Justice
Ottawa’s gun buyback is rightly falling apart
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Author: Gage Haubrich
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 Canadian’s money,” said a spokesperson 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 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 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 buyback even more guns.
The government says the aim of the ban is to keep Canadians safe, but the evidence shows that 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 that represents 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 buyback 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 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.
Crime
Biden’s ‘preemptive pardons’ would set ‘dangerous’ precedent, constitutional scholar warns
From LifeSiteNews
By Bob Unruh
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley warned that preemptive pardons ‘would do precisely what Biden suggests that he is deterring: create a dangerous immunity for presidents and their allies in committing criminal abuses.’
An expert who not only has testified before Congress on the U.S. Constitution but has represented members in court cases is warning about Joe Biden’s speculated agenda to deliver to his friend and supporters preemptive pardons.
It is Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, who wrote, “After years of lying to the American people about the influence-peddling scandal and promising not to consider a pardon for his son, Biden would end his legacy with the ultimate dishonesty: converting pardons into virtual party favors.”
There has been much speculation about those preemptive pardons from Biden, who lied about allowing juries and courts to determine the outcomes of son Hunter’s criminal gun and tax cases, flip-flopped and pardoned him.
Hunter Biden could have been ordered to jail for years for his felony gun convictions and his guilty pleas to felony tax charges.
However, Joe Biden handed him a get-out-of-jail free card, then followed up with hundreds and hundreds more commutations and pardons to a long list of those with criminal convictions.
The activity triggered a rash of speculation about those preemptive pardons, and Turley explains what’s going on.
“Democrats are worried about the collapsing narrative that President-elect Donald Trump will destroy democracy, end future elections, and conduct sweeping arrests of everyone from journalists to homosexuals. That narrative, of course, ignores that we have a constitutional system of overlapping protections that has blocked such abuses for over two centuries.”
Thus, the talk of preemptive pardons, but Turley said it wouldn’t work out.
“Ironically, preemptive pardons would do precisely what Biden suggests that he is deterring: create a dangerous immunity for presidents and their allies in committing criminal abuses,” he said.
He noted if Biden delivers those pardons, “he would fundamentally change the use of presidential pardons by granting ‘prospective’ or ‘preemptive’ pardons to political allies. Despite repeated denials of President-elect Donald Trump that he is seeking retaliation against opponents and his statements that he wants ‘success [to be] my revenge,’ Democratic politicians and pundits have called for up to thousands of such pardons.”
He explained there’s politics all over the scheme.
“After many liberals predicted the imminent collapse of democracy and that opponents would be rounded up in mass by the Trump Administration, they are now contemplating the nightmare that democracy might survive and that there will be no mass arrests,” he wrote. “The next best thing to a convenient collapse of democracy is a claim that Biden’s series of preemptive pardons averted it. It is enough to preserve the narrative in the face of a stable constitutional system.”
But there will be a cost to such a “political stunt,” he said.
“Preemptive pardons could become the norm as presidents pardon whole categories of allies and even themselves to foreclose federal prosecutions. … It will give presidents cover to wipe away any threat of prosecution for friends, donors, and associates. This can include self-pardons issued as implied condemnations of their political opponents. It could easily become the final act of every president to pardon himself and all of the members of his Administration.
“We would then have an effective immunity rule for outgoing parties in American politics.”
He noted that in the past, Bill Clinton pardoned both family members and political donors.
“Yet, despite that history, no president has seen fit to go as far as where Biden appears to be heading,” he said. Promoters of the plan, he said, “would prefer to fundamentally change the use of the pardon power to maintain an apocalyptic narrative that was clearly rejected by the public in this election. If you cannot prove the existence of the widely touted Trump enemies list, a Biden pardon list is the next best thing.”
Reprinted with permission from the WND News Center.
Business
‘Source Of Profound Regret’: Firm Pays Half Billion Settlement To Avoid Criminal Prosecution For Fueling Opioid Crisis
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Adam Pack
A consulting giant that helped fuel the United States’ deadly opioid epidemic agreed to pay a massive settlement to avoid criminal prosecution, according to court papers filed Friday.
McKinsey & Company, an international management consulting firm that advised Purdue Pharma to “turbocharge” sales of Oxycontin during the height of the opioid crisis, entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) that will require the firm to pay a $650 million settlement over five years.
A former senior McKinsey employee also pleaded guilty to an obstruction of justice charge for destroying records detailing the consulting giant’s work for Purdue.
The McKinsey settlement is the latest in a string of lawsuits seeking accountability from corporations and consulting firms for contributing to the opioid crisis.
The epidemic, created in part from the work of Purdue and McKinsey to market OxyContin to millions of Americans, has taken more than 500,000 lives and left a trail of devastation in its wake, particularly in parts of rural America.
“McKinsey schemed with Purdue Pharma to ‘turbocharge’ OxyContin sales during a raging opioid epidemic — an epidemic that continues to decimate families and communities across the nation,” U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy for the District of Massachusetts, who sued McKinsey alongside an attorney for the Western District of Virginia over the firm’s consulting work for Purdue, wrote following the settlement. “Consulting firms like McKinsey should get the message: if the advice you give to companies in boardrooms and PowerPoint presentations aids and abets criminal activity, we will come after you and we will expose the truth.”
“We are deeply sorry for our past client service to Purdue Pharma and the actions of a former partner who deleted documents related to his work for that client,” the consulting firm wrote in a statement following the settlement. “We should have appreciated the harm opioids were causing in our society and we should not have undertaken sales and marketing work for Purdue Pharma. This terrible public health crisis and our past work for opioid manufacturers will always be a source of profound regret for our firm.”
-
Health2 days ago
Trump doubles down on using RFK Jr. to study possible link between vaccines and autism
-
Bruce Dowbiggin2 days ago
Hero Or Villain: How Chrystia Freeland Wears Both Masks
-
Alberta2 days ago
Province says Alberta family doctors will be the best-paid and most patient-focused in the country
-
COVID-192 days ago
Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich calls out Trudeau in EU Parliament address for shunning protesters
-
International2 days ago
GOP-led House bill allows for future vaccine and mask mandates, international emergency powers
-
Crime2 days ago
Biden’s ‘preemptive pardons’ would set ‘dangerous’ precedent, constitutional scholar warns
-
Business1 day ago
Senator Introduces Bill To Send One-Third Of Federal Workforce Packing Out Of DC
-
MAiD2 days ago
Nearly half of non-terminally ill Canadians who choose euthanasia say they are lonely