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.
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