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Canadian Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced on Thursday that 324 more “assault-style firearms” have been added to Canada’s list of banned guns.

Defense Minister Bill Blair suggested the legally purchased but now-banned weapons could be confiscated and shipped to Ukraine for use against Russian invaders.

“We’ve been working very closely with our friends in Ukraine to ensure that weapons that were intended to be used in combat, could be made available to them,” Blair said.

“The Department of National Defense will begin working with the Canadian companies that have weapons that Ukraine needs and which are already eligible for the assault-style firearm compensation program, in order to get these weapons out of Canada, and into the hands of the Ukrainians,” he said.

Blair said Canada’s ruling Liberal Party checked with the Ukrainians in October, and they “confirmed that indeed some of the weapons that are part of the program would be suitable” for their purposes.

The guns added to the ban list are all semi-automatic weapons with “sustained rapid-fire capability.” Owners will be required to surrender them before the end of an amnesty window on October 30, 2025.

“The best thing we can do to honour the memories of those we lost in mass shootings, is to act on gun control and to restrict access to the very weapons used to commit these horrible crimes,” said LeBlanc.

“Our goal is to ensure that no community, no family, is devastated by mass shootings in Canada again,” he said.

LeBlanc was alluding to the Ecole Polytechnique massacre, a 1989 mass shooting whose 35th anniversary was on Friday. The killer ordered all of the men to leave a classroom and then fatally shot the 14 women who remained. 

Canadian gun rights groups criticized the expanded ban list as a theatrical gesture that would do nothing to improve public safety.

Wes Winkel of the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association told CTV News the government’s move could be “devastating for our industry.”

“Anger and disappointment would be definitely the two emotions, I would say, are the most fitting for this. We very rarely see these types of firearms used in crimes at all,” Winkel said.

“This is strictly trying to appease voters in urban Canada,” he charged. “There is no reason for public safety concern for these firearms to be out in circulation.”

Conservative MP Raquel Dancho said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was trying to cover up his own weakness on crime by scapegoating “lawful and vetted hunters, sport shooters, and Indigenous Peoples who safely and legally use firearms as they have done for generations.”

“After nine years of Trudeau’s reckless policies, he has unleashed a crimewave on Canada. Violent crime has exploded over 50% and gun crime has surged 116%,” she said.

“Trudeau’s latest underhanded attack against lawful Canadians and his continued blind eye to actual gun criminals is an insult to the thousands of victims of gun crime who continue to be terrorized and lose their lives as a result of Trudeau’s catch-and-release policies,” she said.

“It is disappointing that the federal government has decided to double-down on their firearms policies that are not rooted in evidence-based decision-making regarding public safety,” said Alberta Justice Minister Mickey Amery.

“Instead of choosing to commit scarce resources to addressing criminal usage of firearms, such as through strengthening our border to combat the trafficking of firearms that make up the overwhelming majority of those used in violent crime, the federal government has chosen to focus its attention once again on undermining law-abiding firearms ownership in Alberta and across Canada,” Amery said.

The Alberta government has refused to participate in the federal mandatory gun buyback program. Manitoba and Saskatchewan have also said they will resist the program.

“This is typical Liberal Party divide-and-conquer politics. They know they are out of time and Canadians are out of money. They know the Tories will repeal it all in less than ten months,” charged Tracey Wilson of the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR), hinting at the widely expected Conservative victory in the next election.

“They haven’t used an Order in Council to deal with the daily violence plaguing Canada, no action on repeat violent offenders, no response to the pleas of law enforcement. Nothing,” Wilson complained.

“The Liberals have normalized the subversion of Canada’s democratic process for their own political maneuvering,” she said.

LeBlanc indicated on Thursday that the Trudeau government is still trying to ban the SKS, an extremely popular hunting rifle. The Liberals tried to ban the rifle in 2022 by sneaking an amendment into a gun control bill at the last minute, but backed down under massive public opposition when their ploy was discovered.

LeBlanc admitted that a major obstacle to banning the SKS is that First Nations and Inuit hunters love the weapon, so it might be politically incorrect to take it away from them.