More proof (as if any was needed) has emerged that the Canadian gun ban and confiscation is a massive administrative, practical and economic debacle.
Canada’s lawful gun owners have just days left in which to “declare [their] prohibited firearms” and submit a claim for compensation under the Liberal government’s “Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program,” as the nationwide “declaration period” ends on March 31. Public Safety Canada (the department overseeing the program) advises that once the declaration period closes, only the gun owners who have submitted a timely declaration are “eligible for the collection process and compensation,” but compensation is not guaranteed. Claims for compensation will be “accepted based on availability of program funds.”
The “availability of program funds” statement raises the issue of how funds have been allocated and spent.
Five years ago, our alert (The Cost of Confiscation: Millions of Dollars, No Sense) reported that the initial cost estimate given for the gun ban and confiscation was CAD$250 million and raised the possibility it would follow the example of the “spectacularly pointless national gun registry” championed by Canada’s Liberal government of the day. The registry started with a price tag of CAD$2 million but ended up costing at least CAN$2.7 billion.
According to Daniel Fritter of the Canadian firearm magazine Calibre, as of early 2026 the amount spent on the gun grab program is CAD$779.8 million, an amount that exceeds the original estimated cost more than three times over.
Fritter refers to government sources showing that “the current known, documented cost to the taxpayer” per gun surrendered or confiscated is approximately CAD$25,000, with the “undocumented cost being even higher” because the “costs accrued by more than a dozen partner agencies” involved haven’t been included. To place that per-gun price tag into context, Public Safety Canada has advised that it intends to pay out an average of CAD$1,800 per gun, making the gun grab’s administrative cost per firearm significantly over CAD$20,000 (and likely more).
However, the few people who participated in the federal government’s initial rollout of the program for individual gun owners in November were reportedly paid far less – around CAD$700 per gun, increasing the already astonishing imbalance between the outlay for administration and compensation. Nothing has been publicly released about the make, model and compensation paid for each confiscated gun collected then and whether these were truly the “weapons of war” that the Liberals used to justify the gun grab. The government “released records that were almost entirely blacked out” in response to a freedom of information request.
Canada’s gun owners have overwhelmingly rejected the gun grab: “somewhere between just 1.6 and 6 percent of newly prohibited firearms in circulation have been declared,” states Fritter. An increasing number of jurisdictions have taken the “ten-foot barge pole” approach to participation, too. The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) issued a March 2 statement advising that “[b]ased on the assessment of the program’s requirements, OPS is not in a position to take on the additional responsibilities without impacting core policing priorities.” Two western provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, have reportedly gone so far as to notify the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which is contracted to act as law enforcement “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.”
Instead of going after responsible gun owners, program funding could be far better spent on investing in actual public safety and fighting crime. A reporter with Canada’s National Post newspaper who describes the program’s steadily ballooning price tag notes that the current cost figure is “significantly larger than the $497 million spent each year to run the Vancouver Police,” would cover almost the entire annual budget of the Montreal Police or half the annual budget of the Toronto Police (the fourth largest police service in North America and another agency that refused to participate). For just “three firearms turned over as part of the program, the federal government could have instead paid the starting salary of a full-time RCMP officer,” or purchase a new, fully-equipped patrol car for the cost of two guns.
For Canadians, six years into this gun grab it is evident the program is going down the drain as the same kind of unforgivable waste as the long gun registry. Far from learning from that fiasco, the Liberal government remains committed to face-saving and the sunk cost fallacy, hanging on to the notion that all of the non-recoverable resources expended so far irrationally justify continued investment despite all evidence to the contrary. For those of us observing from afar, it’s a compelling argument of how useless and costly gun control measures can be.
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