LILLEY: Mark Carney should have skipped Trudeau's disastrous gun buyback

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LILLEY: Mark Carney should have skipped Trudeau's disastrous gun buyback

Once again, the program simply isn't working but the Liberals continue to push ahead.

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When Mark Carney took over from Justin Trudeau last year, he wasn’t shy about dropping unworkable Trudeau policies, including dropping the carbon tax to zero.

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It’s too bad he didn’t drop Trudeau’s ill-thought-out gun “buyback” program.

LILLEY: Mark Carney should have skipped Trudeau's disastrous gun buyback Back to video

The program has always been more about political theatre than public safety. It was Trudeau’s way of saying to the Canadian public that he was doing something in the wake of the Nova Scotia massacre that took place in April 2020.

Just days after that event, Trudeau announced that he would ban the AR-15 and other so-called military-style assault weapons. He used the emotions of the country to sell the public on the idea that his plan would keep them safe and that a tragedy like this would never happen again.

Except that this program wouldn’t have prevented that massacre even if it had been in place years earlier.

Shooter used illegal guns to carry out his evil deeds

Gabriel Vortman, the man behind the shooting, didn’t have a gun licence and in fact had been previously banned from owning guns by the court over criminal violence. Still, he had illegal guns, mostly smuggled in from the United States.

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His guns had been reported to the RCMP before the massacre, but they didn’t act.

Trudeau announced the gun ban, said there would be a government “buyback” program and then spent years trying to figure out how to do it. When Carney took office a year ago, he could have said that after five years there had been no movement, that there was no plan to collect all these guns and said he would focus on gun crime, the kind happening in our streets with illegal, smuggled guns from the United States.

Instead, he doubled down.

Program isn’t collecting as many guns as expected

On April 1, Public Safety Canada announced that 37,869 people registered for the program, declaring just over 67,000 firearms.

That’s a fraction of what is out there.

The government has banned more than 2,500 models and variants of rifles and shotguns. Estimates on the total number of guns covered by the ban range from between 150,000 and two million.

Tracey Wilson, VP of public relations at the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, says she believes many gun owners aren’t participating because they are waiting to see what the Supreme Court rules on this matter. The CCFR has already challenged the gun ban and “buyback” program at the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal, losing both times.

Will the Supreme Court step in?

On March 19, though, the Supreme Court agreed to hear their case, when exactly is still to be determined. Wilson said they have several arguments against the law, but the main one is how the government invoked the ban through government decree rather than legislation.

“Can the government use an OIC, an order in council, which is like an executive order, can they use it for something as big as a sweeping gun ban like this, stepping into the lives of millions of Canadians who’ve done nothing to deserve it and confiscate our property,” Wilson said.

She added that CCFR lawyers will be asking for an injunction to make sure that legal gun owners who have held onto their property are protected from criminal prosecution until after the court rules.

In the meantime, the Carney government pushes ahead with this bad plan despite a near complete lack of support from law enforcement.

LILLEY: Gun buyback pilot nothing short of failure after netting 25 weapons

Gun buyback program not 'operationally viable' as Toronto Police opt out

Both Alberta and Saskatchewan have said their governments will not assist and they’ve passed legislation to protect gun owners. Ontario hasn’t gone nearly as far but the Ford government isn’t offering assistance, the Ontario Provincial Police is not participating in the program and most municipal police forces aren’t assisting either.

Only the provincial government of Quebec has signed on to participate along with police services in Halifax, Waterloo, Cape Breton and Winnipeg.

By the way, those 57,440 guns are only registered, they haven’t been collected, they are still in the possession of the owner.

This program is a disaster, Carney should have skipped it.

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