Gun Rights

Just 25 guns. That’s how many firearms were taken in as part of the Mark Carney government’s gun “buyback” pilot program in Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton region.

The government had been hoping for 200 guns collected in an area that industry experts estimate has at least 2,000 guns that the government has banned.

Ottawa’s gun grab program is under renewed fire after a federal pilot project in Cape Breton netted just 25 firearms, far short of government targets, prompting critics to call the entire scheme a costly failure.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation says the six-week pilot project, launched in September 2025, demonstrates what law enforcement and policy experts have warned for years: confiscating firearms from licensed owners will not make communities safer.

The Liberal government says it’s learned some lessons after a pilot project to buy outlawed assault-style firearms from owners yielded a low uptake.

Since 2020, Ottawa has banned some 2,500 makes and models of assault-style firearms, arguing they are designed for warfare — not hunters and sport shooters.

The decision saw backlash from the Opposition Conservatives and firearms-rights groups. The government has pointed to its plan to buy back those guns as a way to fairly compensate owners.

Democrats want our guns, and they want to repeal the Second Amendment. They’ve been very clear about their agenda for quite some time now. Unfortunately for them, jurisprudence and good, old-fashioned American stubbornness are not on their side. Americans own hundreds of millions of firearms, ranging from handguns to various rifles.

Picture a winter morning in northern Alberta or rural Saskatchewan.

A licenced firearms owner — maybe an indigenous hunter, maybe a rancher — reaches for the same rifle or shotgun they’ve used for decades.

It might be an SKS picked up when they were still cheap and plentiful. It might be a semi-automatic shotgun that takes detachable magazines because that’s what the local shop had in stock at the time.

Once upon a time, there was a provincial justice minister who abhorred a new, far-more-expensive-than-originally-quoted federal gun program that infringed upon the lives of private citizens. So, he decided not to enforce any of it.

I’m not referring to Alberta Justice Minister Mickey Amery and his move against federal gun seizures on Wednesday, which signalled to all provincial entities that they should not participate in the buyback program. This is about a group of justice ministers in the early 2000s who refused to play ball when it came to the federal long-gun registry.