According to Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, Bill C-71 is a response to substantial increases in gun violence since 2013. It is legislation driven and justified by the empirical evidence. Or so it would seem.
In actuality, the statistical basis for Bill C-71 is particularly weak. Its reliance on faulty assumptions regarding crime and firearms breaks with the government’s promise of legislation tempered by “evidence-based decision making.”
Minister Goodale’s assertion that “gun homicides are up by two-thirds since 2013” should concern Canadians. After all, that’s quite an increase. But why select 2013 as the baseline for comparison?
2013 was a year of historical lows, a statistical outlier of sorts. According to Statistics Canada, 2013 had the lowest police-recorded crime rate since 1969. In fact, it had the lowest rate of criminal homicides in 50 years (1.45 per 100,000) as well as the lowest rate of fatal shootings ever recorded by Statistics Canada (0.38 per 100,000).
Patrick Deegan, a senior range officer, displays long guns at a gun store in Calgary in 2010.
By selecting a year of record lows, marginal increases in succeeding years are made to look like significant surges. This explains Minister Goodale’s decision to use four years (2013 to 2016) of crime data instead of the standard five. Selecting 2012 as the point of comparison would weaken the perception that gun violence had increased precipitously.
In truth, gun homicides have not exploded. They have regressed to normal levels prior to 2013. In fact, Canada’s crime rate has steadily declined since the 1990s.
