Canada's Lac La Ronge sits in the midst of an unlikely hotbed of gun-related crimes. — Canada’s Lac La Ronge sits in the midst of an unlikely hotbed of gun-related crimes. Photographer: Heywood Yu/Bloomberg

NRA-Style Politics Transformed Canada’s Gun Culture — and Shootings Rose 869%

A third of guns used in Canadian crimes and then traced by authorities were legally imported from the US. That’s three times the global average.

By Natalie Obiko Pearson, David Kocieniewski and Eric Fan

Graphics by Christopher Cannon

August 24, 2023, 12:01 AM EDT

Some 300 miles north of Canada’s border with Montana, the prairies end, the roads narrow and the rural towns give way to the vast, unbroken forests of northern Saskatchewan, where on clear nights the aurora borealis dance above pristine lakes.

This is the home of Canada’s highest rate of gun crimes.

Drive-by shootings, the latest just a few months ago, have erupted in the quiet lanes of La Ronge, which serves as an entry point to the northern expanse. In May 2022, a 32-year-old man was shot dead at a cottage. A month later, on a sunny Sunday morning, La Ronge went into lockdown as an emergency alert warned of two suspects, armed with handguns, on the loose. In a community of some 7,000 people, police in recent months have seized more than 50 rifles and handguns. The firearms now line one wall of a storage room. A dozen more are stashed, barrels down, in a blue bucket.

“There are a lot of people with firearms that shouldn’t have one,” said Tom Roberts, an Indigenous elder in La Ronge. “In small northern communities, it’s scary for a lot of people. A lot of the elders don’t go for walks in the morning or the evening like we used to.”

La Ronge’s crime wave has come amid a historic increase of US semiautomatic firearm shipments to Canada, part of a push by American manufacturers over the last 20 years to export guns into private hands around the world. Weapons flowed to Canada, Guatemala, Thailand and elsewhere as the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation primed markets by stoking opposition to gun control. Gun companies had help from the US government, which has used the Commerce Department and embassies to recruit buyers.

Gun supporters of the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights at a march on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Sept. 12, 2020. Photographer: Lars Hagberg/AFP

The impact on Canada has been profound as new types of weapons began coming north. With a centuries-old gun culture but little firearm manufacturing of its own, Canada has long been the largest importer of US hunting rifles and has been ranked second only to the US among developed countries in guns per capita. In recent years, though, the number of semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles coming from the US each year has skyrocketed — from just 6,205 in 2003 to more than 66,000 in 2022. While those numbers are a small fraction of US domestic sales, in per capita terms Canada is now the biggest foreign buyer of American rapid-fire weapons.

Sources: US Census Bureau, Statistics Canada
Note: Excludes countries with a population less than 1 million.

Over the same two decades, the country’s annual rate of shootings per capita — incidents referred to as “discharge firearm with intent” — surged almost sevenfold. In Saskatchewan, which saw the highest increase, that rate exploded 35-fold since 2003 and is now nearly five times the national average, according to a Bloomberg analysis of national crime data. These concurrent trends — more guns, more shootings — have alarmed Canadian authorities.

America, Global Gun Pusher by Bloomberg Investigations. Read the series

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won election in 2015 after promising to keep guns out of criminals’ hands. Since 2019, he has passed legislation tightening background checks and requiring retailers to record gun sales. He used a decree to ban 1,500 models, most of them semiautomatic rifles, in 2020 and another last year to freeze handgun imports, sales and transfers. Through June, semiautomatic firearm imports were down 35% compared with the same period last year.

Those measures have galvanized a growing pro-gun movement that has adopted political tactics pioneered in the US. Its proponents argue that the crime surge stems from weapons smuggled from the US and that legal guns play little role.

“By definition, criminals break the law — a new law won’t change that,” Pierre Poilievre, leader of the pro-firearm Conservative Party, told a gun group at a dinner called “Stick to Your Guns” last year. “Border-based gun smuggling” is the real problem, he said.

Over the past two decades, the annual volume of US-made semiautomatic firearm imports into Canada has increased almost 10-fold.

During this period, the annual number of overall crimes fell slightly while the number of all violent crimes remained fairly flat ...

Yet firearm-related crimes more than doubled ...

And shootings increased 869%, from 219 in 2003 to 2,123 in 2022.

Until recently, data didn’t exist to fact-check that argument because Canada traced few crime guns to their origins. Then in January, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives disclosed for the first time that of the almost 25,000 Canadian crime guns it traced from 2017 to 2021, one of every three had been legally imported from the US. That figure was three times the global average.

Tracing in Canada is still largely in its infancy, but as more data is gathered it’s becoming clear that legal imports are a larger problem than has been recognized. Toronto, close to the US border, is known to have a higher percentage of smuggled guns than the rest of Canada. Still, national figures obtained by Bloomberg News — through confidential documents, public information requests and parliamentary disclosures — indicate that Canadian law enforcement officials and policymakers have often understated the role that legally imported weapons play in crimes.

Data from the Canadian National Firearms Tracing Centre, for instance, indicate that half the crime guns it traced in 2022 were what authorities call “domestically sourced” weapons. That term actually means most of them were legally imported because Canada manufactures few firearms.

Firearms seized in recent months by police in the small town of La Ronge. Photo: Courtesy of La Ronge RCMP Detachment

The US isn’t the nation’s only gun supplier. Canadians also buy from Turkey, Italy, China and other countries. But American gunmakers account for fully half of all imports and two out of every three semiautomatic handguns and rifles, according to Canadian trade data.

Despite Trudeau’s gun-control measures, Canada may not have felt the full impact of that surge yet. Imports of US-made semiautomatic firearms peaked last year, and the average interval between a gun’s purchase and its use in a crime was four years in Canada, according to the ATF.

This fall, Trudeau is expected to make the handgun decree a law as part of one of the nation’s most ambitious firearm bills in three decades. That has invigorated the Conservative Party, which boasts a record of rolling back gun control and has begun polling ahead of Trudeau’s Liberals in recent months. Canada’s increasingly aggressive gun rights groups, which are aligned with the Conservatives, say they won’t stop until they’ve ousted Trudeau.

Even if the controls survive, advocates worry that so many weapons have already seeped into the country that Canada has passed a turning point.

“Twenty-five years ago, we’d see all the violence guns were causing in the US, shake our heads, and think ‘Maybe they’ll look at how much safer things are up here and become more like us,’” said Wendy Cukier, co-founder of Canada’s Coalition for Gun Control and a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. “But, unfortunately, we’ve become more like them.”

Guns have been part of Canadian life since the nation’s birth. When the Dominion of Canada formed in 1867, the government encouraged civilian gun ownership to defend the new country against the US. Hunting remains a way of life for many in a country whose land area is 92% rural. Canadian gun owners, who span the political spectrum, believe in their right to firearms even if it’s not one recognized by Canada’s constitution and courts.

Attempts to regulate firearms stretch back almost as far, including a requirement to register the ownership of all handguns that dates to 1934. But it was a mass shooting in 1989 at École Polytechnique de Montréal — where a gunman used a Ruger semiautomatic rifle bought at a local sporting goods store to kill 14 women and wound more than a dozen other people — that ushered in Canada’s modern era of gun control.

Outrage over the killings led to a national debate that culminated in expanding the registration requirement to long guns in 1995 — alarming firearms advocates south of the border. The NRA helped the homegrown Canadian Shooting Sports Association set up a political arm to battle the expanded rule. The American organization also coached the Canadian group’s members in grassroots advocacy to promote pro-gun candidates in the 2006 election that made Conservative leader Stephen Harper prime minister.

In 2012, Harper repealed the long-gun registry and, over the protests of police organizations, ordered the ownership records of 5.6 million rifles and shotguns destroyed — a decision that still stymies police agencies’ ability to trace crime guns.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in La Ronge. Photographer: Heywood Yu/Bloomberg

Today, Canadians are increasingly interested in rapid-fire weapons. The country’s most popular gun show — focused on so-called tactical firearms inspired by military models — drew nearly 20,000 people in 2019, only its second year. According to one blog, it was the largest gathering of gun users in three decades. There are nearly as many ranges as McDonald’s outlets; licensed gun owners outnumber ice hockey players four to one.

At the same time, pro-gun doctrines ripple across the border in a steady feed of podcasts, YouTube channels and online websites. Gun manufacturers tweak designs just enough to get them past Canada’s more stringent laws — like the Canadian version of the Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol, whose barrel was lengthened ever so slightly to make it legal for sale.

Assessing the continuing influence of the NRA abroad isn’t a simple task. One of the group’s officials has said its “quiet diplomacy” makes it the world’s most influential firearm advocate. James Baranowski, the organization’s director of international affairs, cited the Canadian debate over Trudeau’s policies while addressing the group’s January 2021 board meeting. He said the NRA’s efforts are “often in the shadows,” but the results “can be seen and heard around the world.”

An NRA spokesman, Billy McLaughlin, didn’t respond to questions about the group’s interactions with Canadian gun advocates. Instead, he pointed to crime increases in Canada and the US, criticizing Trudeau and President Joe Biden. “Both leaders champion stricter gun controls,” McLaughlin said, “and often target responsible gun owners, even as crime rates escalate in both countries.”

For their part, Canada’s gun groups have grown more sophisticated. In the past year, they’ve filed legal challenges seeking to overturn Trudeau’s 2020 rifle ban and last year’s handgun freeze. Both are pending; a ruling in the rifle case is expected any day.

Groups like the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association steer potential customers to the US Commerce Department, which matches Canadian law enforcement agencies, gun retailers and “influencers” with American firearm companies. The US-based National Shooting Sports Foundation reaches north of the border by including hundreds of Canada’s gun clubs on its “Where to Shoot” App and website, which feature an interactive map of firing ranges.

“In the 1970s, there weren’t a lot of Canadian gun groups,” says R. Blake Brown, Canada’s foremost historian on gun control. They were mostly hunting groups that adamantly rejected being labeled as lobbies. But times have changed. “Canadians — who once rejected the idea that they were somehow affiliated or influenced by the NRA in the 1970s — are now more willing to adopt some of those ideas and play around with them.”

Of the gun-rights groups inspired by the NRA, the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights is one of the most successful. Espousing policy positions once unthinkable in Canada — like lifting prohibitions on fully automatic machine guns — the group has shown a remarkable capacity to mobilize people to its cause. Mid-pandemic, it rallied 5,000 Canadians in a march on Ottawa to oppose Trudeau’s 2020 ban of rifle models.

The CCFR was founded in 2015 by breakaway members from the country’s oldest gun advocacy group, the National Firearms Association, in a move reminiscent of the NRA’s splintering in the 1970s when Second Amendment advocates ousted more moderate leaders. Among those leading the Canadian break was Shawn Bevins, a former NFA executive who once touted a Christmas ad featuring Santa Claus gifting an AR-15 to a child with the tagline “No Ho Ho Compromise.”

CCFR’s first directors included Tracey Wilson, a registered lobbyist dubbed the “Gun Goddess” by Canadian newspapers, and Rod Giltaca, who’d worked as an HVAC engineer. In just a few short years, they orchestrated a remarkable rise to influence.

Today, the coalition — with a staff of only six and no office — has 45,000 members and 90,000 individual donors, and it draws annual revenue of more than C$2 million ($1.5 million), Giltaca told the organization’s annual general meeting in June. It boasts the highest-rated show on a Canadian outdoor-lifestyle TV channel and takes credit for helping to force Trudeau’s government to revise a bungled attempt to ban assault weapons last year.

Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights' Tracey Wilson and Rod Giltaca begin the march against the government's new gun regulations, in Ottawa. — Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights’ Tracey Wilson and Rod Giltaca begin the march against the government’s new gun regulations, in Ottawa. Photographer: Justin Tang/The Canadian Press/AP Photo

Giltaca brushes aside concerns that looser, American-style firearm regulations could take Canadian gun violence to US levels. Canada has far more vigilant oversight of gun ownership than the US, he said, including a screening process that alerts law enforcement officials when a registered gun owner commits a crime or has a mental health issue flagged. And Giltaca said the social ills that drive violent crime in the US are far less severe in Canada.

“What are the root causes of crime?” he asked in an interview with Bloomberg. “Poverty. Lack of economic opportunity. Racial divisions. And way down the list is the availability of guns. We have those problems in Canada, but not to the same extent that you have in the US. So in Canada, people shooting and killing you doesn’t happen as much.”

Giltaca said his group has never received funding or strategic help from the NRA or any other US gun-rights group. He declined to release the CCFR’s list of donors, saying confidentiality helps prevent adversaries from undermining the group’s plans and that most contributors hadn’t given him permission to reveal their identities. In June, Giltaca told members that its donors on average give C$65.40 each and don’t include “some kind of shadowy cabal of gun manufacturers.”

In the group’s early days, Wilson, a competitive shooter and lawyer, promised a more media-savvy approach that would win over the hearts and minds of Canada’s non-gun owners. Then came the Danforth shooting.

Emergency personnel work on a victim of the Danforth shooting in Toronto in 2018. Photographer: Richard Lautens/Toronto Star via Getty Images

On a July evening in 2018 in Toronto’s Danforth neighborhood, families strolled for ice cream and diners spilled onto restaurant patios. When sharp, staccato-like shots rang out, many assumed they were fireworks. The gunman sauntered along the strip, randomly firing into restaurants and cafes, in a 10-minute rampage that claimed two young lives, wounded 13, and altered the perception of gun crime in Toronto, long considered one of the world’s safest major cities.

The incident set off cries for tougher gun control. Wilson responded by calling the families affected by the shooting “ghouls” and “buffoons” for advocating for a handgun ban. Giltaca, speaking on behalf of Wilson for this article, defended the CCFR’s clashes with Canadian gun-control groups: “Understand that our conduct towards them is a response to their behavior, after I made numerous attempts to work with them.”

Wilson’s tweet, which touted a storybook for children called Why Everyone Needs An AR-15. It was later deleted. — Wilson’s tweet, which was later deleted.

Wilson, CCFR’s vice president of public relations, has at times urged her tens of thousands of social media followers to troll her ideological opponents. Months after the massacre, Wilson touted a storybook for children called Why Everyone Needs An AR-15. She deleted the tweet hours later because, she said, she’d received “vile, vulgar responses” to it.

CCFR’s adversaries include a Toronto trauma surgeon, Najma Ahmed, who treated victims of the Danforth shooting and built a coalition after the tragedy. The group Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns quickly found traction, winning endorsements from nearly a dozen major medical associations and grabbing the attention of Trudeau’s office by talking about gun violence in public health terms.

Ahmed says about five years prior to the Danforth shooting, people in the medical community — trauma surgeons, pediatricians, psychiatrists, social workers — had begun to notice an uptick in the rate of gun violence.

“We were talking about it amongst ourselves,” she said. The shooting “crystallized for all of us and many Canadians that this is not a US phenomenon only — that we need to pay attention.”

In February 2019, Wilson posted the address of the investigations department of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario on Twitter, with a link on how to file a complaint against Ahmed. In the post, she wrote, “Stay in your lane, Doctor” — a nod to what the NRA had told the American College of Physicians to do a few months earlier after ACP issued a position paper framing gun violence as a public health issue. Her post has since been taken down.

St. Michael’s Hospital trauma surgeon Najma Ahmed in Toronto. Photographer: Chloe Ellingson/Bloomberg

Some 70 complaints soon flooded into the college — none of them from anyone who’d been treated by Ahmed. The regulatory body summarily dismissed them, saying, “The complaints process should not be used as a tool to silence or intimidate physicians.”

The effort failed, but it made an impression on Ahmed. “How worried am I?” she asked. “Worried. Very worried about the Americanization of our gun culture.”

The Danforth killer’s weapon was made in America: a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol that arrived at a Saskatchewan retailer, was reported stolen in 2016, and made its way 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) across the country into the shooter’s hands. Legally imported, it was part of a push by the storied American gunmaker to get more handguns into the hands of overseas buyers.

In the early 2000s, US firearm production had been flatlining for years, and manufacturers needed new growth. Smith & Wesson launched a series of products in 2005 that it named M&P for “Military & Police” — weapons designed for war and law enforcement — and marketed internationally. Within two years, 5,000 officers in 13 countries outside the US were carrying M&P guns, a company executive said on an investor call.

Other gunmakers followed similar strategies. Austria-based Glock, which makes pistols in the US, says it now sells to more than 80% of Canada’s law enforcement agencies. It also makes the third-most popular brand among civilians, and its Canadian sales broke new records in 2020, the company spokesman told TheGunBlog.ca. Colt’s Manufacturing LLC, the iconic Connecticut-based company that supplies machine guns to Canada’s armed forces, in 2014 released a Canadian-made AR-style assault rifle for the commercial market. Colt, which Czech gunmaker CZ bought in 2021, is now one of the top 10 brands of handguns owned in Canada.

Smith & Wesson found that marketing guns for military and police use made civilians want them more, in what executives called the halo effect. “Our sales in the professional user channel, mainly law enforcement and government, are intended to ultimately drive consumer sales,” James Debney, then-president of the firearms division, explained to analysts in 2011, shortly before rising to CEO.

At the time, the company estimated that the broader annual market for military and police sales would top out at 200,000 guns a year. By contrast, civilian markets might reach 4.5 million, if people could be persuaded that they needed guns for protection.

“For want of a better word, it was fearmongering among consumers,” says Harry Falber, a long-time associate of Debney who first began consulting for Smith & Wesson in 2009, then ran its licensing business before leaving in 2012 over what he described as ethical concerns about the company’s marketing practices. “You recognize that there’s only so much growth that can happen in the existing marketplace. You have your machines turning out guns and you say, where are the guns going to go?”

Smith & Wesson, Colt’s Manufacturing and Glock didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A Toronto-area police department became the first international buyer of Smith & Wesson’s semiautomatic M&P 40 in early 2006. The model became a commercial hit, part of a two-decade trend in which the number of semiautomatic handguns in Canada more than tripled to 866,806 as of June, according to data obtained from the Canadian National Firearms Tracing Centre.

Today, the top 10 crime guns in Ontario are all semiautomatic pistols, including Smith & Wesson’s M&Ps, according to confidential tracing reports seen by Bloomberg News.

Canada’s firearm laws today are extensive, but critics and experts say they’re often arbitrary.

Guns are grouped into one of three categories, non-restricted, restricted and prohibited. But take a non-restricted hunting rifle, change the color of its grip or add accessories like an adjustable shoulder stock, and it may be prohibited even though it operates identically, gun retailers say. And while a license is required to own a gun, none is needed to import most parts such as barrels, slides and trigger assemblies, which with the help of a 3D printer can be assembled into fully functioning weapons.

A warning sign near La Ronge, Saskatchewan. Photographer: Heywood Yu/Bloomberg

Successive governments have used decrees — formally known as “orders-in-council” that bypass parliamentary debate — to add or withdraw firearms from the three categories. Trudeau did so in 2020 for the ban on 1,500 rifle models and in 2022 for the handgun freeze.

The system has alienated many gun owners: “You’ve jumped through all the hoops, you’ve been vetted, you’ve done everything to participate,” says Wes Winkel, president of Ellwood Epps Sporting Goods, a major independent firearm retailer. “It’s the most maddening thing.”

With Trudeau’s latest proposal, Bill-C21, he seeks to enshrine his handgun decree into law and to create an “evergreen” definition of banned military-style semiautomatic rifles that would prevent gunmakers from tweaking designs to get around Canada’s rules. The proposed legislation is expected to pass this fall. Trudeau’s office referred questions to Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, whose spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Conservative Party’s Poilievre, the most significant political rival Trudeau has yet faced, has pledged to rewrite the gun classification system. “They’ve been unpredictable and they’ve not been based on what a gun does, but on how it looks,” he said at the “Stick to Your Guns” dinner last year. “This is made-for-Hollywood show business, not public safety.”

In places like Regina, Saskatchewan’s provincial capital, the stakes for figuring out effective regulations are only getting higher.

When Evan Bray joined the Regina police force almost three decades ago, the department fielded only a handful of firearms-related calls in a month. When he retired earlier this summer as its chief, his officers were fielding six a day.

Bray says Canada needs to do a fuller job of tracing the origins of crime guns. As semiautomatic rifles proliferate in Canada, no one knows exactly how many long guns exist in the country thanks to the registry’s destruction a decade ago.

Tracing is one area where Canadian gun advocates disagree with their US counterparts. “We think more resources should be allocated to firearm tracing and a more detailed approach be deployed,” Giltaca said. “The issues at stake on both sides of the gun debate are too important to be influenced with inaccurate data.”

In Regina, gang wars engulf inner-city neighborhoods and sawed-off rifles are often the weapon of choice, according to police. What little tracing is done shows that weapons are only rarely smuggled from the US. It’s far easier to steal them, obtain them secondhand or find a straw buyer in a region where hunting, recreational shooting and gun stores are a part of daily life.

“Tracing is about telling a story. Tracing tells us, where did the gun come from? How did it get to where it got to?” Bray says. “Because often what tracing can show is that this gun came from a legal gun owner at one point, but somehow transferred hands.”

Branden Smith, a supervisor at a supermarket in La Ronge. Photographer: Heywood Yu/Bloomberg

Up in La Ronge, authorities say gangs are infiltrating a tightly knit community, use of drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine is on the rise, and on average a woman shows up every other day at the local shelter to escape violence. Guns don’t cause those problems, but they can make them more lethal.

They have another effect that’s harder to quantify, yet for people like 21-year-old Branden Smith it’s no less real. When police searched for the armed men during the lockdown last summer, Smith had rushed to draw down the shutters of a local grocery store he was supervising. “I never imagined something like that could happen here,” he said. “Honestly, people were scared.”

Roberts, the Indigenous elder, said the combination of guns, gangs and drugs has fueled the fears of longtime residents. He never thought twice about leaving his home unattended or picking up a hitchhiker. Today, he wouldn’t dare. “You really have to watch your back,” he says.

(Updates with additional information on number of shooting crimes in the chart labeled “More Guns, More Shootings.”)

Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

Editors: Flynn McRoberts, Jason Grotto and John Voskuhl

Methodology:

Bloomberg analyzed crime and trade data from Statistics Canada, the Canadian national statistical agency.

To examine the trade value and volume of centerfire semiautomatic rifles and pistols, reporters relied on the 10-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule codes. The analysis excluded military weapons, which have different codes. Bloomberg calculated per-capita gun import rates by country, using 2022 population data from the United Nations and additional trade data from the US Census Bureau.

To measure the number of shootings, reporters used the “discharge firearm with intent” category in the crime data.

NRA-Style Politics Transformed Canada’s Gun Culture — and Shootings Rose 869%

A third of guns used in Canadian crimes and then traced by authorities were legally imported from the US. That’s three times the global average.

Canada’s Gun Appetite

The Geography of Violence

Gun Crime Wave

Growth in Semiautomatic Imports

Surge in Saskatchewan