ANALYSIS: Fund to fight gun crime a political opportunity for federal Liberals – National | 24CA News
Across the nation, Liberal MPs have spent the week handing out hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to municipalities to struggle gun crime and remind voters about their intention to ban handguns and strengthen gun management legal guidelines, measures which inner authorities polling obtained by Global News seems to point are political winners for the Trudeau authorities.
On Thursday in Whitehorse, Yukon, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino joined the native Liberal MP Brendan Hanley to announce a federal grant of $929,500 to the City of Whitehorse for community-led prevention, training and outreach initiatives with the objective of lowering gun crime.
Also on Thursday in North Vancouver, B.C., Liberal MP Terry Beech introduced that the District of North Vancouver would obtain a grant of $1.779 million. North Vancouver municipal politicians will determine learn how to spend the cash as long as it goes to initiatives that deal with gun crime and gang violence.
The day earlier, Beech, the MP for Burnaby North — Seymour, gave the City of Burnaby a federal grant of $2.96 million to forestall gun and gang violence there.
And earlier this week, in London, Ont., Liberal MPs Arielle Kayabaga and Peter Fragiskatos noticed that metropolis get the same grant price $3.09 million.
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The cash comes from the Building Safer Communities Fund, a $250-million envelope of money established final March to help native initiatives to forestall gun crime and gang violence and to assist “young people make good choices.” Municipalities and Indigenous organizations can apply to Public Safety Canada for disbursements from the fund. So far, together with Thursday’s bulletins, near $80 million has been disbursed through a few dozen totally different bulletins stretching again to March 2022.
The single largest disbursement was made final August: $41.8 million to the federal government of Quebec to assist it with an present provincial anti-gun violence initiative. The smallest disbursement was made on the finish of August: During a go to to Miramichi, N.B., Mendicino supplied town there with $821,000.
Each disbursement, although, is a chance for a Liberal minister or MP to face earlier than native media, as MPs Hanley, Beech and Kayaboga did this week, and discuss up the Trudeau authorities gun management measures.
“My number one priority as Minister of Public Safety is keeping Canadians safe,” says the boilerplate quote attributed to Mendicino in each press launch saying a disbursement. “Investing in grassroots and community efforts in (the name of the community is inserted here) is essential to addressing the social conditions that lead youth and young adults to get involved in a life of crime and gun-related violence. Put simply, we must stop gun and gang violence before it starts.”
And with nicely over $160 million in “gun money” nonetheless handy out, extra Liberal MPs and MPs may have numerous alternatives within the months forward to speak up a difficulty that’s, for Liberals, a political candy spot.
Indeed, one might argue that the problem of weapons and gun management helped flip round Liberal fortunes in each the 2021 and 2019 federal elections. In 2021, each Conservative and Liberal insiders mentioned after the election that Erin O’Toole’s mid-campaign flip-flop on gun management was the second the Liberals’ mid-campaign slide within the polls stopped and Conservative fortunes began to fall.
And within the 2019 election, the primary marketing campaign occasion Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau held after the revelations of his “blackface” pictures was on Danforth Avenue in Toronto, talking with gun crime victims and speaking up guarantees to ban handguns.
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Internal authorities polling achieved over the summer time, just lately obtained by Global News via an access-to-information request, helps the notion that the Liberals consider they’re on the successful aspect of the problem. The polling, performed by the Privy Council Office, is circulated to each cupboard minister, each deputy minister, and all of the senior political advisors within the prime minister’s workplace.
Last spring and summer time, the Privy Council Office’s weekly polling program included questions on weapons.
- For every of 4 weeks in late May and early June it requested the identical query in regards to the legal guidelines governing firearms gross sales in Canada. A mixed 4,000 had been polled and a majority — 53.6 per cent — favoured stricter legal guidelines governing firearms gross sales; 33.6 per cent mentioned the legal guidelines had been high quality as they had been; whereas 9.6 per cent mentioned such legal guidelines ought to much less restrictive.
- During the identical collection of May/June polls, the PCO discovered 70 per cent in favour of “capping the market and banning the sale and import of handguns in Canada.”
David Akin is the chief political correspondent for Global News.
© 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
