Juno News - April 09, 2023


Canada’s ongoing war against legal gun owners (ft. Tracey Wilson)

Guests
Tracy Wilson
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Danielle Smith Bill Blair Doug Ford Marco Mendicino Justin Trudeau New Brunswick Terry Bryan
Smith puts the CBC on notice Former CSIS intelligence officer speaks out on Han Dong reports

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

187.03

Word count

1,091

Sentence count

77

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Tracy Wilson is the Vice President of Public Relations for the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights (CCFR), a group dedicated to protecting the rights of gun owners across the country. In this episode, she talks about the ongoing federal government's assault on gun owners, and how the CCFR is fighting back.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:07.900 And joining me is Tracy Wilson, the Vice President of Public Relations for the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights,
00:00:15.020 a group that's always been a great supporter of True North, and I've always been a great supporter and member of them.
00:00:21.040 Look, I think it's not really breaking news to say that gun owners have been under assault with Justin Trudeau's government.
00:00:27.260 We've had the Order in Council Bill, C-21, a number of reforms and regulations.
00:00:32.760 And even just as we were chatting a moment ago, how do you even as a gun owner begin to tackle all of these things?
00:00:39.160 Because it really is a battle on many fronts that the government's waging.
00:00:42.340 It absolutely is. And in fact, to me, as a gun owner, I've been a gun owner for 27 years.
00:00:47.700 I'm a mom, I'm a grandma. I want to save her country too.
00:00:51.340 And I know it's not my community committing the violence.
00:00:54.020 So for me, the problem is, is it's sort of a breach of the social contract that I made with the government
00:01:01.080 where they said, here's the regulations in order to be a gun owner.
00:01:04.700 Here's what you can have. Here's what you can do.
00:01:06.540 And I said, OK. And I complied with them, regardless of how ridiculous some of them are. 0.88
00:01:11.400 And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.
00:01:12.900 They just are still coming at us, still trying to confiscate our legally acquired property,
00:01:17.600 even though we've done nothing to warrant it.
00:01:19.580 And it's incredibly frustrating. So frustrating that, yeah, we're taking them to court.
00:01:24.840 We've seen a little bit of optimism, I'd say, in the last few months, not from the federal government,
00:01:29.300 but from provinces. I think Alberta really started this off.
00:01:32.680 They appointed a very firearms-focused, firearms-owners-focused CFO, Terry Bryan.
00:01:37.260 They've also now, under Danielle Smith, really said,
00:01:39.540 we're not playing ball with the federal government's gun confiscation.
00:01:42.440 Has this been an area where there's a bit of hope that you can lobby provincial governments
00:01:46.920 in a way that might not have been top of mind for your agenda?
00:01:49.820 Yeah. Well, in fact, when the CCFR first launched our federal court action back in 2020,
00:01:55.220 immediately after the big sweeping gun ban, we had written to the different provinces,
00:02:00.720 to the attorney generals of each province, asking them to intervene on our court challenge.
00:02:05.320 And we didn't hear back from any of them.
00:02:07.240 And then after Danielle Smith took over, we heard back from them,
00:02:11.740 they've actually intervened on our—they filed an application to intervene on our court challenge,
00:02:16.840 and it was approved by the Associate Chief Justice of the federal court.
00:02:20.920 So Alberta's all in. Saskatchewan's right behind them.
00:02:24.920 Manitoba, Yukon, and New Brunswick have all been very vocal against this.
00:02:28.700 Not Ontario, though.
00:02:29.580 We're still waiting for—well, that's the thing with Doug, right?
00:02:32.200 I think he's perfectly comfortable where he is, and he doesn't like to rock the boat either way.
00:02:37.240 At the same time, I've known Doug Ford a long time, and I know he doesn't support the war on gun owners.
00:02:42.540 He knows that the problem is crime violence and gun smuggling.
00:02:46.080 A lot of—I mean, you mentioned this a moment ago.
00:02:48.640 A lot of people might not realize, because gun owners probably seem a bit rebellious to the Canadian culture,
00:02:53.300 but they're very compliant, by definition, individuals.
00:02:56.940 You know, we get the paperwork, we get the forms, we, you know, make sure that this is locked and this is locked.
00:03:01.560 And at a certain point, you reach a breaking point, I think, where gun owners are saying,
00:03:06.440 it's just not worth being in this hobby anymore.
00:03:08.360 And that's my fear.
00:03:09.500 Are you seeing that, or are they really digging their heels in and saying,
00:03:11.740 no, I'm fighting for this right to keep my property?
00:03:14.240 There's two things I'm really afraid of.
00:03:15.940 Number one, people just giving up, getting rid of their stuff, and abandoning our community altogether.
00:03:20.900 Because it's—to the people who participate, it's incredibly important.
00:03:25.700 The other thing I'm afraid of is—is non-compliance, and I'll tell you why.
00:03:29.900 I know—I know a lot of people sort of promote that idea, but here's the thing.
00:03:34.240 In any functioning civil society and democracy, you don't want people willingly breaking the law.
00:03:40.920 But when you force people to that edge, when they've complied with every law and every regulation you've put before them,
00:03:47.580 and then you still come at them, and the idea is you're coming to kick in their doors and take their stuff,
00:03:52.700 people just say, forget it.
00:03:54.340 I am sick and tired of complying because it hasn't paid off for me.
00:03:57.940 So I think those are the two things that frighten me most.
00:04:01.200 And thirdly, the fact that all the effort, resources, and focus is on legal gun owners.
00:04:08.200 And meanwhile, we've got crime blowing up out of control all across the country,
00:04:12.560 and especially in places like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
00:04:16.520 Yeah, and gun owners are actually the toughest people in terms of wanting to go after gun crime.
00:04:21.540 The issue is just the Liberals have a very broad definition of what a gun criminal is,
00:04:26.320 and they basically think a gun owner is inherently a bad person
00:04:29.320 that needs all of these regulations heaped upon them.
00:04:31.500 Either that, or they at least want the public to think that,
00:04:33.900 because it's very politically expedient to beat up the opposition
00:04:37.960 or to beat up their opponents with, you know,
00:04:40.600 they're going to make assault weapons legal again, or scary things like that.
00:04:45.140 I think down deep, the Liberals know.
00:04:47.160 Marco Mendicino knows.
00:04:48.620 He's a Crown prosecutor in his previous business life.
00:04:53.240 They've got all kinds of lawyers.
00:04:54.580 They've got Bill Blair, who was Chief of Police in Toronto.
00:04:57.260 These people know full well what they're doing.
00:04:59.320 isn't going to have a demonstrable public safety benefit,
00:05:02.500 but they know it's going to have an actual political impact,
00:05:07.760 and that's why they do it, which is horrible, and it's un-Canadian.
00:05:13.080 Tracy Wilson, thank you.
00:05:14.420 Thank you.
00:05:15.600 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:05:18.220 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:05:23.660 True North at www.tnc.news.exe,
00:05:34.700 that's how it will be possible.
00:05:36.520 Hey, man, man, for you next time we have over.
00:05:39.260 I'm your family.
00:05:39.840 I'm your family.
00:05:41.680 I'm your family.
00:05:42.520 Tell me, you're a family.
00:05:43.920 Tell me, I'm your family.
00:05:46.020 I'm your family.
00:05:48.040 You across the world, you know what I want.