Protesters rally against a federal firearm ban and buyback program in front of the legislature in Quebec City, on Feb. 28.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
Ed Landy has been shooting so long he can remember riding the school bus with a shotgun so he could hunt ducks after the final bell.
“My teacher would just tell me to keep it in a locker during school hours,” Mr. Landy recalls of his ninth-grade hobby in rural Manitoba. “And then he’d wish me luck at the end of the day.”
Now aged 75, Mr. Landy remains an avid firearms enthusiast, even as the federal government has limited their use and availability in the wake of several mass shootings over the past four decades.
But the latest restrictions have proved the most jarring, forcing him to sift through RCMP e-mails, social-media posts and online lists to determine what to do with his guns ahead of a looming deadline.
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The end of this month will bring yet another milestone in Ottawa’s decades-long campaign to take control of firearms like the ones used in the massacres. But unlike past gun-control measures, this one lacks widespread support from a crucial partner – local police – creating jurisdictional bewilderment for the likes of Mr. Landy and undermining confidence that the program will accomplish the government’s goal of eradicating assault-style firearms.
“It’s all very confusing,” said Mr. Landy, who lives in Winnipeg, where the Manitoba Premier has vowed not to participate in the looming firearms buyback program but the local police force has. “Me and my friends are calling the deadline doomsday.”
March 31 is the cutoff date to declare ownership of assault-style firearms, a type of magazine-fed, semi-automatic rifle used in mass shootings in Montreal, Quebec City, Portapique, N.S. and elsewhere.
Since the Portapique shooter took 22 lives in 2020, Ottawa has banned about 2,500 models – mostly rifles but some shotguns as well – totalling between 150,000 and 518,000 guns across Canada. The precise figure is unknown owing to the scrapping of the long-gun registry in 2012.
Visitors pay their respects at a roadside memorial in Portapique, N.S.Andrew Vaughan
Owners who declare by the March deadline qualify for compensation if they turn in their prohibited guns. Those who don’t have until Oct. 30 to surrender or deactivate their firearms. After that, they could face criminal prosecution.
Ottawa had been relying on local police to collect the surrendered guns from their owners. But one by one, municipal forces and police associations have turned their backs on the program.
“I think what a lot of municipalities are finding is that this is a hot-potato program,” said Noah Schwartz, a political science professor at the University of the Fraser Valley and author of Targeted, a study of Canadian gun culture. “Activists in Canada have been very diligent about writing letters and showing up at municipal town halls when the issue is being discussed.”
Canada has long maintained stringent gun-control regulations. The RCMP created a centralized handgun registry in 1951. Automatic firearms – guns that can fire continuously for as long as the trigger is held down – were prohibited in 1977. In the mid-nineties, Ottawa introduced a universal licensing system and banned an array of semi-automatic rifles – firearms that shoot once with every pull of the trigger without a user having to manually chamber a new round.
March 31 is the cutoff date to declare ownership of assault-style firearms.J.P. MOCZULSKI/The Globe and Mail
For the most part, Canada’s police forces supported those efforts, said R. Blake Brown, author of Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada and a history professor at Saint Mary’s University.
But things are different in 2026.
Outside of Quebec, which is receiving $12.4-million in federal funding to direct a provincewide buyback, only police in Halifax, Waterloo, Cape Breton and Winnipeg have opted in, leaving vast swaths of the country where the collection of banned guns is uncertain.
The RCMP is also being funded to participate.
“Not to say the obvious, but this has definitely been a challenge for the federal government,” Prof. Brown said about the buyback.
In Ontario alone, at least 20 local forces – including the Ontario Provincial Police and the Toronto Police Service – have declined to participate in the program. Their reluctance was galvanized last summer when the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police met with Public Safety Canada about the buyback and subsequently issued a press release framing the program as a bureaucratic distraction: vague in its rules, costly in its staffing demands and aimed at law-abiding gun owners.
In an interview, OACP president Mark Campbell estimated that accepting a single gun takes between 15 and 20 minutes. Hundreds of guns could bog down detachments, he said.
The group also pointed to an underwhelming buyback pilot project conducted in Cape Breton last fall that collected just 25 firearms over six weeks, 175 fewer than expected, at a cost of $149,760 for administration and $26,535 for compensation, according to federal records.
Mr. Campbell said the buyback forced chiefs to weigh whether they wanted “to focus on serious violent crimes and repeat violent offenders as opposed to acting as custodians for a federal gun buyback program.”
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree privately acknowledged the program’s flaws in September. That month, a leaked audio recording emerged that captured him telling a tenant of a property he owned that the buyback was necessary to hold support in Quebec.
In recent months, the premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island all spurned the program. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has effectively barred police there from participating, labelling it a “gun grab against law-abiding firearms owners.”
That has created problems for some Alberta gun owners. A Calgarian with two banned 9mm carbines worth a total of $3,000 told The Globe he’s keen to turn them in for federal compensation. But after contacting the Calgary Police Service, the Alberta RCMP, the provincial Chief Firearms Officer and two local gunsmiths, he can’t find a willing taker. He even called the closest B.C. RCMP detachment to see whether going to British Columbia would help. They told him not to bother. The Globe is not naming the gun owner because he feared it would make him a target for theft.
Public Safety Canada confirmed that Alberta legislation has effectively barred residents in that province from participating in the program.
Through the first two months of the declaration window, around 26,000 Canadians have declared more than 51,000 firearms, according to Mr. Anandasangaree.
A statement from his office noted that agreements with several other jurisdictions are “in the works,” without providing names.
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The figures are well short of the total number of prohibited rifles in circulation, ranging from the government’s estimate of 150,000 to an industry estimate of 518,000. Ottawa has said compensation will be dispensed based on the availability of funds, capped at $248.6-million.
Public Safety Canada says it will dispatch its own Mobile Collection Units staffed with RCMP to regions lacking local police participation.
“The decision of local police forces to not administer the collection of firearms will not prevent the federal government from collecting them through these MCUs,” said Simon Lafortune, spokesman for the minister’s office.
“The results from the first month of the launch of the gun buyback program have clearly demonstrated the willingness of law-abiding gun owners to declare their weapons and, contrary to what the detractors of this program would like you to believe, a majority of Canadians support the assault-style firearms ban.”
Halifax Police Chief Don MacLean has an inbox full of those detractors.
Halifax police to participate in federal gun buyback program
To him, the choice was a no-brainer. Halifax and most other police departments already serve as collection points for unwanted firearms. Last year, Halifax destroyed 156 guns voluntarily surrendered by owners, Chief MacLean said. He sees the buyback as an extension of the same program, with the welcome addition of $654,751 in federal funding.
“I really don’t see a big difference with this program except that the issues around it have become more politicized,” he said. “I think there becomes a conflation sometimes between the firearms compensation program and the actual ban itself, which I understand to be divisive and contentious for a lot of folks.”
The Mass Casualty Commission into the Portapique massacre found that the presence of firearms in a home is associated with increased chances of accidental injury, suicide, domestic violence, hate crimes and diversion of lawfully owned guns. Chief MacLean’s proximity to that tragedy hardened his decision.
“This is no knock against lawful gun owners or anything like that, but fundamentally I think a community with fewer guns is better than a community with more, particularly in an urban environment,” he said.
Eventually, local police nationwide will be drawn into the issue. Anyone holding on to banned guns beyond Oct. 30 could face criminal prosecution and the loss of their firearms licence.
Is that likely to happen? The leaked recording of Mr. Anandasangaree captured his take: “I just don’t think municipal police services have the resources to do this.”