Gage Haubrich: Chopping gun confiscation program a good place to start cutting government spending

National Post

19 hours ago

If Prime Minister Mark Carney is looking for ways to save money, he can start by shooting fish in a barrel: He can scrap the gun confiscation program that law enforcement leaders and academic experts say won't work.
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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 outlay.
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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.
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The letter from Champagne called on ministers to 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.
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All the scheme has accomplished so far is increasing costs to taxpayers. And that's all that it looks likely to do.
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When Ottawa originally announced its buyback program in 2020, the government banned 1,500 different makes and models of guns. After additional waves of bans, the list now contains more than 2,000 different models.
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The feds have only recently started to seize firearms from businesses, and the government has yet to take a single firearm away from individual gun owners.
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The government said in 2019 that the program would cost $200 million. Now it has decided to spend more than $342 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 unsuccessful venture.
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The government's plan to seize guns from licensed Canadian firearm owners is a colossal failure from every angle.
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It's not a failure just 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 those individuals who are willing to commit crimes with guns aren't going to participate in a government program to take their firearms away.
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That's simple logic, but it also echoes what the facts and the experts are saying.
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'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.
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The police are saying the same thing.