Gun imports up under Tories

Re. Andy Thomsen’s letter PM’s ‘anti-gun’ campaign (Castanet, June 5)

Firearms flooded into Canada after (former prime minister) Stephen Harper’s Conservative government dismantled the federal long gun registry in 2012 .

Nearly two million rifles, shotguns and handguns were imported for retail sale across the country over just five years, federal records show.

The surge in firearms, with a total import value of $751 million, rose 79 per cent over the number of firearm imports from the start of 2007 to the end of 2011, customs information held by Statistics Canada reveals.

The data going back to 1988 shows that even by 2007, firearms imports that were growing steadily after a steep dive when the Liberal government (of former prime minister Jean Chretien) implemented the long-gun registry in 1995, began to increase sharply after Harper and his Conservatives won their second minority government in 2008.

Ian Skinner