The buyback program managed to spend $67.2-million by 2024, before it collected a single gun, and is now projected to cost $459.8-million in 2025-2026.JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Mark Carney wasted no time in axing a signature Justin Trudeau policy the moment he took on the job. It wasn’t that the carbon tax was bad policy, per se, or focused on the wrong target or poorly administered or needlessly bureaucratic. Indeed, Mr. Carney was broadly supportive of carbon pricing as a mechanism to curb greenhouse gas emissions right up until the moment he got the words “Right Honourable” added to his stationery.
The problem with the carbon tax, as we all know, was that it was deeply unpopular in Canada, so the new Prime Minister had no choice but to kill it if he wanted to keep his job.
Since then, Mr. Carney has demonstrated he doesn’t feel particularly wedded to the policies, procedures and perspectives of his predecessor. In 2023, Mr. Trudeau stood in the House of Commons and accused the Indian government of orchestrating the killing of a Sikh leader on Canadian soil. In 2025, Mr. Carney invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7 in Alberta. For years, Mr. Trudeau lectured the country about Canada’s obligation to welcome and resettle refugees. A month after winning the federal election, Mr. Carney tabled a bill to significantly restrict eligibility criteria for refugees who wish to claim asylum. In 2024, Mr. Trudeau implemented a Digital Services Tax (DST) despite threats of trade retaliation from the U.S. Earlier this week, Mr. Carney cancelled the DST in response to trade retaliation from the U.S.
The value of each decision can be debated on its own merits, but it’s clear that Mr. Carney doesn’t feel compelled to follow the course chartered by Mr. Trudeau. So as long as he’s intent, as he says, on pursuing a more efficient, more effective, less ideological type of governance, there’s one Trudeau-era policy that should rise to the top of his hit list: the Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program.
The government’s plan to buy back thousands of legally owned firearms has been a boondoggle from the moment it was announced. In the wake of a horrific mass killing in Nova Scotia in 2020, the Trudeau government declared it was banning what it called “military-style assault rifles,” which is not an actual firearms designation in Canada. The shooter in that case had not obtained the weapons he used legally, meaning that a ban of this sort would not have prevented his rampage.
Carney unveils public-safety proposals, plans to launch gun-buyback program
Nevertheless, the issue was so urgent, according to the government, that it couldn’t wait for legislation to be passed in Parliament; instead, the government issued an order-in-council to “remove dangerous firearms designed for military use from our communities.” Five years on, not a single one of those dangerous firearms has been collected from an individual license-holder (though 12,195 guns have been collected from businesses as of April 30). The program managed to spend $67.2-million by 2024, before it collected a single gun, and is now projected to cost $459.8-million in 2025-2026. (The Parliamentary Budget Office estimated in 2021 that the total cost could be over $750-million, plus administrative costs.)
Those costs would be defensible if there was some evidence – any evidence – that confiscating the guns prohibited in 2020 (and later, in 2024 and 2025) would meaningfully reduce rates of violent crimes involving firearms. But we know that the vast majority of violent crimes are being committed with illegal firearms; the Toronto Police Service has long reported that the majority of weapons seized by authorities have been smuggled in from the U.S. According to Statistics Canada, in 91 per cent of solved homicides in 2023, the shooter did not have a valid license for the firearm used.
Then there are the ongoing logistical challenges about how guns and gun components will be submitted for compensation. Canada Post is currently participating in the first phase of the buyback program by collecting and shipping prohibited firearms from businesses, but it has refused to take part in the second phase in which firearms will be collected from individuals, citing safety concerns. The federal government might thus have to engage local and provincial police forces, as well as the RCMP, to set up dropoff depots akin to those used by New Zealand during its buyback program (which it announced and completed within the span of one year, though gun crimes continue to rise there).
Mr. Carney didn’t hesitate to kill a defensible policy in the carbon tax. The proposed buyback program, by contrast, isn’t defensible by any measure: it targets the wrong weapons, legally owned by the wrong people, to try to tackle a problem it will absolutely not address. It is already overly bureaucratic, incredibly complicated, and exorbitantly expensive, but the one thing it has going for it is that it sounds good. Who wouldn’t want to ban deadly weapons, after all? Indeed, it’s the antithesis of the carbon tax in that sense, but the buyback program is equally deserving – and arguably, much more deserving – of a spot in the Trudeau-era trash heap.