OPINION: Ottawa's gun buyback is rightfully falling apart

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's gun ban and buyback policy is losing effectiveness.

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And he didn't even leave the station.

Redemption is broken. Law-abiding firearm owners don't want to lose their firearms. That's not enough for gun control advocates. And taxpayers don't want to pay such a huge bill.

“This is a waste of Canadians' money,” said a spokesman for PolyRemembers, a leading gun control advocacy group. “We are not reducing the level of risk. It's just an appearance.”

Instead, PolyRemembers wants the government to go further and ban even more firearm models.

However, if the recommendation is to ban more guns, the solution creates many more problems.

Ottawa has already tried this. The federal government attempted to dramatically expand the list of prohibited weapons through committee amendments. One addition was the SKS semi-automatic rifle, which is estimated to number over 500,000 in Canada.

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Following amendments to Bill C-21 that would have banned many common hunting rifles, the Assembly of First Nations passed an emergency resolution opposing the ban.

“It's a tool,” Kitigan Zibi chief Dylan Whiteduck said of the list of rifles to be banned. “It's not a weapon.”

“No government has the right to take that away from us and regulate it,” said Heather Bear, vice president of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations. “This is our job as mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers and hunters.”

The government relented and removed the amendments.

Expanding buybacks to even more firearms would mean more resistance from existing firearms owners and higher costs to buy back even more guns.

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The government says the ban is intended to keep Canadians safe, but evidence shows it is unlikely to help even if it were expanded to cover more firearms.

In May 2020, the federal government announced a ban on the sale of 1,500 types of firearms it called “assault weapons.” He promised to provide “fair compensation” to gun owners whose guns he confiscates.

New Zealand tried to introduce a gun ban and buyback program that was more far-reaching than Ottawa's, banning almost all semi-automatic weapons, not just so-called “assault” rifles.

It didn't work.

According to New Zealand Police data, in the ten years before the buyout, New Zealand averaged 932 firearms offenses per year. In 2019, the buyout year, there were 1,142 offenses. In 2022, the number of offenses amounted to 1,444.

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Buying New Zealand back wasn't cheap either. The costs of administering the program were more than twice as high as initial estimates.

Experts in Canada have seen enough to know this policy is a failure.

The National Police Federation, the union representing the RCMP, says the Ottawa buyout “diverts critically important personnel, resources and funds from addressing the more immediate and growing threat of criminal use of illegal firearms.”

And that's a lot of funds and resources.

Overall, estimates show that Trudeau's plan could cost taxpayers up to $756 million to buy back weapons, according to the parliamentary budget officer. This doesn't even include administrative costs – it's simply the cost of compensating firearm owners.

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Instead of taking away Canadians' firearms, it would be enough to cover the average wages of 1,000 police officers for over seven years.

The government has long increased the costs of these types of programs. The government initially promised that the long gun registry would only cost taxpayers $2 million. The last payout was over $2 billion. The registry was abolished by Stephen Harper's government and remained scrapped during the Trudeau government.

If these were trespasses just to register guns, how much money would the federal government waste trying to confiscate them?

As of 2020, the Ottawa buyout has already cost taxpayers $67 million. So far, not a single weapon has been “bought back.”
It's time for Ottawa to end its gun ban and implement a gun buyback. Because right now it looks like all this will do is cost taxpayers a lot of money while doing nothing to make Canadians safer.

Gage Haubrich is the Prairie Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

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