Connect with us
[bsa_pro_ad_space id=12]

Business

The gun ban and buyback still isn’t worth it for taxpayers

Published

5 minute read

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

By Gage Haubrich

Even worse than the cost is the simple fact that the policy isn’t making Canadians safer. Trudeau banned the initial list of 1,500 guns in 2020, meaning that it’s illegal to buy, sell or use them. In every year since, violent gun crime in Canada has increased.

Right from the beginning, experts have told the prime minister that his gun ban and buyback will divert resources away from fighting crime rather than making Canada safer.

Instead of changing course, the Trudeau government announced it’s diverting even more taxpayers’ money to its failing gun policy policy.

And it’s an expensive diversion.

The federal government recently announced an additional 324 models of firearms are now prohibited and being added to the buyback list. That brings the total makes and models banned to almost 2,500.

Even though Ottawa hasn’t confiscated a single gun yet, costs have already begun to pile up for taxpayers. Since 2020, when the ban was first announced, the government has spent $67 million on the program. By the end of the fiscal year the government is likely to increase that number to about $100 million, according to government documents.

The projected costs of this scheme have been a problem from the start. In 2019, the government  said the buyback would cost taxpayers $200 million. But according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, buying back the guns could cost up to $756 million, not including administrative costs. Other government documents show that the buyback is now likely to cost almost $2 billion.

Those costs do not include the newly banned firearms. And it looks like the government has plans to expand the list even further. That means even more costs to taxpayers.

Minister of Public Safety Dominic Leblanc, who is charge in charge of the gun ban, hinted during the press conference the popular SKS rifle might be added to the ban list next. There are estimated to be a million of those firearms in Canada.

That means the costs to taxpayers could soar and even more people could lose their guns. The  PBO report estimates that there were about 518,000 firearms banned on the original list. Adding the SKS could more than double the projected $756 million it would cost to confiscate the guns.

The government tried to ban the SKS before. It was included in an amendment to Bill C-21 that would have seen it banned along with a lot of hunting rifles. The Assembly of First Nations immediately passed an emergency resolution opposing this amendment at the time.

“It’s a tool,” said Kitigan Zibi Chief Dylan Whiteduck about the list of rifles that would have been banned. “It’s not a weapon.”

The government backed down on that amendment. There is no doubt it would encounter similar resistance from Indigenous hunters if Ottawa reimposed it.

Even worse than the cost is the simple fact that the policy isn’t making Canadians safer. Trudeau banned the initial list of 1,500 guns in 2020, meaning that it’s illegal to buy, sell or use them. In every year since, violent gun crime in Canada has increased.

And international examples confirm the pattern. New Zealand conducted a similar, but more extensive, gun ban and buyback in 2019. New Zealand had 1,216 violent firearm offenses in 2023. That’s 349 more offences than the year before the buyback.

All of this only confirms what experts have said from the beginning: This cost a lot of money, but won’t make Canada safer.

The union that represents the RCMP says the buyback “diverts extremely important personnel, resources, and funding away from addressing the more immediate and growing threat of criminal use of illegal firearms.”

“The gun ban is not working,” said the president of the Toronto Police Association. “We should focus on criminals.”

Academics who study the subject also agree.

“Buyback programs are largely ineffective at reducing gun violence, in large part because the people who participate in such programs are not likely to use those guns to commit violence,” said University of Toronto professor Jooyoung Lee.

Everyone but the prime minister can see the obvious. The costs for this program keep ballooning and taxpayers have every reason to worry the tab is only getting bigger. Yet our streets aren’t safer. Trudeau must scrap this ineffective and expensive gun buyback.

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

2025 Federal Election

Don’t let the Liberals fool you on electric cars

Published on

CAE Logo Dan McTeague

“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do.”

The Liberals’ carbon tax ploy is utterly shameless. For years they’ve been telling us that the Carbon Tax was a hallmark of Canadian patriotism, that it was the best way to save the planet, that it was really a “price on pollution,” which would ultimately benefit the little guy, in the form of a rebate in which Canadians would get back all the money they paid in, and more!

Meanwhile big, faceless Captain Planet villain corporations — who are out there wrecking the planet for the sheer fun of it! — will shoulder the whole burden.

But then, as people started to feel the hit to their wallets and polling on the topic fell off a cliff, the Liberals’ newly anointed leader — the  environmentalist fanatic Mark Carney — threw himself a Trumpian signing ceremony, at which he and the party (at least rhetorically) kicked the carbon tax to the curb and started patting themselves on the back for saving Canada from the foul beast. “Don’t ask where it came from,” they seem to be saying. “The point is, it’s gone.”

Of course, it’s not. The Consumer Carbon Tax has been zeroed out, at least for the moment, not repealed. Meanwhile, the Industrial Carbon Tax, on business and industry, is not only being left in place, it’s being talked up in exactly the same terms as the Consumer Tax was.

No matter that it will continue to go up at the same rate as the Consumer Tax would have, such that it will be indistinguishable from the Consumer Tax by 2030. And no matter that the burden of that tax will ultimately be passed down to working Canadians in the form of higher prices.

Of course, when that happens, Carney & Co will probably blame Donald Trump, rather than their own crooked tax regime.

Yes, it is shameless. But it also puts Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives in a bind. They’ve been proclaiming their intention to “Axe the Tax” for quite some time now. On the energy file, it was pretty much all you could get them to talk about. So much so that I was worried that upon entering government, they might just go after the low hanging fruit, repeal the Carbon Tax, and move on to other things, leaving the rest of the rotten Net-Zero superstructure in place.

But now, since the Liberals beat them to it (or claim they did,) the Conservatives are left grasping for a straightforward, signature policy which they can use to differentiate themselves from their opponents.

Poilievre’s recently announced intention to kill the Industrial Carbon Tax is welcome, especially at a time when Canadian business is under a tariff threat from both the U.S. and China. But that requires some explanation, and as the old political saying goes, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

There is one policy change however, which comes to mind as a potential replacement. It’s bold, it would make the lives of Canadians materially better, and it’s so deeply interwoven with the “Green” grift of the environmentalist movement of which Mark Carney is so much a part that his party couldn’t possibly bring themselves to steal it.

Pierre Poilievre should pledge to repeal the Liberals’ Electric Vehicle mandate.

The EV mandate is bad policy. It forces Canadians to buy an expensive product — EVs cost more than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles even when the federal government was subsidizing their purchase with a taxpayer-funded rebate of $5,000 per vehicle, but that program ran out of money in January and was discontinued. Without that rebate, EVs haven’t a prayer of competing with ICE vehicles.

EVs are particularly ill-suited for Canada. Their batteries are bad at holding a charge in the cold. Even in mild weather, EVs aren’t known for their reliability, a major downside in a country as spread out as ours. Maybe it’ll work out if you live in a big city, but what if you’re in the country? Heaven help you if your EV battery dies when you’re an hour away from everywhere.

Moreover, Canada doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a total replacement of gas-and-diesel driven vehicles with EVs. Our already-strained electrical grid just doesn’t have the capacity to support millions of EVs being plugged in every night. Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 public charging stations to support an entirely electric fleet. At the moment, we have roughly 30,000. That’s a pretty big gap to fill in ten years.

And that’s another fact which doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. The law mandates that every new vehicle sold in Canada must be electric by 2035. Maybe that sounded incredibly far in the future when it was passed, but now it’s only ten years away! That’s not a lot of time for these technological problems or cost issues to be resolved.

So the pitch from Poilievre here is simple.

“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do. If you vote Conservative, we will fix that, so you will be free to buy the vehicle that meets your needs, whether it’s battery or gas powered, because we trust you to make decisions for yourself. Mark Carney, on the other hand, does not. We won’t just Axe the Tax, we will End the EV Mandate!”

A decade (and counting) of Liberal misrule has saddled this country with a raft of onerous and expensive Net-Zero legislation I’d like to see the Conservative Party campaign against.

These include so-called “Clean Fuel” Regulations, Emissions Caps, their war on pipelines and Natural Gas terminals, not to mention Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental benefits of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard.

But the EV mandate is bad for Canada, and terrible for Canadians. A pledge to repeal it would be an excellent start.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

Continue Reading

2025 Federal Election

Three cheers for Poilievre’s alcohol tax cut

Published on

By Franco Terrazzano

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation applauds Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre’s commitment to end and reverse the alcohol escalator tax.

“Poilievre just promised major alcohol tax cuts and taxpayers will cheers to that,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Poilievre’s tax cut will save Canadians money every time they have a cold one with a buddy or enjoy a glass of Pinot with their better half and it will give Canadians brewers, distillers and wineries a fighting chance against tariffs.”

Today, federal alcohol taxes increased by two per cent, costing taxpayers about $40 million this year, according to Beer Canada.

Poilievre announced a Conservative government “will axe the escalator tax on wine, beer and spirits back to 2017 levels, ending the automatic annual tax increases.”

The alcohol escalator tax has automatically increased excise taxes on beer, wine and spirits every year, without a vote in Parliament, since 2017. The alcohol escalator tax has cost taxpayers more than $900 million since being imposed, according to Beer Canada.

Taxes from multiple levels of government account for about half of the price of alcohol.

Meanwhile, tariffs are hitting the industry hard. Brewers have described the tariffs as “Armageddon for craft brewing.”

“Automatic tax hikes are undemocratic, uncompetitive and unaffordable and they need to stop,” Terrazzano said. “If politicians think Canadians aren’t paying enough tax, they should at least have the spine to vote on the tax increase.

“Poilievre is right to end the escalator tax and all party leaders should commit to making life more affordable for Canadian consumers and businesses by ending the undemocratic alcohol tax hikes.”

Continue Reading

Trending

X