PBO Report Estimates Canadian Gun Ban Cost - Sort Of

The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) released a report estimating the costs of compensating Canadian gun owners for their prohibited firearms. Being unable to obtain any meaningful details as to how the Liberal’s plan to execute the gun ban they created last May, the PBO was forced to base the report on the New Zealand model of compensation and, thus, the estimated totals extrapolated range from $56M to $756M. No, that is not a typo.

The massive variance is due to a huge discrepancy between two estimates of the total firearms impacted by the ban. Public Safety told the PBO they’d arrived at a figure of 150,000 firearms, after prohibiting nine new types of firearms, as well all AR-15s, anything with a bore greater than 20mm in diameter, and anything capable of producing over 10,000 joules of muzzle energy, on May 1st, 2020. This figure was reportedly “based on open-source records from 2012 and adjusted up (by 25 percent).” 

However, historical and more recent import certificates provided by Canadian firearms importers and distributors put the figure much higher; at 518,000. 

The government’s inability to estimate gun totals hearkens back to 2011, when the long gun registry was a hotly debated item prior to its demise. When it was removed, 7.8 million guns were registered, of some 15 million guns estimated to have been imported into Canada by that time. 

Aside from the gross inaccuracy of basing the estimate on numbers from a long-gun registry that was in part cancelled because it was inaccurate, we can find no evidence to support the government’s estimate of 25% increases for the now-banned firearms over 2012 totals. 

Using the totals of registered firearms as reported in the Commission of Firearm’s Annual Reports for 2012 and 2019 (the last year for which data is available) indicated an increase of 60.9%. And while that number only reflects the increase in restricted firearms (the non-restricted firearms registry being cancelled in 2011), it is if anything a conservative estimation of the growth one would expect to see in the non-restricted market, being both larger and more popular. License volumes don’t give any indication as to where Public Safety’s 25% estimate comes from either; over that same time period (2012 to 2019) there was a 14.5% increase in the number of PAL holders (1,938,080 in 2012 versus 2,219,344 in 2019.)

Overall, the PBO report’s compensation cost estimate is likely not a realistic estimate, but perhaps the PBO report can provide insight into the level of government organization as we look towards the end of the current amnesty on April 20, 2022:

“As noted in the report, there remains too many outstanding questions on how this program will be implemented to currently develop a complete picture of the true potential cost of the program. Many of these details, such as the compensation structure and program administration costs, will have a significant impact on the overall cost of the program. PBO could therefore only provide estimates of potential scenarios, solely for the cost compensating firearms owners, rather than the full cost of the program. Based on the experience of previous firearms programs, administration costs are highly affected by program design and can represent a high proportion  of overall costs.”

In 2002, the Auditor General penned the famous report that notified parliament that the cost of the long-gun registry, which was initially estimated at $2 million, had eclipsed $1 billion. The PBO report, by its own admission, is not a report on program cost but rather compensation costs, due to the lack of transparency provided by the Ministry of Public Safety on the file.

Stage 1 of the contract awarded to IBM to facilitate the buy-back has already incurred a $1.2M cost to the taxpayer, and that doesn’t include the hundreds of man-hours it took to get the OIC and its supporting legislation, Bill C-21, proposed, drafted, and introduced. The PBO even points out that their own reliance on New Zealand’s data renders an incomplete estimate of costs simply due to geographic size: Being over 37 times the size of New Zealand, the cost of collecting, storing and transporting seized firearms is not insignificant, especially in Canada’s more remote areas.

So, what will it really cost? It’s hard to say. And frankly, with quantitative easing having made the transition from theory to reality so thoroughly, it’s hard to find context for a gun ban that will likely cost 1-5 billion dollars in a nation so far in the red it doesn’t even remember what black looks like. 

But it’s easier to find the other costs. With unemployment already low across the country, the RCMP quite literally lowering their hiring standard to meet staffing requirements, and the public sector already accounting for roughly 20% of jobs in Canada, it’s hard to imagine such a program is even possible, never mind plausible. The long-gun registry, which accounted for nearly 8 million firearms at its peak, employed over 600 people and had a logistical operation that never got more complicated than sending letters.

For over a decade, the Canadian Firearms Centre’s phone messaging service has begun with the same phrase: “We are experiencing higher than average call volumes, please hold.” The police tasked with enforcing these very laws? Overworked, overburdened, and oftentimes ill-equipped to handle today’s challenges with policies, equipment, and training stuck in the past. 

And the courts and prison system those officers serve as the foundation for? In even worse condition. Canada’s crime severity index crept up 5% in 2019, with violent crime rising by a whopping 7.3% nationally. Worse still, the clearance rates (which indicate how many cases are seen through to a successful verdict), have declined across the board since the Liberals took office. In 2019 alone the overall clearance rate saw a decline of 5.12% while violent crimes were solved 6.4% less frequently.

And the victims of these more-common, less-solved crimes? The people you read about in the paper; the marginalized. The over 13,000 drug poisoning victims that have died since this government took office. Kids too young to drive have been told to shoot an enemy on our city street. And of course, the thousands upon thousands of victims of crime across Canada who have been more poorly served by our justice system than they would have been before this government took office. The US State Department has formally delegated Canada “a major money laundering country,” alongside places like China, Cuba, and Afghanistan, and to add insult to injury also declared our fair nation “as a ‘major precursor country’ for illicit narcotics and a source country for fentanyl.”

During his final message before the summer session, where he introduced yet more gun regulations, Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair stated that “strengthening gun control has been [his] number one priority as the Minister of Public Safety.”

It’s too bad public safety wasn’t.

Read the PBO report here: 4196f91c9ca790eba879bf359fc2535b02af838191712fcef827a0643d71b4a7 (pbo-dpb.ca)