Supreme Court will hear challenge to Liberal gun ban

OTTAWA — The Supreme Court of Canada will hear arguments against the Liberal government’s controversial firearms ban.

The top court said on Thursday that it will simultaneously hear four appeals challenging the Liberals’ sweeping ban of more than 2,500 “assault-style” firearms , including numerous models frequently used by Canadians for hunting and sport shooting.

The Liberals moved to ban some 1,500 firearms in May 2020, shortly after the worst mass shooting in Canadian history unfolded in Nova Scotia. The firearms blacklist has since mushroomed by more than 1,000 models, spurring criticisms from across the political spectrum that the policy puts confiscating legally obtained guns over cracking down on the illegal firearms that are responsible for most of Canada’s gun violence.

The Federal Court dismissed a court challenge led by the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights (CCFR) in 2023, with Justice Catherine Kane writing in her decision that the federal government was acting within its constitutional authority in establishing the gun ban. That ruling was upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal in April 2025.

The CCFR is one of the groups that will now be arguing the case before the Supreme Court.

Federal Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said he and fellow Liberals looked forward to “robustly defending the government’s position” before the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court didn’t say why they decided to hear the challenge, which is customary, or set a date when the hearing of arguments will begin.

The announcement comes just over six months before the amnesty period on banned firearms is set to end on Oct. 30. The amnesty has already been extended several times and the CCFR is already calling for it to be further extended in light of today’s news.

Yuan Yu Zhu, a Canadian professor of international law at Leiden University in the Netherlands says he expects the Supreme Court challenge to yield the same result as the ones submitted to lower courts.

“The challenge is made up of a rag-tag bunch of procedural objections and assertions of substantive rights but I didn’t see any argument that was really that convincing,” said Zhu.

“It may be a bad policy, but that doesn’t mean the government didn’t have a right to enact it.”

National Post

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