BOOBS said:
In a nutshell, a previous Conservative government created laws that made them illegal.
Under the Progressive Conservative government of Justice Minister Kim Campbell, AK variants were declared "Restricted" under Bill C-17 (1992) which required them and a number of other military type semi auto's to be registered. Like handguns.
The idea was to "weed out the Rambos". The PC's honestly didn't think the move would cost them any capital with the firearms community, but it did, firearms owners moved to the Reform Party, the PC's suffered the worst election defeat in Canadian history in 1993.
When the Liberals came to power, they introduced Bill C68 (1995). The majority of Military semi auto's on the Restricted list were converted to prohibited. The idea here was ALL guns were bad and needed to be registered, but some were badder than others and needed to be "banned".
Grandfathering provisions of Canadian firearms laws are supposed allay fears of gun confiscation, but it's a lie. Slow and inevitable confiscation is confiscation nonetheless, firearms owners know it, and the politicians and gun control bureaucrats are fooling nobody.
Registration equals confiscation, and certainly leads to harrassing regulations like the 12(X) SAP situations we have now.
The biggest joke is only about a third of the firearms requiring registration under Bill C-17 in 1992 ever got registered.
The rest are still out there. Unregistered. Often in the possession of people who were either ignorant of the laws that were introduced in a haphazard and slapdash way, or who refused to register for fear of prohibition and were proved right.
Theses firearms are completely beyond the control of law enforcement and the firearms bureaucracy.