SIMPER: Four extensions, six years, and still no answer — Ottawa’s gun grab is failing by its own logic

Ryan Simper is an Ontario-based marketing and communications professional who has spent his life involved in the Canadian shooting sports community as a hunter, competitor, and advocate.On June 9, the Carney government did something remarkable.It announced that the amnesty protecting licenced firearm owners from criminal prosecution for possessing property prohibited by the federal government in 2020 would be extended once more. This time, there is no fixed end date.Instead, the amnesty will now expire 90 days after the Supreme Court of Canada renders its decision in the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights’ (CCFR) constitutional challenge, a decision expected sometime in 2027.That means Canadians who legally acquired and lawfully possessed these firearms before the 2020 prohibition will have spent at least seven years in legal limbo.These are not unknown people operating outside the law. They are licenced firearm owners, already vetted by the federal government, subject to background checks, and required to follow Canada's firearms licencing rules. Yet for six years, Ottawa has told them their property is too dangerous to remain legal, while also telling them they may keep it a little longer.That contradiction tells you everything you need to know about this program.When the Trudeau government issued its sweeping Order in Council on May 1, 2020, the language was unambiguous. These firearms, it declared, posed a "significant risk to public safety" so severe that it "outweighed any justification for their continued use and availability within Canada." The Liberals called them weapons "specifically designed to inflict mass human casualties" with "no place in Canadian society.”.The original amnesty was set to expire two years later.That should have been enough time if the premise held.It didn't.The amnesty was extended in March 2022. Then again, in October 2023. Then, in October 2024. Then, in October 2025. Then, in October 2026. And now, indefinitely.The government that declared these firearms an urgent threat to public safety has now spent six years telling its owners: "We are fine with you keeping them a little longer.”At some point, the government's own behaviour becomes the rebuttal to its own argument.The numbers behind that behaviour are equally damning, and complicated by a problem the government created for itself.According to Public Safety Canada's own Parliamentary briefing materials, approximately 150,000 firearms were affected by the 2020 prohibition. Of those, roughly 110,000 were formerly restricted and therefore registered. In plain terms, the government knew who owned them and where they were.The remaining 40,000 were formerly non-restricted firearms, which were not required to be registered in Canada. That means the government did not have a reliable list of them, their owners, or their locations when it prohibited them. On that second group, Ottawa admits its estimate is "based on open-source records from 2012, which have been increased by 25% to account for observable trends in market growth.”.That is not a registry; it is a guess using 14-year-old data.The Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association, drawing on historical import permit data, estimates the total number of affected formerly non-restricted firearms is approximately ten times the government's figure. This is a variance that the Parliamentary Budget Office acknowledged and incorporated into its own analysis. The result is a PBO cost estimate ranging from $47 million to $756 million, depending on whose count you use. The gap between those two numbers is the gap between what the government claims to know and what it never had the records to prove.That uncertainty matters because the buyback declaration period that closed on March 31, which required owners to log their intent to surrender their property for compensation formally, produced 67,000 declarations from 37,869 individual owners. Against the government's conservative count of 150,000 affected firearms, that represents roughly 45% participation. Against the industry estimate of approximately 518,000, participation falls to about 13%. The program's own math cannot tell you which one it is.What it can tell you is the cost. By March 2026, approximately $800 million had been spent. At that point, roughly 32,000 firearms had been collected, working out to about $25,000 per firearm, often far more than the market value of the guns being surrendered. In Cape Breton, a pilot collection event recovered 25 firearms at a cost of $6,000 each, of which only $700 went to the owner, and $5,300 went to administrative overhead.Ottawa is spending extraordinary sums to retrieve firearms from licenced owners who were already known to the state, vetted, and subject to ongoing eligibility screening. Meanwhile, police leaders have repeatedly pointed to illegal importation, trafficking, smuggling, and the criminal use of firearms as the more urgent public safety priorities. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police was direct about this, describing the program as misaligned with current policing priorities.That is the central problem..This policy has always been aimed at the easiest people for the government to find, not the people driving violent crime.And now, even that approach has stalled.The declaration window has closed. Owners who did not participate by March 31 can no longer receive compensation. They must deactivate, export, or surrender their firearms without payment.Those owners are now in a different kind of limbo: the compensation door has shut behind them, but the amnesty remains open and now has no fixed end date. The government has simultaneously closed the path to compensation and removed any immediate consequence for non-compliance. In practice, it has acknowledged that it will not be enforcing this law anytime soon.The Supreme Court challenge now gives the Carney government an opportunity.The CCFR's case is expected to be heard between January and April 2027, with a decision to follow, and then 90 more days after that before the amnesty expires. If the Court rules against the government, Ottawa will have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars prohibiting property it had no constitutional authority to prohibit in the first place..Even if the government wins, it will still face the same compliance problem it has had since day one: a large and unmeasured population of formerly non-restricted firearms in private hands, owned by people who have now been formally excluded from compensation.The Carney government did not design this program. It inherited it.That matters.Mark Carney has no political equity tied up in the 2020 Order in Council. The Supreme Court process gives him a clean mechanism to move on: let the Court decide, accept the outcome, and govern accordingly.If the Court strikes down the prohibition, the program can end without Ottawa having to admit the original policy was wrong. If it upholds it, the government can start fresh with an honest accounting of what it will actually take, and what it will actually cost, to achieve meaningful compliance.What is not an option, or at least should not be, is a seventh extension.Spending six years telling vetted, background-checked Canadians that their property is simultaneously too dangerous to own, yet perfectly fine to keep a little longer, is not a public safety strategy.It is a confession that the original premise was wrong, written in amnesty orders, one year at a time.Ryan Simper is an Ontario-based marketing and communications professional who has spent his life involved in the Canadian shooting sports community as a hunter, competitor, and advocate.

SIMPER: Four extensions, six years, and still no answer — Ottawa’s gun grab is failing by its own logic

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