi-automatic guns but bolt-action rifles that have been used by hunters and sportsmen for over a century, while others were variants of the AR-15 platform.
The 2020 ban came in the wake of a deadly mass shooting and arson rampage in Nova Scotia by Gabriel Wortman, who put on the uniform of a police officer and drove a fake RCMP cruiser while going on a killing spree before he was shot dead by police. Investigations later revealed that Wortman’s firearms had been illegally acquired, however, and smuggled across the US border.
Earlier this year, Trudeau went even further, looking to ban the sale and transfer of all handguns in Canada, with minister of public safety Mendicino arguing the ban would combat gun violence in the country.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.