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Fraser Institute

Cost of Ottawa’s gun ban fiasco may reach $6 billion

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6 minute read

From the Fraser Institute

By Gary Mauser

According to the government, it has already spent $67.2 million, which includes compensation for 60 federal employees working on the “buyback,” which still doesn’t exist.

Four years ago, the Trudeau government banned “1,500 types” of “assault-style firearms.” It’s time to ask if public safety has improved as promised.

This ban instantly made it a crime for federally-licensed firearms owners to buy, sell, transport, import, export or use hundreds of thousands formerly legal rifles and shotguns. According to the government, the ban targets “assault-style weapons,” which are actually classic semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that have been popular with hunters and sport shooters for more than 100 years. When announcing the ban, the prime minister said the government would confiscate the banned firearms and their legal owners would be “grandfathered” or receive “fair compensation.” That hasn’t happened.

As of October 2024, the government has revealed no plans about how it will collect the newly-banned firearms nor has it made any provisions for compensation in any federal budget since the announcement in 2020. Originally, the government enacted a two-year amnesty period to allow compliance with the ban. This amnesty expired in April 2022 and has been twice extended, first to Oct. 30, 2023, then to Oct. 30, 2025.

Clearly, the ban—which the government calls a “buyback”—has been a gong show from the beginning. Since Trudeau’s announcement four years ago, virtually none of the banned firearms have been  surrendered. The Ontario government refuses to divert police resources to cooperate with this federal “buyback” scheme. The RCMP’s labour union has said it’s a “misdirected effort when it comes to public safety.” The Canadian Sporting Arms & Ammunition Association, which represents firearms retailers, said it will have “zero involvement” in helping confiscate these firearms. Even Canada Post wants nothing to do with Trudeau’s “buyback” plan. And again, the government has revealed no plan for compensation—fair or otherwise.

And yet, according to the government, it has already spent $67.2 million, which includes compensation for 60 federal employees working on the “buyback,” which still doesn’t exist.

It remains unclear just how many firearms the 2020 ban includes. The Parliamentary Budget Officer  estimates range between 150,000 to more than 500,000, with an estimated total value between $47 million and $756 million. These costs only include the value of the confiscated firearms and exclude the administrative costs to collect them and the costs of destroying the collected firearms. The total cost of this ban to taxpayers will be more than $4 billion and possibly more than $6 billion.

Nevertheless, while the ban of remains a confusing mess, after four years we should be able to answer one key question. Has the ban made Canadians safer?

According to Statistics Canada, firearm-related violent crime swelled by 10 per cent from 2020 to 2022 (the latest year of comparable data), from 12,614 incidents to 13,937 incidents. And in “2022, the rate of firearm-related violent crime was 36.7 incidents per 100,000 population, an 8.9% increase from 2021 (33.7 incidents per 100,000 population). This is the highest rate recorded since comparable data were first collected in 2009.”

Nor have firearm homicides decreased since 2020. Perhaps this is because lawfully-held firearms are not the problem. According to StatsCan, “the firearms used in homicides were rarely legal firearms used by their legal owners.” However, crimes committed by organized crime have increased by more than 170 per cent since 2016 (from 4,810 to 13,056 crimes).

Meanwhile, the banned firearms remain locked in the safes of their legal owners who have been vetted by the RCMP and are monitored nightly for any infractions that might endanger public safety.

Indeed, hunters and sport shooters are among the most law-abiding people in Canada. Many Canadian families and Indigenous peoples depend on hunting to provide food for the family dinner table through legal harvesting, with the added benefit of getting out in the wilderness and spending time with family and friends. In 2015, hunting and firearm businesses alone contributed more than $5.9 billion to Canada’s economy and supported more than 45,000 jobs. Hunters are the largest contributors to conservation efforts, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to secure conservation lands and manage wildlife. The number of licensed firearms owners has increased 17 per cent since 2015 (from 2.026 million to 2.365 million) in 2023.

If policymakers in Ottawa and across the country want to reduce crime and increase public safety, they should enact policies that actually target criminals and use our scarce tax dollars wisely to achieve these goals.

Fraser Institute

U.S. election should focus or what works and what doesn’t work

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From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew D. Mitchell

As Republicans and Democrats make their final pitch to voters, they’ve converged on some common themes. Kamala Harris wants to regulate the price of food. Donald Trump wants to regulate the price of credit. Harris wants the tax code to favour the 2.5 per cent of workers who earn tips. So does Trump. Harris wants the government to steer more labour and capital into manufacturing. And so does Trump.

With each of these proposals, the candidates think the United States would be better off if the government made more economic decisions and—by implication—if individual citizens made fewer economic decisions. Both should pay closer attention to Zimbabwe. Yes, Zimbabwe.

Why does a country with abundant natural resources, rich culture and unparalleled beauty have one-sixth the average income of neighbouring Botswana? While we’re at it, why do twice as many children die in infancy in Azerbaijan as across the border in Georgia? Why do Hungarians work 20 per cent longer than their Austrian neighbours but earn 45 per cent less? Why is extreme poverty 200 times more common in Laos than across the Mekong River in Thailand?

Or how about this one: Why were more than one-quarter of Estonians formerly exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution when the country was socialist while today nearly every Estonian breathes clean air in what is ranked the cleanest country in the world.

These are anecdotes. However, the plural of anecdote is data, and through careful and systematic study of the data, we can learn what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, the populist economic policies in vogue among Democrats and Republicans do not work.

What does work is economic freedom.

Economic freedoms are a subset of human freedoms. When people have more economic freedom, they are allowed to make more of their own economic choices—choices about work, about buying and selling goods and services, about acquiring and using property, and about forming contracts with others.

For nearly 30 years, the Fraser Institute has been measuring economic freedom across countries. On one hand, governments can stop people from making their own economic choices through taxes, regulations, barriers to trade and manipulation of the value of money (see the proposals of Harris and Trump above). On the other hand, governments can enable individual economic choice by protecting people and their property.

The index published in Fraser’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report incorporates 45 indicators to measure how governments either prevent or enable individual economic choice. The result reveals the degree of economic freedom in 165 countries and territories worldwide, with data going back to 1970.

According to the latest report, comparatively wealthy Botswanans rank 84 places ahead of Zimbabweans in terms of the economic freedom their government permits them. Georgians rank 107 places ahead of Azerbaijanis, Thais rank 60 places ahead of Laotians, and Austrians are 32 places ahead of Hungarians.

The benefits of economic freedom go far beyond anecdotes and rankings. As Estonia—once one of the least economically free places in the world and now among the freest—dramatically shows, freer countries tend not only to be more prosperous but greener and healthier.

In fact, economists and other social scientists have conducted nearly 1,000 studies using the index to assess the effect of economic freedom on different aspects of human wellbeing. Their statistical comparisons include hundreds and sometimes thousands of data points and carefully control for other factors like geography, natural resources and disease environment.

Their results overwhelmingly support the idea that when people are permitted more economic freedom, they prosper. Those who live in freer places enjoy higher and faster-growing incomes, better health, longer life, cleaner environments, more tolerance, less violence, lower infant mortality and less poverty.

Economic freedom isn’t the only thing that matters for prosperity. Research suggests that culture and geography matter as well. While policymakers can’t always change people’s attitudes or move mountains, they can permit their citizens more economic freedom. If more did so, more people would enjoy the living standards of Botswana or Estonia and fewer people would be stuck in poverty.

As for the U.S., it remains relatively free and prosperous. Whatever its problems, decades of research cast doubt on the notion that America would be better off with policies that chip away at the ability of Americans to make their own economic choices.

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Economy

Ottawa’s new ‘climate disclosures’ another investment killer

Published on

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

The Trudeau government has demonstrated consistently that its policies—including higher capital gains taxes and a hostile regulatory environment—are entirely at odds with what investors want to see. Corporate head offices are fleeing Canada and business investment has declined  significantly since the Trudeau Liberals came to power.

According to the Trudeau government’s emissions reduction plan, “putting a price on pollution is widely recognized as the most efficient means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Fair enough, but a reasonable person might wonder why the same politicians who insist a price mechanism (i.e. carbon tax) is the most efficient policy recently announced relatively inefficient measures such “sustainable investment guidelines” and “mandatory climate disclosures” for large private companies.

The government claims that imposing mandatory climate disclosures will “attract more private capital into Canada’s largest corporations and ensure Canadian businesses can continue to effectively compete as the world races towards net-zero.” That is nonsense. How would politicians Ottawa know better than business owners about how their businesses should attract capital? If making climate disclosures were a good way to help businesses attract capital, the businesses that want to attract capital would make such disclosures voluntarily. There would be no need for a government mandate.

The government has not yet launched the regulatory process for the climate disclosures, so we don’t know exactly how onerous it will be, but one thing is for sure—the disclosures will be expensive and unnecessary, imposing useless costs onto businesses and investors without any measurable benefit, further discouraging investment in Canada. Again, if the disclosures were useful and worthwhile to investors, businesses seeking to attract investment would make them voluntarily.

Even the government’s own announcement casts doubt that increasing business investment is the likely outcome of mandatory climate disclosures. While the government says it’s “sending a clear signal to corporate boards and shareholders, at home and around the world, that Canada is their trusted partner for putting private capital to work in the race to net-zero,” most investors are not looking to put private capital to work to combat climate change. Most investors want to put their capital to work to earn a good financial return, after adjusting for the risk of the investment.

This latest announcement should come as no surprise. The Trudeau government has demonstrated consistently that its policies—including higher capital gains taxes and a hostile regulatory environment—are entirely at odds with what investors want to see. Corporate head offices are fleeing Canada and business investment has declined significantly since the Trudeau Liberals came to power. Capital per worker in Canada is declining due to weak business investment since 2015, and new capital per-Canadian worker in 2024 is barely half of what it is in the United States.

It’s also fair to ask, in the face of these onerous polices—where are the environmental benefits? The government says its climate disclosures are needed for Canada to progress to net-zero emissions and “uphold the Paris climate target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels,” but its net-zero targets are neither feasible nor realistic and the economics literature does not support the 1.5 degrees target.

Finally, when announcing the new climate disclosures, Trudeau Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said they are an important stepping stone to a cleaner economy, which is a “major economic opportunity.” Yet even the Canada Energy Regulator (a federal agency) projects net-zero policies would reduce real GDP per capita, increase inflation of consumer prices and reduce residential space (in other words, reduce living standards).

A major economic opportunity that will increase business investment? Surely not—mandatory climate disclosures will only further reduce our standard of living and impose useless costs onto business and investors, with the sure effect of reducing investment.

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