Last year, we wrote about how several previous enforcement schemes for Canada’s Liberal government’s 2020 gun ban and confiscation appeared to have fizzled out. An attempt to enlist the support of private contractors through government procurement/solicitation documents apparently came to naught – perhaps unsurprisingly, as these entities would have no police powers and would be relying on voluntary compliance. Another plan, in which Canada Post, a Crown Corporation, would enforce the confiscation by accepting firearms turned in by individual owners and mailing these to the government, floundered almost immediately when Canada Post’s CEO advised that his agency wanted no part of it due to safety and security concerns. Another proposal was to use retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and other former law enforcement officers as gun collection agents, but it’s not clear what actual law enforcement authority such individuals have, and, in any event, this too seems to have failed to excite sufficient interest.
A Canadian gun-rights news site, TheGunBlog.ca, now reports that the Canadian government is apparently paying municipal police forces in two provinces to enforce its “assault style firearms” (ASFs) ban and confiscation law.
A federal government “grants and contributions” website lists a CAD$2.8 million agreement between Public Safety Canada and the Winnipeg Police Service for the “planning, coordination, control, and administration of the Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program in their jurisdiction.” It shows a similar agreement between the federal agency and the Cape Breton Region Police Service in Nova Scotia, in the amount of CAD$103,013. The “expected results” for both agreements are “lowering firearm related crime, the percentage of firearm-related homicides, and mass shootings involving ASFs in Canada,” and the “program purpose” is “complement[ing] the prohibition of assault-style firearms and support[ing] the Government’s mandate and commitment to safely and securely remove these firearms from Canadian communities.”
Even though the by-now twice extended federal amnesty period will expire on October 30th of this year, the term of both agreements runs until March 31, 2026, suggesting that a fresh extension is likely on the horizon.
Responsible gun owners in Canada are still left without a clear idea of how and when the program will be enforced against them and their property, as the timing of “Phase 2,” the confiscation of firearms from individual citizens, remains a mystery. The official “Firearms Buyback Program Overview” page at the Public Safety Canada website hasn’t been updated since 2023 and continues to state that “[a] staged implementation is planned, with the collection of business stock beginning before the end of the year, and to get started with individual collection in the second half of 2023.”
This local police-enforced gun grab is likely limited to cities or towns that opt-in to participate, and any police services administered by First Nations. In many areas across Canada, the RCMP provides police services pursuant to agreements with the provincial, territorial or First Nations governments, and many of these jurisdictions have already expressed their intention (here and here and here) to have the RCMP resources they pay for focused on their own policing priorities and not “any federal effort to strip lawfully obtained personal property from our residents.”
The amounts involved in these latest agreements are minimal relative to the task at hand. In the case of Winnipeg, a $2.8 million payment from the federal government is basically inconsequential, given that as of late December, the Winnipeg Police Service’s 2025 budget was a reported CAD$339 million (and according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the City’s spending on police is already a quarter of its entire budget).
Even assuming this federal funding is sufficient for the “program purpose,” when one considers the overall objective of “the Government’s mandate and commitment to safely and securely remove these firearms from Canadian communities,” the impact of these two agreements is painfully small. The population of the “Census Metropolitan Area” (CMA) of Winnipeg, which includes the City’s surrounding municipalities, is approximately 942,000; that of Cape Breton County in Nova Scotia is just under 113,000.
The real issue is Winnipeg’s taxpayers, like Canadians in general, have bigger public safety problems than having their police officers deployed to seize firearms from law-abiding residents. A report on violent crime in Canada’s urban areas released late last year by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute refers to “Canada’s urban crime calamity,” as “violent crime rates for certain crimes – most notably sexual assault and robbery– are rising nearly everywhere” in the country, and even historically low-crime cities “are seeing significant increases in violent crime.”
Of particular concern, given the use of municipal police officers to enforce the federal gun grab, is that of the nine major cities the report looked at,
Winnipeg has the highest violent crime rates. Its three-year rolling homicide rate has been the highest every year since 2019. It has had the highest rolling average rate for robbery every year from 2016 to 2023, and the second-highest rolling aggravated assault rate (behind Edmonton) every year since 2017. Winnipeg’s sexual assault rate has always been highest or second-highest. These high violent crime rates are consistent; Winnipeg has had the highest or second-highest three-year rolling average rate for all four crimes every year in our dataset (2016–2023).
A March 2024 presentation by the Winnipeg Police Service confirms that violent crime in 2024 was up by 31% as compared to 2023; calls to the police communication center were up by 20%, and that the number of authorized officers relative to the city population had dropped precipitously, with fewer officers available in 2023 than in 2013. If this is correct, it’s hard to believe that redirecting limited law enforcement resources towards “administering” gun confiscations from innocent residents, rather than responding to actual crimes, is a winning strategy, at least from the perspective of the Winnipeggers being assaulted, robbed and otherwise victimized. It’s also hard to believe that community police officers will relish the prospect of going door-to-door to demand that licensed and vetted gun owners – including their relatives, neighbors, friends, and coworkers – surrender their lawfully acquired firearms.
In case Canada’s Liberal government is still open to suggestions on enforcement and implementation, one obvious solution is to get real: learn from the embarrassing debacle of the long-gun registry, save Canada’s taxpayers the billions of dollars this new futile gun grab will likely cost, and shut the whole thing down.
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