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GUNTER: Ottawa's gun buyback program a dismal failure

There may be a lot of gunowners who signed up for compensation who will be left without a convenient way to hand in their guns.

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Six years ago, after Gabriel Wortman of Nova Scotia committed the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history, the Trudeau government banned more than 2,500 models of firearms because they looked scary. Even though other models of the same firearms had the same firepower, those versions were not banned because they lacked the militarist features that made the others look like “assault-style” weapon.

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From the outset the ban was destined to be useless. It would seize guns only from law-abiding citizens and those guns would be no more deadly than hundreds of thousands of similar firearms that remained perfectly legal.

GUNTER: Ottawa's gun buyback program a dismal failure Back to video

Eventually, this January, after six years of dithering, the Liberals got around to commencing their compensation scheme to buy back the guns from their lawful owners.

As predicted, the buyback has been a flop. Even before it began, a report by the Privy Council Office predicted response to the buyback would be underwhelming and a pilot project on Cape Breton last year saw just 20 guns handed in.

From mid-January until the end of March, Canadians whose guns were covered by the ban could register those guns with Ottawa to receive compensation later this year.

The federal Liberal government offered $742 million for what it estimated were 175,000 guns covered by its ban. The Liberals projected 136,000 would be turned in, yet under 68,000 (approximately 50 per cent) were.

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And that’s only if you believe the Liberals’ deliberately low estimate of the total number. (More reliable estimates places the total number of individual guns banned at over 300,000, which means only 20 per cent of banned firearms were registered for compensation.)

That is just the beginning of the flopping.

Over the spring and summer, the 38,000 gunowners who registered their firearms for surrender and compensation will be contacted by the feds about how to give up their guns in return for taxpayer cash. Most will be compelled to make a “collection appointment” with the RCMP during which they can handover their private property for destruction. The Liberal government may also set up “mobile collection units,” although it seems frightfully expensive and logistically unrealistic.

Or they might direct gunowners to go to a local police station.

What makes all of this impractical (and the scheme an ongoing flop) is the fact that so many provinces and local police forces refuse to participate in the confiscation.

Already the Toronto Police Service and Edmonton Police Service have refused to participate, as have the Ontario Provincial Police.

In Alberta and Saskatchewan, where more than 80 per cent of the population is patrolled by the RCMP as a local police force, the two provincial governments (who pay a yearly fee to the feds for RCMP policing) have announced that if any RCMP officers are called away from local duties to help Ottawa with the buyback, Alberta and Saskatchewan will deduct the cost from the amount they pay the federal government.

There may be a lot of gunowners who signed up for compensation who will be left without a convenient way to hand in their guns.

Curiously perhaps, Saskatchewan had the lowest per capita number of guns registered — just over 700. While Newfoundland and Labrador had the lower total number — just 484.

But here is the biggest potential for flopping.

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has frequently said the buyback is voluntary, by which he means registering for compensation was voluntary. The voluntary part ended March 31.

Last week he explained, “individuals who did not declare their prohibited firearms during the declaration period must dispose of or permanently deactivate them before the amnesty period ends Oct. 30.

After that, if police suspect anyone of owning a banned firearm, they may subject them to a door-to-door search.

Gunowners are among the most law-abiding Canadians. But imagine their attitude change is they are subjected to arbitrary searches to take away firearms (at that point without compensation) that are a threat to no one.

lgunter@postmedia.com

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