Quote:
Originally Posted by HonestJohn
The problem lies in the fact that replicas were grandfathered, but there is no strong basis to prohibit ownership. A prohibited weapon that has been grandfathered requires a prohib PAL - you can't have one without the other. But without any sort of licensing for replicas, you can't grandfather them and make their possession illegal at the same time.
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I think it's worth pointing out that our current situation is closer to
de facto grandfathering than to
de jure. To grandfather something is not just a term describing a special type of transfer, but represents an actual type of legislative wording. The permission to grandfather certain class of items are actually specific clauses explicitly written into Firearms Act (section 11).
I do not believe the situation with replica firearm possession was the result of grandfathering versus legality of possession, but rather the inpracticality of prohibiting all replica firearms in Canada. That was something far beyond what C-68 set out to do. Heck, what we have right now is still beyond that. I don't think it was a well publicized fact that the government wrote in a law that, should they choose, would stop everything that looked like a gun from coming into Canada and significantly reshape future Canadian generations. Essentially, if you think the zero tolerance policy as school is strict, think of a zero tolerance society (the irony being that legal ownership of real firearms would probably still exist).