The British Columbia school shooting comes as Canadian authorities face significant obstacles and complex practical and logistical challenges in rolling out a national firearms buyback.
Canada already has much stronger gun laws than the United States, and mass shootings are extremely rare. The government has pushed for major reforms and a ban on assault-style weapons after the worst mass shooting in Nova Scotia’s history in 2020, when a man pretending to be a police officer killed 22 people.
In January, Canada began implementing one of those reforms, a long-awaited and hotly debated program aimed at compensating the country’s gun owners for currently banned firearms. But the buyback program has been hit by years of delays and pushback from police, state officials and gun owners.
In September, audio leaked of Canada’s Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangary, who is responsible for enforcing the law, questioning the ability of police to enforce buybacks. Anandasangaree later said the recording was made without his knowledge and that his comments were “misguided.”
Under the framework announced last month, Canadians who own any of the 2,500 banned makes and models of assault-style weapons have until March 31 to turn in their guns and potentially register to receive money in return.
Gun owners who register after that date will not be compensated, but must surrender their guns or permanently retire them by October 30, 2026. Otherwise, you risk criminal charges for illegally possessing a prohibited firearm.
Complicating the buyback is the fact that Canada has a larger inventory of guns than it can collect through the program alone. The federal government estimates it has the funds to buy 136,000 firearms, but a 2017 study by the Swiss-based independent research group Small Arms Research found Canada has about two million registered guns and 10 million unregistered guns.
“Canada actually has a much higher rate of civilian gun ownership than other developed democracies,” said Blake Brown, a gun control expert and professor at St. Mary’s University in Nova Scotia.
Brown said despite overall support for gun control among Canadians, buybacks are moving “very slowly” in some cases due to opposition from gun owners.
“Public opinion polls show that there is almost always very strong support for stricter gun control,” Brown said. “But this is a political issue. The Conservative Party of Canada, in its current form, aligns with the position of many gun owners in the country.”
One such gun owner is Rod Giltaka, CEO of the Canadian Firearms Rights Coalition, a group that calls itself “Canada’s firearms lobby.” Giltaka told CNN he strongly supports Canada’s strict licensing regulations, but believes stock buybacks go too far.
“We are not anti-regulation,” Giltaka said. “We just want to make sure these regulations have a clear impact on public safety, and if they are put in place solely to punish law-abiding gun owners, they should be repealed.”
“Canada has a vibrant gun culture,” Giltaka continued. “And I’m all for regulation, as long as it’s not suspended for frivolous political reasons.”
Share buybacks have also encountered friction in Western Canada. Alberta has said it will not participate in the buyback and has banned police from participating. Saskatchewan and Manitoba have also said they will not participate.
“We’ve made that clear from the beginning,” Alberta Chief Firearms Officer Terry Bryant told CNN from the sidelines of a gun show over the weekend.
“We had no intention of being part of this plan,” Bryant said. “And they spent six years on it. If they thought this was really important, they would have set up some mechanism.”
In a statement to CNN, the Department of Public Safety said in the absence of state approval or police cooperation, the federal government will deploy a Mobile Recovery Unit (MCU) to recover prohibited firearms from their owners.
“A local police department’s decision not to control the collection of firearms does not preclude the federal government from collecting firearms through these MCUs,” said spokesperson Simon LaFortune.
But Bryant said it’s unclear how these MCUs will operate in Alberta.
“Those mobile collection units will require a seizure agent license from us,” Bryant said. “They haven’t applied.”
Elsewhere in the country, some police departments are still debating whether to participate in the buyback, and others have vowed not to participate.
Four days after the shooting at Kingston’s Tumbler Ridge, the Ontario Provincial Police Service announced that the medium-sized city would no longer collect or store prohibited guns for the project, citing an October recommendation from the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP).
OACP spokesperson Jose Couto told CNN that Canadian police are most concerned about firearms that are not owned by licensed gun owners in Canada, typically those brought illegally across the U.S. border.
This includes some of the firearms used in the 2020 mass shooting that prompted the Canadian government to introduce buybacks. Three of the guns used in the assault were illegally smuggled from Maine. The gunman also illegally owned another gun he used, a model of rifle that is currently banned and subject to buyback laws.
In a statement to CNN, Public Safety’s Mr. LaFortune pointed to other bills introduced by the Liberal government to combat gun smuggling and tighten bail laws, saying the buyback is “just one part of our government’s broad, comprehensive approach to combating crime across Canada and ensuring the safety and security of all Canadians.”
“Our priorities are to keep our communities safe by eliminating the flow of assault weapons, cracking down on gun smuggling at our borders, and investing in police and community programs that prevent gun crimes in the first place,” LaFortune said.
But some gun violence experts remain wary of supporting the program. Juyoung Lee, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, told CNN that previous buyout programs in other countries have had “minimal to no impact on violent crime rates.”
“I can understand the reluctance of police to crack down on this matter,” Lee said. “This is very exciting because people look at all these guns (collected) and have the assumption, ‘Okay, there are so many fewer guns on the streets now.'” So why aren’t we all safer? ”
“The problem is a social network problem,” Lee continued. “It is highly unlikely that people participating in these programs are submitting or putting guns into the hands of underground networks or people committing crimes.”
However, research shows that the significant decline in mass shootings is due to buybacks. This was a point emphasized by Wendy Cukier, president of the Gun Control Coalition. Mr. Cukier has advocated for stricter gun laws in Canada since the 1989 massacre at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique.
She told CNN that the buyback is not a panacea for criminal gun use in Canada, but is aimed at stopping mass shootings like the one at Tumbler Ridge.
“This buyback is aimed at addressing a very specific issue,” Cukier said, “which is that Canadians don’t believe civilians should have access to military-style semi-automatic firearms.”
Regarding the impact on legal gun owners, Mr. Cukier pointed to statistics showing that about half of the firearms used in homicides in Canada were obtained legally, at least initially.
“Our fundamental position has always been that no law can prevent all tragedies,” Cukier said. “The key is risk management. At least in developed countries, countries with stricter gun laws tend to have fewer such incidents and lower gun homicide rates.”
