On Tuesday, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree announced that the next phase of the government's gun buyback program will be launched in Cape Breton, N.S., next month.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
There are two very simple ways to deduce what a member of cabinet truly thinks about his or her government’s schemes. The first method is to infer what any right-minded, reasonably informed person would think about, say, blowing three-quarters of a billion dollars (plus administrative costs) to confiscate legally owned guns, which we know are not being used in the vast majority of firearms-involved crimes on Canadian streets. The second method is to get ministers in a room where they believe no one is listening, and to let them know it’s safe to use their brains and not their centrally conceived talking points.
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree accidentally told the truth about his government’s plan to buy back more than 2,500 firearm models from Canadian licence-holders in a secretly recorded conversation, as first reported by the Toronto Star. In an exchange with his tenant, Mr. Anandasangaree appeared to confirm that the rationale behind the program makes no sense (“Don’t ask me to explain the logic to you on this, okay?” he said at one point in the 20-minute conversation), and suggested that the motivation for following through with the Trudeau-era promise was to maintain Liberal support in Quebec (“Quebec is in a different place than other parts of Canada, right?” he said. “And this is something that is very much a big, big, big deal for many of the Quebec electorate that voted for us.”)
What’s particularly noteworthy about this exchange – beyond the fact that the minister who is responsible for a multipronged, billion-dollar, nationwide buyback program has no faith in the program – is that all of three months ago, Mr. Anandasangaree didn’t have even the most rudimentary knowledge of firearm licensing in Canada.
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Indeed, in an exchange in the House of Commons in June, the Public Safety Minister was asked if he could define “RPAL” (which stands for Restricted Possession and Acquisition Licence, one of the licence classes for firearm possession in Canada) and he could not, and then was asked if he knew what the “CFSC” was (the Canadian Firearms Safety Course, which would-be licence-holders must complete if they want to legally own firearms in this country) and he could not.
Let’s ignore the question of what Prime Minister Mark Carney was thinking by awarding Mr. Anandasangaree the public safety file for a moment. If someone who couldn’t even define “RPAL” three months ago can see now that the government’s buyback scheme is politically motivated theatre, why on Earth would the government continue with this charade?
But continuing it is. On Tuesday, Mr. Anandasangaree wore a straight face while announcing that the next phase of the buyback program will be launched in Cape Breton, N.S., next month. That means that five years after then-prime minister Justin Trudeau told the public that the urgent threat to public safety was so dire that his government required an order-in-council to immediately reclassify certain firearms as prohibited, the government is finally attempting to collect those weapons from licensed individuals.
So far, the government’s buyback program has been limited to businesses, but starting in October, individuals in Cape Breton will be able to make an appointment to surrender their firearms to police. The government has said it expects the program to be expanded nationwide this fall.
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During his press conference, Mr. Anandasangaree erroneously told the public the buyback program is “voluntary.” The minister responsible for public safety ought to know, however, that it would be a criminal offence to own a prohibited firearm after the government’s amnesty period ends on Oct. 30, and that anyone found in possession of a prohibited firearm could be found guilty of an indictable offence and face a prison sentence of up to five years.
In any case, with so many clear and recurring threats to public safety nowadays – from recidivist offenders repeatedly out on bail to smuggled firearms from the U.S. being used in 80 to 90 per cent of crimes in certain regions – it is crucial that the minister responsible for the file has homed in on what matters: getting guns out of the safes of licensed firearms owners, so that people who similarly can’t define RPAL feel safer.
It’s not hard to deduce what Mr. Carney likely thinks about all of this. He is a right-minded, reasonably informed person, after all, so it’s safe to assume he has concluded that the political cost of cancelling the program would be more than the financial cost of keeping it, even if it ends up costing more than a billion dollars. This technocrat is still a politician, after all. And what about Mr. Anandasangaree’s future? Well, it’s easy to imagine that if you get Mr. Carney in a room and tell him no one is listening, he might accidentally tell the truth about the “confidence” he has expressed in his Public Safety Minister, too.