I asked on an Aussy forum what actually happened with their gun laws:
Category A - manual action rimfires, breach /lever action shotguns
Cat B - manual action center fire rifles
most shooters have both category A/B licenses, most states are restricted to 10 rounds on a detachable magazine
Cat C - semi auto rimfire rifles (upto 10 rounds) semi auto/pump action shotguns (upto 5 rounds)
Category C is generally only for farmers who need to protect their stock or crops from wild animals
Cat D - semi auto centerfires, rimfires (above 10 rounds) pump/semi shotguns (above 5 rounds)
Category D is highly restricted, it is reserved for those who rely on a semi automatic for their job, or income
I'd estimate less than 1% of shooters have a cat D
Well bat119, by now you probably have a fairly good idea regarding the nuts & bolts of our gunlaws here however I will add one or two things seeing as you expressed interest/concern as to how Australia's gunlaws could be applied in the Canadian context. As you probably know, after a growing campaign by the anti-gun campaigners over the preceding decade a shooting event occurred in 1996 that acted as the catalyst for the Federal Government to seize the moment and seek to introduce draconian gunlaws, however one important obstacle stood in their way.
Gunlaws in this country are (and always have been) the responsibility of the individual States & Territories in the federation and as such the Federal Government could not simply take over and dictate to the entire country on the matter, and thus the NFA (National firearms Agreement) was born. Essentially, the Federal government produced a piece of firearms legislation and then got each individual State and Territory to sign off on it (using coercion, bribes and eventually outright threats to ensure that everyone complied) and agree to alter their State-based firearms legislation to reflect the core pillars of the NFA (universal licencing and compulsory registration of all firearms, categorisation of firearms into individual classes ie A/B/C/D/H/R, universal safe-storage requirements including recording the physical storage location of each & every firearm, genuine-reason requirement for each licence class, etc).
Once this new NFA system was in place the Federal Government was then able to proceed with their "buyback" since many firearm owners could no longer comply with either basic licencing/storage requirements or could not qualify for any of the "genuine-reasons" now required to possess many commonly-owned types of firearms such as pump/semi-auto shotguns and semi-auto rimfire & centrefire rifles. The reason of course why the voluntary "buy-back" scheme (with it's fairly generous remuneration rates being paid) was even required was because longarm registration prior to the NFA was either limited or even non-existent in many States and thus the authorities had no mechanism in place (ie: universal firearm registries and up-to-date records of firearm storage locations) that they could use to force compliance and enact confiscations in cases where people refused to voluntarily hand-in their newly-illegal firearms.
There is currently talk here of new restrictions coming in as the result of a review of the NFA which could see certain types of firearms and/or magazine capacities currently classified as A/B being moved up to the more restricted categories and accompanying discussion amongst shooters about whether the powers-that-be will even bother with a generous "buyback" scheme this time, owing to the fact that these firearms are now all registered and their owners & storage locations known, enabling simple and rapid confiscation to occur. In other words, compliance with new bans and restrictions can now be forced upon shooters whilst back in the day it needed to be coerced from them; big difference.
I know nothing of either the existing Canadian gunlaws nor the system & organisation of government over there so have no opinion myself on how enacting Australian-type gunlaws would translate to the Canadian situation, however I would suggest that the first thing your new liberal government would need to do to even have a chance at replicating anything we have here would be to re-introduce the longarms registry which the former conservative government there wisely disbanded. Any new talk of re-establishing a longarms registry over there should immediately start alarm-bells ringing amongst the shooting community as it could be an ominous sign of things to come and believe me, you DO NOT want to go down the same route that we have here.
https://shootingaustralia.net/forum/...s?limitstart=0