Canada Bans Most Folding Knives

My about-to-turn 8 year old has his birthday coming up shortly, and since he is rounding out his time in Beaver Scouts this year and moving up to Cubs next year, I was going to buy him a pocket knife for his birthday.  I was at Mountain Equipment Coop just now and was looking for something and really surprised to see they did not seem to have a single folding knife other than Swiss Army knives.  As a Scout leader my recommendation to kids has always been to forego the bling factor of a mulit-tool style knife, and instead to use just a dedicated knife with a single folding blade.  The reason for this is really simple - a knife that is designed to just be a knife generally fits the hand better and is therefore safer to use.  All those extras on a Swiss Army tend to get into the way of the basic function of the knife.

Confused as to why they did not seem to carry a single folding knife except for Opinel, which I've always found to be really terrible knives precisely because of the odd hand grip, I asked the guy at the knife desk.  That's when I learned that Canada recently banned the import of just about all folding knives because most of them are classified as "assisted opening".  Wow.  Sometimes it is an outright embarrassment to be a Canadian.  Not often fortunately, but this is definitely one of those rare times.



The craziest part of the new rules are that assisted-opening Swiss Army style knives are exempt because they are classified as multi-tools rather than knives.  So while the knife above - my favorite CRKT Lake 111 - is now illegal to import into Canada, the knife shown here with the massive assisted-opening loop on the back of the blade - the Victorinox Ranger Grip 79 - is perfectly legal to import.  This is just crazy.

I've only just started doing some googling so I'm not yet sure whether this was something that was legislated, or determined by way of a lawsuit.  You can read a reasonably good explanation of the situation by following this link.  I will continue to do some research to see what I can find out.