‘This is our last fight:’ Why shooting survivors say now is a pivotal moment for tougher gun control laws in Canada

Last fall, weeks before the 33rd anniversary of the Polytechnique massacre, a Canadian gun rights organization posted a promo code called “POLY” that provided a discount on its merchandise, including shirts that read “Firearm Rights are Women’s Rights.”

The promotion shocked many Canadians who took it as a ghoulish nod to the Montreal shooting that left 14 young women dead.

That was a gross misunderstanding, according to the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR), the group behind the promo code.

Amid the backlash, the CCFR, which bills itself as “Canada’s most effective and recognizable firearm rights organization,” released a statement that said the promotion was “in no way” a reference to one of Canada’s deadliest mass shootings, but instead a “response to a Twitter account criticizing us for fundraising.” The grouplater said the promo code came down on Nov. 25 to make way for its Black Friday sale.

The Twitter account in question belongs to PolySeSouvient, or PolyRemembers, a gun control advocacy group that includes survivors of the Polytechnique shooting, as well as family members of victims.

“I don’t know how they can disconnect our Twitter account from us,” said Heidi Rathjen, who survived the 1989 massacre and later co-founded PolySeSouvient. “But that’s their rationale.”

In the age of social media, Rathjen has watched the debate over gun policy in Canada adopt a vitriolic, intensely personal tone. Along with other gun control activists, Rathjen faces a torrent of backlash for her push to strengthen Canada’s gun laws, ranging from trolling — like in 2017, when a Quebec-based firearms rights group planned to hold a rally at the memorial for those killed at École Polytechnique — to threats.

Meanwhile, those on the other side accuse gun control advocates of maligning law-abiding gun owners and ignoring violence that stems from illegally-acquired guns. Although PolySeSouvient often publicly criticizes the firearms lobby, principally CCFR, Rathjen flatly rejects the notion her organization demonizes gun owners or ignores shootings that involve illegal firearms.

Rod Giltaca, CEO and executive director of the CCFR, which boasts 43,000 members, faces online attacks, as well, though he says hasn’t felt the need to call the police.

The CCFR emerged in 2015 to counter, as its website says, “30 years of bad branding” suffered by Canada’s more than two million licensed gun owners. In doing so, it has become a permanent thorn for the Liberal government, which took office — just as CCFR was starting off — with a promise to get handguns and assault rifles off the streets.

Now is a crucial time in CCFR’s attempt to beat back Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s efforts.

This past week, the group, alongside Canadian gun manufacturers, was in Federal Court to challenge Ottawa’s 2020 prohibition of more than 1,500 assault-style firearms, including the Ruger Mini-14, the semi-automatic rifle used in the Polytechnique massacre. The Liberals introduced the regulatory change less than two weeks after 22 people were killed in Nova Scotia in what remains Canada’s deadliest mass shooting. The CCFR believes the ban violates Canadians’ charter right to “to life, liberty and security of the person.” The lawsuit also challenges the RCMP’s role in prohibiting firearms, which has led to hundreds of additional guns being banned since 2020.

It’s a pivotal moment for PolySeSouvient, as well.

For decades, Rathjen and other gun control advocates have pushed for a permanent, comprehensive ban on civilian access to military-grade, assault-style weapons. It’s a policy that appears to have broad support among Canadians, including gun owners. And in late November, it looked like it might happen.

Catching opposition MPs off guard, the Liberal government added two significant amendments to Bill C-21 that would’ve dramatically expanded the scope of a bill primarily intended to freeze the sale of handguns. One change would have enshrined an “evergreen” definition of an assault-style firearm into law, helping to solidify a ban and avoid repeal by future governments.

That proposal was recently endorsed by the Mass Casualty Commission, the result of an inquiry into the Nova Scotia mass shooting, which urged lawmakers to, among other things, clarify in law that gun ownership is a conditional privilege, not a right. (Some critics say more attention should be focused instead on the flow of illegal guns.)

But in February, the government withdrew the amendments after an uproar from opposition MPs, firearm advocates, hunters and Indigenous groups, who feared many of the guns they’ve long used to hunt would be banned.

Advocates argue those fears were overblown, the result of confusing language within the amendments, poor communication on the government’s part and exaggerated claims by the gun rights lobby that were adopted by some opposition MPs.

It’s true that some guns used for hunting would have been banned, a point the Liberals initially failed to acknowledge. However, the scrapped amendments didn’t “provide the legal ability to ban every firearm left in Canada,” as the CCFR suggested in a promotional video. The group highlighted several hunting rifles it said would’ve been immediately outlawed. However, other models of many of those guns would have remained available — and in all but one case, the outlawed models noted by the CCFR were already prohibited.

For PolySeSouvient, hope still remains. According to a spokesperson at the ministry of public safety, the government is considering reintroducing an amendment that would legally define what kind of gun should be permanently prohibited.

“This is our last fight,” Rathjen said. If they can’t secure an effective ban on assault weapons now, with support from the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Québécois, she continued, “It’s never going to happen.”

Many of the parents who lost daughters in 1989 and took it upon themselves to push for stricter gun laws have since died, including the father of Annie St-Arneault, who was 23 when she was killed. “There is a limit on how (long) you can carry on a fight of that magnitude,” her older brother, Serge, told the Star.

Rathjen, who works in public health, began advocating for stricter gun laws almost immediately after she escaped the Polytechnique shooting more than three decades ago. There has long been pushback. But she said the attacks, often anonymous, have “multiplied tenfold.” A few years ago, she received a photo of herself in the mail that was punctured by a bullet hole. One person left her a voicemail with the sound of gunshots.

Every year on Dec. 6, the anniversary of the Polytechnique shooting, Nathalie Provost, another PolySeSouvient member who was shot four times that day, receives a spike in nasty messages to her Facebook account. She said some call her “a complete idiot” and that she doesn’t understand anything about guns.

Rathjen believes the CCFR inflames the hostility directed at PolySeSouvient and others calling for stricter gun laws. She said its PR strategy often vilifies gun control advocates by name, while distorting their views, including taking quotes out of context to suggest they want all guns banned. Though PolySeSouvient has called for a ban on assault weapons and handguns, the group said it hasn’t targeted firearms designed to hunt or sport shoot. Still, Giltaca believes his opponents ultimately want to do away with civilian gun ownership altogether: “They’re always looking for the next most dangerous firearm.” In the past, the CCFR has said “no firearm should be prohibited,” though some should require additional training and vetting.

The CCFR “may not be the ones doing the threats,” Rathjen said. “But there’s definitely a link.”

In response, Giltaca — a sport shooting enthusiast who said he hadn’t touched a gun until he was in his 30s — said PolySeSouvient and like-minded advocates “receive constant negative responses from gun owners because they relentlessly demonize licensed gun owners and spread patently false information.” He pointed to a questionable gun violence study shared by a Canadian organization called Doctors for Protection From Guns and challenged PolySeSouvient’s use of the phrase “assault weapon,” a contentious term.

The CCFR has faced scrutiny about its tendency to target perceived opponents in the past, including the public shaming of a company the federal government had hired to help with its firearm buyback program in 2020. Eventually, the group’s followers posted the phone number and location of the CEO’s family cottage online¸ according to the Globe and Mail.

Tracey Wilson, the CCFR’s vice-president of public relations, told the Globe and Mail she eventually tried to “call off the dogs” and said she didn’t “condone the way things went down.” But she added, “When somebody takes that contract, business will change for them.”

A year earlier, the CCFR went after Dr. Najma Ahmed, a trauma surgeon at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital who treated victims of the 2018 shooting on Danforth Avenue and has since become an advocate for stricter gun control.

In early 2019, the CCFR encouraged its members to lodge formal complaints against Ahmed with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, even if they had never been her patient. “I hate to say it, but stay in your lane, Doctor,” the group wrote in a post that provided a step-by-step guide on how to file a grievance. The college later dismissed the more than 70 complaints it received as “politically motivated.”

The “vociferousness” of the gun lobby in Canada surprised Ahmed, a founding member of Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns. She told the Star she still receives intimidating messages and threats from gun rights supporters. Sometimes hospital security walk her to her car.

Gun rights advocates themselves say they, too, are a persecuted group.

“Once you step into that arena, then any time your name comes up, you get some harassment and pushback,” said A.J. Somerset, a former gunnery instructor with the Canadian Army and author of Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun, who said he’s “agnostic” about an assault-style weapon ban but supports additional restrictions on those guns.

Somerset counted social media’s tendency to provoke inflammatory rhetoric as one reason. But after years of legislation that has “whittled away the scope of gun ownership,” he said, some gun owners simply see themselves as a persecuted minority — one with its own deep-seated culture — that’s under attack.

For Rathjen, the backlash she’s faced has reinforced her determination.

“We’re all tired. We’re all exhausted. We all want to go back to our lives. And if we do that without finishing this fight, then these people will win.”

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