Nathalie Provost, an anti-gun activist who wants to see the Liberals adopt even harsher measures against law-abiding firearm owners, is now a Liberal candidate in Quebec.
Provost is a survivor of the 1989 École Polytechnique attack which claimed 14 innocent lives. Notably Liberal leader Mark Carney recently mistook Concordia University as the school where the attack took place but he later apologized after backlash.
In her role as an activist, Provost has been accused of spreading misinformation about firearm ownership. In a Radio-Canada interview, Provost presented a fictional rifle she labelled “KD85” as fact, however the image of the gun was a fabricated April fools joke spreading on Reddit.
Radio Canada has since deleted the image containing Provost’s blunder.
Provost is now running as a Liberal candidate in Châteauguay–Les Jardins-de-Napierville, a riding created in 2022. Liberals hold the strongest chance of winning it according to 338Canada’s aggregated polling.
Even following gun bans imposed by the Liberal government, Provost has made it clear that the government did not go far enough.
Provost has been pushing for even more radical measures, including more extensive firearm bans and a wider-reaching gun confiscation program.
Her frustration with the Liberal government’s approach led her to resign from a government panel in 2019. At the time critics like the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights accused Provost of being unqualified and biased due to her lobbying activities.
CCFR sent a letter to the government after the Liberal government ‘watchdog’ dismissed allegations against Provost.
In her resignation letter, she called out the government’s failure to tackle the problem head-on, accusing them of being “too timid” in their attempts to curb gun violence.
The passage of Bill C-71, which she considered a “half-measure,” failed to meet her expectations for stronger action.
Bill C-71 was enacted in 2019 by the Liberal government,expanding background checks for non-restricted firearms, critics argue that it’s a part of overreaching “gun grab” effort by the government that unfairly targets law abiding owners with a backdoor registry.
But it wasn’t just the failure of Bill C-71 that pushed Provost to leave the committee—it was the realization that the government was not willing to go as far as she thought necessary to curb gun violence.
She argued that the gun buyback program, which is currently a central part of the Liberal government’s gun control strategy, would do little to address the root causes of violence while costing taxpayers millions.
Since the Liberal government first introduced the gun ban and buyback program, the costs have already escalated, with taxpayers currently on the hook for more than $100 million according to the Canadian Tax Payers Federation.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has projected that the total cost of the program could reach upwards of $756 million, not including the administrative costs, and could eventually exceed $2 billion if the government continues to add more firearms to the banned list.