Canada’s sweeping gun ban and “buyback” has been an abject failure, with the Liberal government collecting only about half of the firearms it planned for. Many gun owners are holding onto their firearms with no plans to participate in the “buyback” at all, while others are holding out in the hopes of receiving fair market value of their now-banned guns.
Several provinces have declined to participate in the federal compensated confiscation scheme, as have many local and provincial police forces. The Canadian Supreme Court has also agreed to hear a challenge to the ban, and now the Liberals say the federal government will keep its current amnesty in place until the justices issue their ruling, which isn’t expected until some time next year.
The amnesty order, set to expire on Oct. 30, applies to owners of the roughly 2,500 makes and models of firearms the Liberals have banned since May 2020.
“When there is a Supreme Court hearing on a matter that is quite relevant to the program, I think it’s incumbent upon lawmakers to ensure that we respect that process,” Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, told National Post in an interview on Tuesday.
“While you know we would have preferred to have the amnesty in place for October … we have to respect the Supreme Court and their ability as the final arbiter of Canadian law to weigh in, and that’s what we’re doing today.”
Despite Anandasangaree’s comments, I think he’s probably somewhat relieved that he can kick this particular can down the road for a few more months as well. The gun ban, which was first announced back in 2020 when then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that more than 1,500 makes and models of popular firearms could no longer be legally possessed, has been an absolute disaster when it comes to implementation. It’s first test run of collecting firearms, held in Nova Scotia last fall, resulted in just a handful of guns taken in by police. Officials had planned for about 200 firearms, but instead received just 25.
This also isn’t the first time the amnesty has been extended. In fact, the amnesty was originally scheduled to end more than four years ago, in April, 2022. The National Post reports that the amnesty has been extended multiple times since then “as the federal government struggled to get a compensation program for affected firearms owners off the ground.”
Prominent gun control advocacy group PolySeSouvient, formed by victims of the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique shooting, criticized the decision as risking public safety.
“With this decision, the government is protecting gun owners unwilling to surrender their prohibited weapons against criminal charges — at the expense of potential future victims of mass shootings in Canada,” it said in a statement.
I don’t think this is about protecting gun owners. It’s about protecting Liberal politicians. The Liberal government could have kept to its latest schedule and ended the amnesty in October if it wanted. After all, it’s not halting its gun collection efforts while waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision to come down next year.
Asking people to hand over their firearms is one thing. Prosecuting and imprisoning gun owners for keeping ahold of their guns is something else entirely. While the Liberals are more popular than their Conservative counterparts in most polls, I suspect that would change if the feds started jailing people who declined to comply with the compensated confiscation scheme… particularly in provinces like Alberta, where some activists are calling for the province to separate itself from the mother country.
A referendum on separation is scheduled for October 19, and if the Liberals had stuck with their latest deadline for the amnesty’s expiration, the federal government would begin its crackdown on Canadian gun owners about the same time Albertans are heading to the polls. At the moment support for Albertan independence is polling around 20%, but that number would likely surge if the feds were actively targeting Albertan gun owners while the referendum was in full swing.
Extending the amnesty to some unknown date in the future is the politically expedient thing for the Liberals to do. And if the Supreme Court ultimately sides with gun owners, the Libs can blame the courts for the failure of their gun confiscation scheme, even if that means ignoring all of the troubles they’ve had to date.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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