Wes Winkel, president of the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association (CSAAA,) said the government apparently didn’t anticipate that its ban on “assault-style” firearms involved a massive number of parts and accessories that could be captured by the buyback’s planned expropriation, which will require gun owners and retailers holding inventory of those items to be compensated.
Who is Wes Winkel? He’s the guy heading the organization tasked with helping retailers navigate the Trudeau Liberals’ mandatory gun “buyback” says the government has bit off far more than it can chew and is now discovering the difficulty with the sheer volume of items it may have to expropriate.
The amnesty on banned guns is set to expire at the end of October 2025, presuming a buyback regime is in place by then to provide owners and retailers compensation for their seized weapons. But Winkel expects the process is turning out to be much more complicated and much more expensive than the federal government anticipated.
“They don’t understand that liaising with industry should have happened before the regulations were drafted,” he said.
Kind’a like consulting with the provinces before stomping on their jurisdiction and then ignoring them I guess.
The CSAAA’s involvement in the process began last April, when the federal government rolled out the first phase of its confiscation scheme. The association was asked to act as a knowledgeable conduit between bureaucrats and businesses who sell firearms and have been stuck with unsellable inventory as a result of the bans.
“That’s where we come in, where we assist them in the procedures and say ‘yes, these 10 firearms are prohibited but only these seven are covered by the buyback.'”
He said that if the government doesn’t have a buyback in place by October 2025 when the amnesty is set to expire, businesses holding now-banned inventory will be stuck in a legal grey zone.
“Once that amnesty expires, if we don’t deal with this inventory, then we can no longer get import permits and conduct our business in a regular fashion,” he said.
Internal government documents obtained last year through an access-to-information request showed the cost of the program,
which the Liberals had promised would be between $400 million and $600 million, had ballooned to $2 billion.
Last month,
National Post reported that the government had spent $42 million on setting up the buyback already, even though it still doesn’t exist.
“The costs have ballooned on the administration side,” Winkel said. “They’ve used up so much budget already, and they still haven’t bought anything.”
While Winkle is prohibited from discussing all the specifics of his work with government due to a non-disclosure agreement, he said the program has been painful to be a part of.
“The bureaucracy is just growing and growing,” he said.
'The way the regulation was drafted, it was rushed through as an order-in-council and done in such a poor manner, it'll cause issues for the buyback down the road'
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