Sask. firearms commissioner outlines issues with gun buyback as Ottawa launches pilot

As Canada’s federal government prepares to launch a program designed to seize “assault style firearms” and compensate the owners, Saskatchewan’s firearms commissioner says there are some big issues with Ottawa’s plan.

The federal government plans to launch a pilot program in Nova Scotia starting on Oct. 1 to ensure the program runs smoothly before it is rolled out across Canada. The program is meant to get the roughly 2,500 models of firearm that Ottawa has banned since 2020 out of the hands of owners, while offering them compensation for the money they’ve spent on the now-outlawed guns.

Read more:

• Next phase of government’s assault-style firearm buyback to begin in Nova Scotia
• Police lack resources to enforce gun buyback, minister suggests in recorded exchange
• Gun-control group urges Ottawa to ban SKS as assault-style firearm buyback ramps up

Despite moving forward with the program, which was promised by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree expressed doubts over the efficacy of the buyback scheme in a leaked audio recording. Anandasangaree expressed doubts over the ability of police to enforce the program, and suggested it was only moving forward because of political pressure. The minister also downplayed the suggestion that gun owners might be arrested for failing to comply with the program.

On Wednesday morning, Robert Freberg, Saskatchewan’s firearms commissioner, joined guest host Brent Loucks on the Evan Bray Show to outline his thoughts on the buyback program and why he thinks it’s poorly designed and unlikely to result in a drop in crime.

Listen to the full interview with Freberg here, or read the transcript below:

The following questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

BRENT LOUCKS: We’re talking about the federal government pilot project that was announced this week in this buyback of “assault-style” firearms they’re going to start this next month in Nova Scotia. And I know for firearm owners here in the Prairies, Robert, they’re saying, “What’s next?” When is this going to impact people here in this province?

ROBERT FREBERG: I’m glad we’ve got some time this morning, Brent, because to be honest with you, I’ve been involved in this for five years, and our government’s been very supportive of our efforts to advocate for responsible firearms owners, and I’ve been able to meet with the public safety minister, the deputy commissioner of the RCMP and many officials in public safety, senators, the list goes on and on – Indigenous partners and (the) Métis Nation, who’s been very supportive. But on this particular topic and what’s being raised, there’s so many points to cover regarding this press release from the public safety minister yesterday. I hope we can get through it all, because his whole presentation, for the most part, contains so much misinformation and totally false characterizations around the description of firearms and law-abiding farms owners, that it has an extremely negative effect on Saskatchewan residents, and, frankly, across Canada.

So that’s what people are going to be asking right now with this pilot project that they’re going to launch in Cape Breton next month. This will be the beginning of what will eventually roll out right across the country, will it not?

FREBERG: Well, I’m not convinced it’s going to roll out, Brent. And call me a pessimist here, but I understand Cape Breton and I understand the situation in Nova Scotia and the emotional issue that goes with this. When you really get down to it, the police chief out there, with all due respect, indicated this isn’t going to have a negative effect, and I’m not going to question that. It won’t, because the pilot program involves 200 firearms, and they say it’s going to take them eight weeks to do this. We have small communities in Saskatchewan that have more than 200 firearms, so I don’t see how that pilot program is going to translate into an effective program across Canada, and we’re talking hundreds of thousands of firearms.

My understanding is anyone in Cape Breton who has a valid gun license will be notified by the Mounties that they are eligible to participate. And I guess their option is volunteer to turn in their firearm and get some sort of compensation, keep the firearm and destroy it yourself, which you’d have to pay for, or don’t abide by the law, and you run the risk of arrest.

FREBERG: There’s also a few things that you have to be aware of. Some of the firearms that are being characterized here as “assault-style firearms” – which, by the way, I have to tell you right up front, I take exception to – we have firearms on that list, Brent that are single-shot African safari rifles that were built in 1956 that weigh 22 pounds, and you can’t even buy ammunition for anymore, that are worth somewhere north $120,000, and we have one stakeholder that has dozens of those. I mean, we’re talking millions of dollars in just one particular individual. But that being said, the interesting part of that is that many firearms owners in this province don’t even recognize or understand or will know that the firearm that they own currently, that they bought 20 years ago, is affected. And again, the poster child for this is the AR-15, but those are registered. They can send a letter out to somebody and go “Look, you’re offside. You have to turn this in.” But there’s going to be many firearms owners that are not even aware that they are even affected. So I don’t know how we’re going to get through that.

And on top of that, if you do have a valuable, collector’s firearm, they’re not going to get that kind of compensation off a program like this, will they?

FREBERG: No. We’ve looked at the numbers that they’re suggesting, and they’re certainly, in a lot of cases, on the low end of the scale. Not in all cases, but in many. And then (Anandasangaree) made a comment yesterday that these are used firearms, and they should have used value. I can tell you personally, I’ve got two or three that are brand new, still in the box that never came out, that I bought a couple weeks before the ban came out, not knowing it was coming, and they’ve never been used. We can go on and on about that, but I can tell you, in this province when we brought in the Sask. Firearms Act, we’ve been very specific that in order to have a compensation program that’s effective, people have to be properly compensated. And we’re going to be staying laser-focused on that, because in order to get compliance people have to get proper values. If this happens at all.

How do you see this program? You’ve got word out of Ottawa where the minister was caught, basically not realizing he was being recorded, saying he doesn’t think this is a viable program for the police to enforce in any way. So when you get the sense that they are trying to appease their supporters in Quebec, this thing probably doesn’t have the legs to garner support across the country, does it?

FREBERG: Well, I don’t see that. And, you know, Brent, I’m really gonna sort of hit back hard on this, because I think honestly, Canada doesn’t have a gun problem involving law-abiding gun owners. We’ve said that for a long time. What it’s got right now is a problem with our federal government following in the footsteps of former Prime Minister (Justin Trudeau), who thinks that banning and seizing guns from sport shooters, hunters and Indigenous and Métis harvesters will somehow prevent crime, and they’re doing it by banning law-abiding people’s guns and then labeling them as criminals if they don’t surrender their guns to the government to be destroyed for partial or absolutely no compensation, because of special-interest groups. People need to realize that violent crimes in Canada, 97 per cent don’t involve firearms. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s not an issue, and this province has been, I think, leading the country in programming. We’ve built a ballistics lab. We’re doing a lot of work around revocations or refusals for people who shouldn’t have firearms. We’ve been doing a lot of work with tracing of guns, working with law-enforcement partners to do some things that are really positively impacting gun crime. And you may be surprised to hear this, but we get zero funding for the federal government for that. Now, Prime Minister Carney did mention back in April that he was making a campaign promise that he was going to actually provide some funding to the Saskatchewan firearms lab and the RCMP firearms lab. Interestingly enough, this gun ban comes through because they say it’s a commitment made by their government, but I haven’t heard a word about any funding for this lab, which is direct initiative to prevent gun crime. So I’m frustrated, as you can tell from the tone of my conversation.

And you’re sharing the frustration that a lot of gun owners in our province have been sharing with you as well. And this comes with a pretty steep price tag. This entire program, what are they saying? $700-and-some million, it’s supposed to cost?

FREBERG: Again, misinformation. I mean, there’s $742 million that they’ve said they’ve previously budgeted, which is interesting because our understanding was $500 million, but I won’t dicker on that. But the end of the day, their own people have indicated this program can run into the billions of dollars. But rather than come forward and say, “Yeah, we’re going to have another boondoggle like we had with the long-gun registry,” they’re saying, “Oh no, it’s capped at $740 million and it’s first come, first serve, and it’s voluntary.” What’s voluntary, Brent? If you don’t turn them in, you’re now a criminal when the amnesty expires. I mean, there’s no voluntary process here whatsoever.

And think about the workload this is going to put on local police forces. Cape Breton’s a pretty small example how they’re going to roll this out, but think how it’ll operate once they get it up and running. So far, they’re saying it’s an online process, where you as a firearm owner have decided you’re going to partake in this program, you go onto a website, give your information, and at some point somebody comes and collects your gun.

FREBERG: That’s misinformation, because you’re partially correct. You’re gonna go on and register, but there’s no guarantee you’re gonna be accepted into the program for compensation. So you’ve now basically told the government what you have, because most of these guns, are unregistered. The government, or even myself, we have no idea where they are and who has them, and so they’re going to basically say, “Well, go ahead and register, but we’ve ran out of money, but now we know that you have these guns.” So I don’t see where that’s going to play out very well. And then the other side is around the police resources. I mean, the Ontario police, O.P.P., have turned around and said, “No, we’re not doing this.” Their numbers kicked around, it was going to look at $50 million for them to roll out something like this. And they just said “Look, we’re not going to do this, and we don’t see the value in it.” And in this province, we’ve said to the RCMP and the municipal police, “We want you focused on crime and gun crime and illegal use of firearms, not being a Purolator or Loomis or courier company. I mean, as I’ve kind of jokingly said, what’s next? Uber Eats? “I need a pizza in a hurry. Get over here with it.” Like, come on. Our police agencies need to be focused on what we want them to do, and we don’t have enough resources. In that leaked audio, that’s something I can agree on with the public safety minister. He said “We don’t have enough police forces to enforce the law, so how are we going to have enough to actually go out and collect these firearms?”

How many firearms do you think we’re talking about, across the country?

FREBERG: That’s a great question, and I actually brought some stats that. And you may be shocked to hear this, but you know, 26 per cent of homes in Canada is half a firearm. You know, that works out to about 2.2 million Canadians who own somewhere north of 10 million firearms. So we’re talking a lot of firearms.

But they all wouldn’t fall into the category…

FREBERG: Many do! I mean, this whole “assault-style” firearm issue is just they used back in the day with the handguns, when they called them “Saturday-night specials.” They always like to characterize them because it sounds good and it makes it all Hollywood. But at the end of the day, there’s .22s in here. There’s blinkers, there’s varmint rifles, there’s hunting rifles – the SKS, which is a very popular firearm and used in a lot of our Indigenous and Métis Nation communities for hunting and harvesting. Now the very people who have brought this forward, the special-interest groups, have come out yesterday in the media and said “This whole program is useless. It’s a waste of money unless they ban the SKS.” It’s an insatiable appetite. One of the comments that minister Anandasangaree mentioned yesterday is that “We’re turning off the tap, but we need to empty the swimming pool.” That was one of the comments that was made in French. So this isn’t the end of this.

Oh, by far it’s not the end of it. It’s certainly rising more to the attention of people now, though, that they’ve announced they will begin this pilot project. I’ve got a couple of texts in here with different points of view on this, Robert. Let’s take a look at them here. Dylan says if you own a gun for fun, you don’t need it, plain and simple. No one should cry about a bunch of people losing their toys that were designed to kill. However, he says if you live on a farm or you need it for hunting, that’s a little bit of a different story.

FREBERG: I don’t mean to be offside with your listener, but I need to take exception to the comment. I mean, they’re not toys, and they’re not treated as such, and the people that own them are vetted thoroughly through RCMP background checks. They’re trained. They go through a process. They securely store them. Law-abiding firearms owners haven’t been the ones causing the issues out there that we see in the communities. The other side of this is we’ve got a very good licensing system in Canada and regulatory system, and people have been very responsible in following it. But at the end of the day, if this comes into place and you’re taking people’s property away and not compensating them properly, there’s going to be non-compliance, and we’re going to go into a situation like we had with alcohol and marijuana many, many decades ago, where that was prohibited. And guess what happened? And now many years later we’ve legalized it and controlled it and we’re trying to get it back on track. Again, we’ve got a good system right now and again, they’re not viewed as toys, but people do enjoy sport shooting, and there’s a lot of uses across a lot of areas.

I know some of our listeners have made the comment in text, saying it’s only handguns that are actually registered. That’s not correct, is it?

FREBERG: No, unfortunately. The handguns are registered and controlled, but then they’ve been banned. They’ve been grandfathered, which ironically they’re not doing with these guns. The rifles that they’ve characterized as “assault-style firearms” they want to go out and buy and take away, and yet they’ve grandfathered the handguns. So the point that we’ve made to the federal government is why not do the same thing here and save yourself billions of dollars and have it regulated? And we’re not getting any traction whatsoever because of special-interest groups that want a photo op of these things being chewed up and chopped up. I don’t get it.

–with files from The Canadian Press