If Prime Minister Mark Carney is looking for ways to save money, he can start by shooting fish in a barrel:
He can scrap Ottawa’s the gun confiscation program that law enforcement leaders and academic experts say won’t work.
Carney’s government says it’s working super hard on a spending review.
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne told the rest of cabinet to come up with “ambitious savings proposals” to control government spending.
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree doesn’t have to hunt very far for his savings proposal, all he needs to do is cancel Ottawa’s gun confiscation scheme and save taxpayers potentially billions of dollars.
The letter from Champagne highlights that ministers should look assess “whether existing programs within their departments are meeting their objectives.”
And in the case of Ottawa’s gun confiscation and payment program, that’s a big fat no.
All the scheme has accomplished so far is increasing costs to taxpayers. And that’s all that it looks likely to do.
When Ottawa originally announced the ban in 2020, the government banned 1,500 different makes and models of guns. After new waves of bans, the list now contains more than 2,000 different models.
Now, five years later, the feds have only recently started to seize firearms from businesses, but the government has yet to take a single firearm away from individual firearm owners.
The government said the program would cost $200 million in 2019. Now the government has decided to spend $260 million on the program just this year, according to the Main Estimates. Some other projections by firearm policy experts put the total cost to taxpayers at $6 billion.
Scrapping the program today would allow the government to cut its losses and stop wasting any more money on this failed program.
The government’s plan to seize guns from licensed Canadian firearm owners is a colossal failure from every angle.
It’s not a failure because it was designed incorrectly and needs more work, it’s a failure because it was never going to work in the first place. That’s because criminals who are willing to commit crimes with guns, aren’t going to participate in a government program to take their guns away.
That’s simple logic, but it also echoes what the facts and the experts are saying about this program.
“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, who studies gun violence in Canada.
The police are saying the same thing.
“The majority of gun crime in Canada is committed with illegal firearms that are traced back to the United States,” said Brian Sauvé, the president of the National Police Federation, the union that represents the RCMP.
The NPF also says that Ottawa’s confiscation “diverts extremely important personnel, resources, and funding away from addressing the more immediate and growing threat of criminal use of illegal firearms.”
Since the government made it illegal for Canadians to use the banned firearms in 2020, gun crime in Canada has increased.
The government of New Zealand took guns away from its citizens in 2019, and its ban was even more far-reaching than Ottawa’s. There were 379 more violent firearm offences in 2023 in New Zealand, compared to 2018, the year before the confiscation.
Canadians don’t believe this program is the most effective way to reduce gun crime either. Fifty-five per cent of Canadians think introducing tougher measures to stop the smuggling of guns into Canada from the United States is most effective way to reduce gun crime, according to Leger polling.
Ottawa’s gun confiscation is expensive, it’s failing to achieve its goals and Canadians don’t think it’s likely to work.
So, when Anandasangaree presents his plan for savings to Champagne, scrapping the gun ban and confiscation scheme should be at the top of his list.
Is Canada Off Track?
Canada has problems. You see them at gas station. You see them at the grocery store. You see them on your taxes.
Is anyone listening to you to find out where you think Canada’s off track and what you think we could do to make things better?
You can tell us what you think by filling out the survey