Six years after the ban, the collection trucks finally roll this summer. Before they do, the program’s own arithmetic deserves a look in full daylight, because it is the taxpayer doing the buying.
The background in one breath. Since 2020, Ottawa has banned roughly 2,500 makes and models of firearms. This year it opened a compensation program capped at $248.6 million and gave owners a two month window to declare what they hold. Collection and payment run through the early fall.
Now the Numbers
About 67,000 firearms were declared in that window. Ottawa’s own estimate of affected firearms starts at 150,000. Industry estimates run as high as 518,000. Take the government’s floor and the program reached fewer than half the guns it targets. Take the industry ceiling and it reached about one in eight.
Then there is the pilot run, which collected 25 firearms at a total cost of roughly $176,000. Divide it out and the pilot spent about $7,000 per firearm collected. Nobody at any podium has explained what makes one collected gun worth seven thousand public dollars, because the question has not been asked loudly enough to require an answer.
The Alberta Delivery Gap
For this province the program is mostly a rumour with a budget. Alberta is not administering it. Only a handful of police services outside Quebec opted in at all. Federal mobile units are meant to fill the space, which means a quarter billion dollars is being spent into a delivery gap the size of the prairies.
Meanwhile the same government that split the Gordie Howe International Bridge tolls will tell you every program is fully costed. Fine. Costed against what outcome?
Every Program Deserves a Scoreboard
Here is the standard, and it applies to programs of every political stripe. A quarter billion dollar public safety initiative should come with a scoreboard stapled to it. Which safety statistic is this supposed to move. By how much. By when. Who reports the result, and what happens if it does not move.
Those questions have answers or they do not. If they do, publish them before the trucks roll. If they do not, then $248.6 million is buying a press release with a fleet attached, and Albertans, who are funding their share of it from a province the program barely operates in, deserve to hear which it is.
What result would make this program money well spent, and who is on the hook to show it?
