Canada’s Liberal government has consistently and misleadingly used “buyback” to describe the 2020 mandatory “assault weapon” confiscation law, in an attempt to make the scheme appear less hostile to property rights and Canada’s responsible gun owners and more palatable to the general public. Recent pronouncements on the gun ban and confiscation have now veered even further down the road of disingenuous political messaging.
In a September 10 interview with Alberta podcaster Ryan Jespersen, Prime Minister Mark Carney went so far as to describe the scheme as “voluntary.” “This is not about confiscation,” Carney said. “This is about voluntary return of firearms for compensation…We’re not confiscating guns. People aren’t going around confiscating guns. …That is a mischaracterization. What it is, is an opportunity for Canadians to return guns for compensation.”
A day later, a Juno News reporter asked the latest federal Public Safety Minister, Gary Anandasangaree (who oversees the department responsible for implementing the gun ban and confiscation law) about the Prime Minister’s comments. Anandasangaree agreed with Carney and said, moreover, that “it’s always been voluntary.”
Carney’s interview included another whopper, with the Prime Minister claiming that the ban does not affect hunting rifles or sporting firearms. “We are not talking about hunting rifles. We’re not talking sports shooting or anything like that. We’re talking about assault rifles.” Automatic firearms have been classified as “prohibited” firearms in Canada for decades, so the gun ban list of prohibited firearms and devices almost exclusively features semi-automatic firearms (not just rifles, but shotguns and handguns) along with many bolt action and pump action models. It was obvious from the start that the ban covered “hunting rifles” because it includes an explicit exception (here and again in 2024, here) “for Indigenous peoples’ exercising a right under section 35 of the Constitution Act, as well as those who use firearms for sustenance hunting, which enables them to continue to use their newly prohibited firearms to hunt.”
One could speculate that either this language is a cynical PR exercise to misrepresent the ban as applying solely to dangerous and unusual “military grade assault weapons,” or Carney is unaware of just how far-reaching the gun ban actually is.
Certainly, his Public Safety Minister has demonstrated a lack of knowledge about the basics of Canada’s gun laws and the confiscation scheme. A podcast by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) featuring Kris Sims and Gage Haubrich (both firearm owners) examined an exchange between Anandasangaree and Conservative Member of Parliament Andrew Lawton. Asked by Lawton about how many prohibited firearms are liable to be collected under the confiscation scheme, Anandasangaree responded that the “anticipation is about 179,000.” The podcast notes that Anandasangaree’s latest figure is at odds with a 2021 report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which indicated that the number of impacted firearms is unknown but could exceed 500,000. (To mix things up even more, in late 2023 Canadian gun rights site TheGunBlog.ca reported that the Liberal government gave an estimate of 144,000 rifles and shotguns to be destroyed, based on a document prepared for the Public Safety Minister at the time.) Due to the significant expansion of the prohibited firearms list in 2024 and again in 2025, the 2021 and 2023 figures are likely obsolete and call into question the minister’s new estimate.
In response to Lawton’s follow-up questions, the Public Safety Minister admitted he doesn’t know what an RPAL or a CFSC are. (An RPAL is the Possession and Acquisition License necessary to lawfully acquire and possess a “restricted” firearm, like handguns and certain long guns; the CFSC is the mandatory Canadian Firearms Safety Course that all would-be gun owners must complete successfully to be eligible for a PAL.) The minister, as the podcasters note, “doesn’t seem to know a single thing about the thing he supposed to be in charge of,” akin to a Health Minister “who has never, like, seen a band-aid.”
The most alarming part, however, was Anandasangaree’s retort to a question about whether he understands the classes or other safety demands required of law-abiding gun owners, in which he stated, “this [the gun ban law] is not about law-abiding gun owners.”
That answer pretty much sums it up.
The gun ban amnesty and compensation scheme apply exclusively to legal owners of the now-prohibited firearms. In fact, as the government’s own website notes, the only individuals eligible to claim compensation are those who “held a valid firearms licence on May 1, 2020 (and who have maintained that licence in good standing).” To echo the CTF podcasters, does the minister really believe that Canadian gun rights groups would be advocating in favor of criminal gun possession – that “there would be this big hullabaloo if this was about criminals not getting guns? Like, nobody would be opposed to this…of all the really dumb answers he gave there, him saying that this wasn’t about law-abiding gun owners was the most mind-blowing.”
As for the claims that the confiscation is “voluntary” and has “always been” voluntary, the current Public Safety Canada website on the now-prohibited firearms states, unequivocally, that the gun ban “takes effect immediately” and the “Government will not provide any option for owners to grandfather these weapons as it intends to bring forward a mandatory buyback program” (emphasis added). To the extent that an owner has any other options, it is the Hobson’s choice of surrendering the gun to authorities without compensation, permanently deactivating the gun, exporting the gun “in accordance with all applicable legal requirements, including the legal requirements of the country to which it is exported,” or face criminal prosecution and sanctions.
There is other trouble on the horizon. Anandasangaree disclosed earlier this month that provincial law enforcement in Canada’s most populous province has refused to participate in the government’s gun confiscation program. According to the news source, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) is “responsible for more than a quarter of the policing in Ontario;” the refusal compels the federal government to now convince local governments with their own police to implement the confiscation, while looking for an alternative in places without local law enforcement. According to the article, though, that doesn’t appear promising: representatives for several such local forces either indicated that they had no active plans regarding participation or declined to respond. Further, the office of Ontario’s Solicitor General, Michael Kerzner, has lately advised that “Ontario police services do not have the resources to attend residential addresses to confiscate previously lawful but now prohibited firearms from lawful gun owners.”
This obfuscation on the law from the highest officials in the land is exacerbated further by the imminent expiry of the already twice-extended amnesty period. The amnesty is all that stands between responsible gun owners and criminal liability for the possession of their lawfully acquired, but now illegal, firearms. Even so, at the time of writing Public Safety Minister Anandasangaree was prevaricating over whether another extension was in the works – “his government is not ready to announce when and for how long its gun amnesty program will be extended,” states a Sept. 17 news report from the CBC. Given that the confiscation and compensation program for individual owners is still not operational, this seems to be the latest example of the government’s directionless drift on this blatantly ineffective, pointless and likely unworkable law.
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