Around 25% of Canadian households own some sort of firearm. Families with firearms tend to vote as a bloc, and they also tend to be single-issue voters. Firearms are that single-issue. When you’re bad on that single-issue, you lose them, when you’re good on it, you get them, when nobody’s offering much of anything, they go with who has helped them in the past, and that’s always been the Conservatives.

Excluding the MapleMAGA idiots, they also tend to be highly patriotic and consider defending this country a duty, which is why they have firearms. Many are ex-military. These are the people who could easily be swayed away from Conservative (speaking as one who did) to vote Liberal. But it would’ve been vastly easier for me if I hadn’t needed to do so while holding my nose to ignore the stinkiness of the Liberal gun policy… yet again. Many, I would say most, firearm owners in Canada, would not be and were not willing to make that sacrifice to their single-issue. Most of the people I talked to are so incensed about it I have to hide the fact that I voted for anything other than Conservative. But I know these people well, and I’m telling you, most of them, their support for the Conservatives has little to do with ANYTHING other than gun legislation. They are truly single-issue voters. They may follow talking points for the Conservatives but all they’re really trying to do is get everyone to vote Conservative so they can get better gun laws. All you need to do to get them to vote for another party is to present better gun legislation.

Note this doesn’t mean offering to give everyone tanks and allowing private ownership of nuclear weapons. Most of the responsible, law-abiding gun owners in Canada would be happy to just have the laws stop treating us like we’re the criminals, when it’s people with no license and unregistered illegal firearms responsible for the vast majority of gun crime. Fight illegal guns and unlicensed owners, not us. Ask us to help you do that, and we’ll help you. Assume good faith. We’ve jumped through all the hoops, we’ve done the background checks, we follow the laws, don’t make more hoops and more laws, don’t make the laws more complex and harder to follow, don’t limit us even further. Maybe do something to make it easier to open gun ranges (safely, indoors) instead of letting municipal NIMBYism ghettoize us into an ever shrinking number of authorized ranges with limited membership capacities in remote areas hours away from where we live. We’re simply asking for fewer legislative monkeys on our backs. We can only go through so much tedious bureaucracy before something we enjoy becomes no longer enjoyable. We shouldn’t need a separate permit to “transport” for every range day. We’re not asking for things that are unreasonable, we’re just asking for legislation that is not unreasonable. It would honestly not take much, and it would not have to negatively impact safety in any way.