Ottawa’s gun buyback is rightly falling apart

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

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.

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‘Source Of Profound Regret’: Firm Pays Half Billion Settlement To Avoid Criminal Prosecution For Fueling Opioid Crisis

Published on December 14, 2024

Todayville

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.”

COVID-19

Ontario doctor punished for questioning COVID response plans appeal to Supreme Court

Published on December 4, 2024

Todayville

Ontario pediatrician Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Elon Musk has said he would help Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill financially in her fight against the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.

Ontario pediatrician Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, who is embroiled in a legal battle with a medical regulator for her anti-COVID jab and mandate views on social media, is looking to take her case to Canada’s Supreme Court with financial help from Elon Musk and a leading freedom-fighting lawyer.

Libertas Law, which is representing Gill, said in a press release sent to LifeSiteNews on Monday the canceled doctor “filed an application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada” her case against the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO).

“The growing overreach of regulators into monitoring the speech of professionals on social media has become a matter of national concern to the public, which loses the benefit of hearing a variety of opinions when professionals’ speech is chilled out of fear of punishment,” Libertas Law attorney Lisa Bildy said. “We hope that the Supreme Court of Canada will use Dr. Gill’s case to restore the historic role of the courts as guardians of the constitution.”

The application follows Gill’s unsuccessful judicial review of the “cautions-in-person ordered against her in 2021” by a CPSO committee concerning her Twitter comments in August 2020 that criticized multiple levels of governments COVID mandates and policies.

The orders against Gill were made despite her “providing the College with ample evidence in 2020 to support her position against catastrophic lockdowns,” Libertas Law noted.

Musk, the billionaire Tesla and X owner, pledged in March to back Gill financially.

The application to Canada’s highest court comes after her application for leave to appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal (ONCA) “was denied” on October 3.

“The infringement of Dr. Gill’s freedom of expression and conscience, guaranteed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was barely mentioned by the committee when it issued the orders for cautions in-person (which Dr. Gill has not yet received),” Libertas stated in its press release.

According to Libertas, the CPSO had placed on its website in 2020 a warning to doctors to provide “an opinion that does not align with information coming from public health or government.”

“Yet the Divisional Court declined to quash the orders, finding that the committee was sufficiently alert to the Charter infringement of Dr. Gill’s speech, such that its decisions were within the range of reasonable outcomes,” the legal firm said.

Last May, LifeSiteNews reported that Gill had vowed to fight with appeals with the help of her Musk-backed legal team after she lost a court battle.

One of Gill’s “controversial” posts she made in 2020 read, “If you have not yet figured out that we don’t need a vaccine, you are not paying attention. #FactsNotFear.”

The Divisional Court decision against Gill dated May 7 concluded, “When the College chose to draw the line at those tweets which it found contained misinformation, it did so in a way which reasonably balanced Dr. Gill’s free speech rights with her professional responsibilities.”

“In other words, its response was proportionate,” the ruling stated.

In Monday’s press release, Libertas Law noted that due to an unrelated recent court ruling relating to Charter Rights, Gill will argue the same reasonings to fight her censorship in her appeal to the Supreme Court.

Canceled doc’s legal battles against medical regulator ongoing for months

Gill’s court challenge against the CPSO began earlier this year, with Bildy writing at the time that the “decisions were neither reasonable nor justified and they failed to engage with the central issues for which Dr. Gill was being cautioned.”

She argued that Gill had a “reasonable scientific basis” for her posts, noting that the previous decision made against Gill targeted her for opposing the mainstream COVID narrative.

Gill is a specialist practicing in the Toronto area and has extensive experience and training in “pediatrics, and allergy and clinical immunology, including scientific research in microbiology, virology and vaccinology.”

Last September, disciplinary proceedings against her were withdrawn by the CPSO. However, Gill was ordered last year to pay $1 million in legal costs after her libel suit was struck down.

The CPSO began disciplinary investigations against Gill in August 2020.

COVID vaccine mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of the federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.

In an interview with LifeSiteNews at its annual general meeting in July 2023 near Toronto, canceled doctors Mary O’Connor, Mark Trozzi, Chris Shoemaker, and Byram Bridle were asked to state their messages to the medical community regarding how they have had to fight censure because they have opinions contrary to the COVID mainstream narrative.