By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Suppose the government threw a party and only have the expected guests showed up.
That appears to be what is happening in Canada, as media reports have revealed only about half of the banned firearms officials expected to be reported by gun owners have actually showed up. The government had “earmarked almost $250 million in compensation to cover about 136,000 guns.”
But according to the CBC in Ottawa, just over 67,000 so-called “assault-style firearms” have been reported by 37,869 gun owners across Canada.
Perhaps that should not be surprising, since—as noted by the Village Report—the program has been “snubbed” by Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Add to that New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and the Yukon.
Quebec supports the buyback, and so does British Columbia, according to reports.
In the midst of this, the Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear a challenge of the law by a number of organizations calling themselves the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights. In the Coalition’s opinion, the buyback effort is “wasteful, ineffective and divisive,” as noted by the Village Report.
Canada does not have an equivalent to the Second Amendment. Lots of Canadians, especially native people, have guns for subsistence, especially in the west and far north—the Yukon and Northwest Territories.
The effort to pare down private firearms ownership, especially of so-called “assault weapons,” began gathering momentum in 2020, when the Ottawa government outlawed some 2,500 different types of guns, including the AR-15 and Ruger Mini-14, the newspaper recalled. There is an amnesty in progress now, which requires that banned guns either be disposed of or rendered inoperable by Oct. 30. Tuesday was the deadline for actually declaring interest in the compensation program.
Same as in the U.S., Canada has its gun prohibition lobbying organization, known as PolySeSouvient, which was founded by survivors of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre in December 1989. The Montreal attack claimed the lives of 14 women, and left ten more women and four men wounded. Ever since, the organization has been pressing for ever-increasing restrictions on Canadian gun owners.
The group posted on ‘X’ Wednesday, “PolySeSouvient said the number of owners who signed up for the program by the deadline was ‘disappointing,’ though far from catastrophic. ‘This is arguably a ‘half-empty, half-full’ situation with respect to the buyback program. Despite pervasive disinformation and daily pleas to refuse to participate from the gun lobby, about half of the estimated number of affected firearms have been registered by their owners.’”
According to the BBC, gun ownership in Canada is regulated by the federal government and the individual provinces. While mass shootings are rare, they do happen, as was the case earlier this year at Tumbler Ridge in northeastern British Columbia.
