A deadly mass shooting at a school in British Columbia is likely to increase scrutiny of whether Canada’s gun laws should be toughened to prevent further attacks.
Nine people were killed and another 25 injured in the attack at Tumbler Ridge on Tuesday, in a remote part of the country that’s about 415 miles (667km) north of Vancouver. The suspect was also found dead with a self-inflicted injury, authorities said.
Currently, gun ownership in the Canadian provinces is largely federally regulated by the government in Ottawa, and there are stricter laws in place than in most US states.
Mass shootings in Canada are rare, especially if compared with its southern neighbour.
Still, gun-related killings as a percentage of all homicides are significantly higher in Canada than in England and Wales, or Australia.
Current gun laws in Canada
Under Canada’s Firearms Act, guns must be kept locked and unloaded.
Anyone wishing to buy a firearm is also subject to extensive background checks and needs to have a licence.
Across the country, more than 2.2 million people – or 7.7% of Canada’s adult population – had firearm licences, according to government statistics from 2021.
An estimated 10 million firearms were in circulation in the country that year.
According to a Canadian website on gun ownership, which obtained statistics from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP, there were 355,678 gun licences in British Columbia as of 2023, or about 6,240 gun licenses per 100,000 people. But the website cautioned that many people own guns without a licence, which is illegal.
A national freeze on the sale and transfer of handguns has also been in place since 2022. In January, the government began a national gun buy-back programme. A federal pilot programme in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, which aimed to collect 200 firearms, had only collected 26.
Mass shootings in Canada over the years
The latest mass shooting follows a string of others over the past decade.
In the wake of the attacks, most military-grade assault-style weapons were banned in the country.
In 2014, a gunman shot dead eight people, including two children, in Edmonton, Alberta, in western Canada.
One of the deadliest shootings in the country took place decades earlier – in 1989. Fourteen women were killed by a gunman in an anti-feminist attack at l’École Polytechnique university in Montreal.