The Liberals continue to beat a dead horse with the so called gun buyback Scrap the federal gun buyback program and save taxpayers’ money. Tell Carney it’s time to stop beating Trudeau’s dead horse.
Given the mountain of federal debt, the Carney government’s much-anticipated fall budget tells us how the Liberals plan to deal with the prime minister’s new priorities. If the government sincerely wants to cut waste, it should axe the Trudeau-era gun ban and confiscation program, which reportedly is set to fully roll out this fall. But of course the Liberals do not want to cut waste.
This is a taste of my opinion piece published in the Financial Post on October 1, 2025. Read the whole thing!
The gun ban is a sham.
Legal Canadian gun owners are actually slightly less likely to commit murder than the adult population as a whole. Let them keep their guns. Even moose are more dangerous than licensed gun owners.
Scrap the gun buyback
The ban supposedly targeted “assault-style weapons,” which, however fearsome some may look, are actually classic semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, which hunters and sport shooters have been using for more than 100 years. When announcing the ban, Justin Trudeau said the government would confiscate the banned firearms and provide “fair compensation” to owners. But that hasn’t happened.
Meanwhile, there’s no evidence the program will improve public safety. The fact is, Canadian firearms owners are exceptionally law-abiding and less likely to commit murder than other Canadians. That should not actually be surprising. To own a firearm in Canada, you must obtain a Possession and Acquisition Licence (PAL) from the RCMP after initial vetting and daily monitoring for possible criminal activity. Between 2000 and 2020, an average of 12 PAL-holders per year were accused of homicide, out of approximately two million PAL-holders. The PAL-holder firearms homicide rate over these 20 years was 0.63 per 100,000 PAL-holders. But the firearms homicide rate for adult Canadians was 0.72 per 100,000 — 14 per cent higher than the rate for PAL-holders.
