DOJ seemed to have an ass backwards way of defining both restricted and prohibited firearms under the Criminal Code. If you look at the way the way SOR/98-462 (16 September, 1998) was written, whoever drafted this tended to restrict or prohibit by first identifying a common name, and then restrict or prohibit all variants or modified versions of firearms from that family.
However, the way they word this using "and any variant or modified version of it" is confusing since it's unclear if they mean variations within the family of firearms, or the model that they've named. It's fine if the named firearm was the original model of the family, but problematic when it itself was a variant of some other firearm (as in this AR-15 case).
I'm sure this could be could be challenged, but even if litigation was successful, it is likely that the entire section of the Criminal Code would be rewritten, and we would all be in a worse than we are today. It takes years to draft things like this, and I would have no doubt that it would be done under a Liberal government.
