They Budgeted for 136,000 Guns. They Got 67,000 Declarations. It Cost $780 Million.

The deadline was March 31. The target was 136,000 firearms. The budget was $248.6 million in compensation alone. On April 1, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s office confirmed that more than 67,000 firearms had been declared — roughly half of what the government projected. Approximately 32,400 people signed up. The program, six years after the ban was first announced, has missed its own benchmark by a wide margin.¹

The compensation budget is just one piece. The total cost of the program to date — including the bureaucracy built to administer it — has reached approximately $780 million, according to figures compiled by Calibre magazine from government sources. That works out to roughly $25,000 per firearm surrendered or confiscated, not including costs incurred by more than a dozen partner agencies whose expenses have not been publicly disclosed.²

To put that in perspective: $780 million exceeds the annual police budget for either Montreal or Vancouver. It is equivalent to two-thirds of the annual budget of the Toronto Police Service — the fourth-largest police force on the continent.

The warning signs were visible from the start. In late 2025, the government ran a six-week pilot project in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It collected 25 firearms from 16 people. The per-gun cost of the pilot was approximately $6,000 in administrative overhead. The national rollout has been four times more expensive per unit.³

The RCMP’s administrative costs alone jumped from $10 million in 2023 to nearly $86 million last year. The government also committed up to $12.4 million to cover costs incurred by Quebec to run the buyback in that province. None of this is compensation paid to gun owners. It is the cost of running the program itself.

The next phase — physically collecting the firearms — faces an even larger problem. Most police forces across Canada have refused to participate. The Ontario Provincial Police, the Toronto Police Service, the Ottawa Police Service, and dozens of other municipal forces have said they will not devote resources to accepting banned guns, helping issue cheques, or conducting raids on non-compliant owners.⁴

Benoit Debaix / Unsplash — The pilot project in Cape Breton collected 25 firearms from 16 people. The national rollout has cost approximately $25,000 per gun in administrative overhead — enough to hire a police officer for every three firearms collected.

Alberta and Saskatchewan have gone furthest. Both provinces passed legislation prohibiting their local police forces from assisting with the buyback. Both have told the RCMP — which serves as contract law enforcement in more than 80% of the Prairies — that any expenses incurred on the buyback will be deducted from their annual contract fees. More than 4,000 people in those two provinces who applied for compensation will not receive it because their provincial governments refuse to participate.⁵

Public Safety Canada says it will dispatch mobile RCMP collection units to regions where local police refuse to help. The logistics of collecting tens of thousands of firearms across a country where most police forces have opted out remain unclear.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police raised concerns in January that the program would become a “significant operational burden.” The chiefs acknowledged the program could reduce prohibited domestic firearms but warned it “may not align with current policing priorities including the illegal importation, trafficking, smuggling and criminal use of firearms.”⁶

That distinction is the core of the Conservative critique. Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has called the program an attack on “licensed, law-abiding, trained and tested farmers, hunters and sports shooters” that does not target actual crime. The banned firearms — approximately 2,500 makes and models including the AR-15 and Ruger Mini-14 — were prohibited in May 2020 following the Nova Scotia mass shooting. The amnesty period has been extended multiple times and now expires October 30, 2026.

The legal ground is also shifting. The Supreme Court of Canada agreed last month to hear challenges to the firearms ban, including from gun-rights groups arguing the prohibitions are unconstitutional. No hearing date has been set. Advocacy groups have said they will seek an injunction to extend the amnesty period until after the court rules.⁷

The government is showing no signs of reconsidering. “Every assault-style firearm out of our communities is a step forward for public safety,” Anandasangaree said. Liberal Secretary of State Nathalie Provost, a survivor of the 1989 Polytechnique shooting, blamed “disinformation approved and supported by the Conservative Party” for the low uptake.

The Liberals banned 2,500 firearms in 2020. Six years later, they have spent $780 million and collected declarations for fewer than half the guns they budgeted for. The per-gun administrative cost is $25,000 — enough to hire a police officer for every three firearms collected, or buy a cruiser for every two. Most police forces across Canada have refused to participate in the collection phase. Two provinces have legislated non-cooperation. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police says the program does not align with policing priorities. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear constitutional challenges. And 4,000 Canadians who followed the rules and applied for compensation will get nothing because their provincial government said no. The program was supposed to make Canada safer. What it has made is a $780-million monument to a government that announced a policy, failed to build the infrastructure to deliver it, and is now six years into a program that most of the country’s police forces will not touch.