Liberal gun buyback program goes from bad to farce
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- 3 min read
Re-printed without permission.
March 8 2026
Lorne Gunter
Mar 8, 2026 Updated 20 hrs ago
The federal Liberals’ gun buyback scheme just keeps getting more and more expensive and more and more useless by the week.
Late last year, the feds conducted a trial run of their confiscation program, more than five years after they first announced it. For six weeks on Cape Breton, regional police accepted banned guns that were being turned in by their owners in return for compensation.
Ottawa had predicted more than 200 guns would be collected during the trial run. In all, Cape Breton police took in just 25 guns at a cost to federal taxpayers nearly $150,000. That works out to $6,000 per gun.
That’s not what owners were paid. People who turned in their guns voluntarily received about $700 per gun, the average cost of a rifle or shotgun in Canada.
The other $5,300 was swallowed up by administrative costs.
Nonetheless, the federal Libs judged their little experiment such a resounding they expanded it nationwide.
They refused to be deterred by common sense.
Nearly every one of the “assault-style weapons” the Liberals have banned has a civilian equivalent. Same calibre, same ammunition, same killing power, just without the camo or other militaristic cladding on the outside.
None of those civilian variants are banned.
It wouldn’t make Canadian streets safer, at all, if both assault-style and civilian models were. The exercise is entirely useless.
But nonetheless, the very anti-gun Liberals decided to bull ahead with their buyback anyway.
Believe it or not, the national program is even worse than the Cape Breton trial.
Rather than costing Canadian taxpayers about $6,000 a gun, the national program has cost about $24,000 a gun.
Again, that’s not the amount gunowners are receiving if they turn in their guns. That’s mostly the cost of the vast bureaucracy Ottawa has set up to administer the buyback.
As Tristan Hopper of the National Post pointed out on Thursday, that’s one new police officer who cannot be hired for every three guns brought in, and one new police cruiser for every two guns.
The total cost of the program to date — nearly $800 million — is more than the entire police budget for a year for Montreal or Vancouver. It is the equivalent of two-thirds of the annual budget of the Toronto Police Service, which is the fourth largest police force on the continent behind only New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Neither does the amount spent on the buyback by Public Safety Canada include the RCMP’s administrative costs, which were $10 million in 2023 but jumped to nearly $86 million last year.
Which do you think would make Canada’s streets safer: spending more money hiring cops or flushing $780 million down the drain on the fallacy that confiscating guns that are not being used by criminals will somehow reduce street crime?
There’s also the little hurdle that very few municipal or provincial police forces will help Ottawa administer the buyback. The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), the Toronto Police Service and dozens of others across Canada have said that not only will they have nothing to do with raids of homes and businesses, they will not devote any of their budgets towards accepting banned guns offered up by the public or helping Ottawa issue cheques.
Even if an owner was eager to comply with the Liberals’ decree, he or she would have difficulty finding a hand-in location and arranging compensation.
Alberta and Saskatchewan have gone the furthest. Both provinces have passed legislation prohibiting their local police forces from aiding the Carney government. And both provinces have told the RCMP, who serve on contract as location police in more than 80 per cent of the Prairies, that any expenses they incur related to the buyback will be deleted from their annual contract fee.
The country neither wants nor needs this Liberal farce.
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