Canada's WWII-era pistols dangerously unreliable — but the quest to find a replacement drags on

Tristin Hopper

The Canadian Army brought 20 pistols to an Arkansas shooting competition. Before events had even officially kicked off, 15 of those pistols had jammed so badly during the warmup they couldn't be used.

“It was so bad, the guys coming off (the range) were handing over their (remaining five) pistols to the next team because they couldn't trust the others,” said Ken Pole, who wrote about the incident for a feature in Canadian Army Today.

On average, Pole found that the Canadians' handguns has jammed once every 62 shots. Their British competitors, by contrast, squeezed off 5,620 rounds without a hitch.

This is all pretty standard for the Browning Hi-Power, the 74-year-old pistol still carried as the primary sidearm of the Canadian Armed Forces.

Unlike most pistols carried by G7 militaries, Brownings have a tendency to rattle and soldiers have been advised not to fully load the pistol because it will wear out the springs.

When a Canadian soldier is deployed to a war zone such as Afghanistan or Mali, they're issued with whatever Browning Hi-Power is deemed to be least likely to give out. That's why some have joked that if they're ever forced to use their sidearm in combat, they'd be better off throwing it than shooting it.

“If you give me a choice of a sharp stick or a Browning, I'll ... sadly take the Browning but will look fondly at the stick,” Bob Kinch, a former competitive marksman with the Canadian Armed Forces, wrote in a September Quora post.

Like many times when the Canadian military tries to buy something, however, the quest to replace the Browning is now held up in a years-long procurement limbo. A 2016 statement by the Department of National Defence estimated that soldiers wouldn't be able to get their hands on new pistols until at least 2026.

Canada's Hi-Powers are so desperately obsolete, however, that the army has been forced to greenlight a stopgap program to buy up some working pistols in the meantime. Known as the “Army Interim Pistol Program,” it will buy about 7,000 sidearms to immediate plug what the army is calling its “current pistol capability gaps.”

Full article: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-wwii-era-pistols-dangerously-unreliable-but-the-quest-to-find-a-replacement-drags-on