The federal government has acknowledged there is no legal definition of an “assault-style firearm,” while the RCMP says it does not specifically track crimes committed with the very category of firearms Ottawa has spent years prohibiting and buying back.
The admissions came in a September 21 response to order paper question Q-1375, submitted by Conservative MP Alex Ruff of Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound.
Asked directly for the government’s definition of an assault-style firearm, Public Safety Canada responded: “There is no legal definition of an assault-style firearm.”
Instead, the department said firearms are legally classified according to criteria contained in Section 84(1) of the Criminal Code. It said firearms prohibited through the May 2020, December 2024 and March 2025 measures share technical characteristics that led the government to deem them unsuitable for civilian use.
The response becomes more striking when Ruff asks for data showing how frequently these so-called assault-style firearms actually appear in crime.
The RCMP said it “does not collect data specifically regarding gun crimes for assault-style firearms.”
Nor could the force say how many firearms it traced between 2021 and 2025 fell into the government’s assault-style category. The RCMP said that information is not tracked in its existing database and would require a manual review.
That leaves Ottawa unable to provide a basic crime statistic for a category at the centre of its Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program.
The tracing data the RCMP does collect shows a sharp increase in firearms suspected of having been illegally imported.
In 2025, the Canadian National Firearms Tracing Centre conducted 1,464 crime-related traces involving firearms reasonably suspected of being illegally imported, up from 487 in 2024, 271 in 2023, 572 in 2022 and just 66 in 2021.
By comparison, 326 crime-related traces in 2025 involved firearms identified as manufactured in Canada.
The RCMP completed 3,011 traces in 2025 involving firearms used or suspected of being used in crimes. That means suspected illegal imports accounted for a substantial share of the crime-related traces reported that year.
The government’s own data also has significant gaps. The RCMP only began collecting information about stolen firearms in 2023 and does not collect information about lost firearms through the tracing centre.
And while Ottawa has prohibited hundreds of firearm makes and models under measures explicitly described as targeting “assault-style firearms,” the RCMP told Parliament it cannot provide the number of traces involving those firearms by reference number, make or model because it does not specifically collect an assault-style designation.
Ottawa’s compensation program is nevertheless explicitly called the Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program, relying on a definition that doesn’t exist.
