Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s gun ban and buyback policy is running out of steam.
And it hasn’t even left the station.
The buyback is broken. Law-abiding firearms owners don’t want to lose their guns. It doesn’t go far enough for gun control advocates. And taxpayers don’t want to pick up the massive bill.
“It’s a waste of Canadians’ money,” said a spokesman for PolyRemembers, a prominent gun control advocacy group. “We are not reducing the risk level. It’s just for appearances.”
Instead, PolyRemembers wants the government to go further and ban even more models of firearms.
But if the recommendation is to ban more guns, the solution brings a lot more problems.
And Ottawa has already tried that. The federal government tried to dramatically expand the list of guns banned with committee amendments. One of the additions included the semi-automatic SKS rifle, of which there are estimated to be more than 500,000 in Canada.
After the introduction of amendments to Bill C-21 that would have seen many common hunting rifles banned, the Assembly of First Nations passed an emergency resolution opposing the ban.
“It’s a tool,” said Kitigan Zibi Chief Dylan Whiteduck about the list of rifles to be banned. “It’s not a weapon.”
“No government has a right to take that away from us and regulate that,” said Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Vice-Chief Heather Bear. “That is our job as mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers and hunters.”
The government backed down and removed the amendments.
Expanding the buyback to include even more firearms would mean more resistance from current firearms owners and a larger cost to buy back even more guns.
The government says the ban aims to keep Canadians safe, but the evidence shows it’s unlikely to help, even if it was expanded to include more firearms.
The federal government announced a ban on 1,500 types of what it called “assault-style” firearms in May 2020. It promised to provide “fair compensation” to gun owners whose firearms it confiscates.
New Zealand tried a gun ban and buyback program that was more far-reaching than Ottawa’s, banning almost all semi-automatic firearms, not only so-called “assault-style” rifles.
It didn’t work.
During the decade before the buyback, according to data from the New Zealand Police, violent firearm offences averaged 932 a year in New Zealand. In 2019, the year of the buyback, there were 1,142 offences. In 2022, the number of offences was 1,444.
New Zealand’s buyback wasn’t cheap either. Costs to administer the program were more than double the initial estimates.
Experts in Canada have seen enough to know the policy is a failure.
The National Police Federation, the union representing the RCMP, says Ottawa’s buyback “diverts extremely important personnel, resources, and funding away from addressing the more immediate and growing threat of criminal use of illegal firearms.”
And it’s a lot of funding and resources.
In total, estimates show that Trudeau’s scheme could cost taxpayers up to $756 million to buy back the guns, according to the parliamentary budget officer. That doesn’t even include the administration costs – it’s just the cost of compensating firearms owners.
Instead of taking away firearms from Canadians, that’s enough money to pay for the average salaries of 1,000 police officers for more than seven years.
The government has a history of ballooning costs for these types of programs. The government initially promised the long-gun registry would cost taxpayers only $2 million. The final tab was over $2 billion. The registry was scrapped by the Stephen Harper government and stayed scrapped under the Trudeau government.
If those were the overruns just to register the guns, how much money would the federal government waste trying to confiscate them?
Ottawa’s buyback has already cost taxpayers $67 million since 2020. Not a single gun has been “bought back” yet.
It’s time for Ottawa to cancel its gun ban and buyback. Because right now, all it looks set to do is cost taxpayers a boatload of money without making Canadians safer.
Gage Haubrich is the Prairie director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation