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 January 19, the federal government sent an industrial-scale email to nearly every one of Canada’s 2.3 million licenced firearm owners. It wasn't a standard update. Instead, it was an invitation to a "maybe." For the next ten weeks, owners are being asked to log into a portal and "declare" property that, in many cases, the government doesn't even know they have.For owners of restricted rifles like the AR-15, the state already has the serial numbers. But for the hundreds of thousands of formerly non-restricted firearms, Ottawa is effectively blind. By blast-emailing the entire PAL-holding population, the government is trying to crowdsource a registry for the sole purpose of confiscation. They are asking the most vetted, law-abiding segment of society to help the state identify and seize their own property — all for the possibility of a cheque.This "confiscation-first" model is an outlier. While Canada treats its most scrutinized citizens as a mystery to be solved through mass emails, a different trend is taking hold in Central and Eastern Europe. There, modern democracies are doubling down on trust.The Czech Republic is the gold standard here. On January 1, Prague fully implemented a new Firearms Act. Like us, they modernized. But their digital "Central Firearms Register" wasn’t built to facilitate a grab; it was built to cut through the red tape. Czech law now allows owners to verify their status instantly via a mobile app, reaffirming a citizen's right to acquire and carry for defence.It isn't a coincidence that the countries leading the world in trust-based regulation — the Czechs, the Poles, and the Baltics — are the same ones with a living, generational memory of authoritarian rule. For them, civilian disarmament isn't some theoretical policy debate on a PowerPoint slide. It was a lived experience enforced by occupying regimes. These societies came out of the twentieth century with a hard-learned lesson: when a state stops respecting property rights or treating its citizens as partners, freedom vanishes. Their modern laws reflect that memory. They still require rigorous licencing, background checks, and training, but they have chosen to view the vetted citizen as a strategic asset, not a liability..In Canada, we are moving toward a "Liability Model" of citizenship. The current approach implies that the vetting process itself — the very background checks these 2.3 million people pass every single day — isn't enough. By obsessing over the object rather than the owner, the state is signaling that it no longer trusts its own licencing system.The 2026 Compensation Program highlights this through its own fine print. The portal explicitly warns that "submitting a declaration does not guarantee you will receive compensation." It’s a "first-come, first-served" system. We are asking people to hand over property for a "maybe," while threatening them with criminal liability if they miss the October 30 deadline. In any other sector, taking property without a guaranteed fair market value would be a scandal. Here, it’s just another Monday in Ottawa.This is why we’re seeing a fracture in our own institutions. In early 2026, several Ontario police services — from London to Peterborough — signaled they won't prioritize administrative seizures from licenced owners. They know where the real threat is: the illegal "street guns" in the hands of violent offenders, not the hunting rifles of people who voluntarily gave their addresses to the RCMP years ago.If nations that have actually felt the weight of an authoritarian boot can build safe, digital systems that respect property, why can’t we? Poland and the Czech Republic have proven you can have public safety without treating your neighbours like suspects.As the March 31 deadline looms, we should ask why a licence to own property has become a notice of upcoming surrender. We should look to Europe and realize that a secure nation is built on trusted citizens and respected rights — not a digital portal designed to make a law-abiding populace disappear their own heritage.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.
