Canadian Taxpayers Federation kickstarts anti-ban/buyback petition

A longtime ally of Canadian firearms owners is once again stepping into the battle against unproductive, cost-prohibitive gun control policies. Now, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is running a petition on its website, asking the federal government to end its current gun ban and forced firearm "buy-back" plans.

Here's what the petition says:

Scrap the gun ban and buy back

To the Prime Minister,

The federal government has banned hundreds of types of guns owned by law-abiding Canadians and the Liberal election platform includes $200 million in taxpayers’ money to buy back those guns, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer says the bill could be more than $750 million.

This expensive policy arbitrarily bans and buys guns owned by law-abiding Canadians and will not take away illegal guns from criminals.

Further, it’s wrong to impose this policy without a vote in the House of Commons.

And spending hundreds of millions to buy legally owned guns will not make Canadians safer.

You can see and sign the petition here.

Will it help?

Maybe this petition will get a message to someone, anyone who can make a difference, but don't get your hopes up. The Liberal government has a long history of ignoring petitions related to firearms policies. Although Petition E-2341 (asking for firearms laws to be debated in Parliament, not passed through Order in Council regulations) was the most-signed e-petition in the federal government's history, the Liberal government's response was to actually increase restrictions on firearms. Before that, the Liberal party also ignored Petition E-111, asking for the legal status of the AR-15 to be changed. MP Blaine Calkins' petition for information on the supposedly-deleted federal firearms registry data seems to have resulted in no change. Neither has a petition asking for an end to the government's new "shadow registry," which slows down transfer processes.

However, while the petitions themselves may be ignored publicly by those in power, they do send a message to anyone who's paying attention. These are issues that people care about, and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is persistent. It's been on the issue of May, 2020 Order in Council gun bans for months, uncovering cost overruns and even running billboard ads in major cities to warn taxpayers of the wasteful expense of the program.

Taxpayer discontent was a big part of the end of the original Long Gun Registry, and if the Federation can bring the financial issues to people's attention, that could a lot more beneficial than any petition, in the long run.