The federal government has quietly withdrawn a call for bids from contractors to pay compensation to gun owners whose firearms were suddenly outlawed in the Liberals’ massive May 1 gun ban.
Back in August, the Trudeau government invited 15 of Canada’s largest accounting and consulting firms to submit proposals to run a program under which gun owners would receive tax dollars for firearms banned in the enormous spring crackdown.
Not one firm applied.
In typical bureaucratese, the federal explanation is “the process did not yield to the selection of a successful bidder.”
Really!? Among companies such as Deloitte, Ernst & Young, IBM, KPMG and Pricewaterhouse Coopers there wasn’t a single company that could satisfy Ottawa’s requirements to run the “buyback?”
Indeed, a senior source at the Ministry of Public Safety told me that far from there being no “successful bidder,” there were no bidders at all.
None of the invited companies took the bait.
My guess for the reason is overly complicated rules and a budget for payouts that was too low. No company wanted to be in charge of a program that was impossible to administer and insufficiently funded.
Officially, the Liberal government’s story now is that it is revising the criteria and will soon put the program out for bids again.
At some point.
Gun owners have every right to be suspicious of Liberal governments. Since the 1970s, successive Liberal governments have treated all gun owners like criminals and made it ever more difficult to own a gun legally, even for hunting or target practice.
So when the Liberals stopped looking for a firm to administer its buyback, naturally many gun groups interpreted this as a sign the Trudeau government no longer intended to pay compensation for the guns it had banned. Many gun owners now expect the Liberals just to confiscate the banned models without paying the owners for their losses.
I can’t say that isn’t the Liberals’ plan. They have done equally underhanded things to gun owners in the recent past (such as insisting they would never ban shotguns, then going ahead and banning several popular shotguns in the follow-up to their May 1 decree).
But here’s what I think the bid failure means: The gun ban is going to become another Liberal promise left in limbo.
The Trudeauites announced the gun ban to capitalize politically on Gabriel Wortman’s mass killing in Nova Scotia in April, the worst mass killing in Canadian history.
But now that they have to implement the ban, it’s too hard (and perhaps too expensive).
By the stroke of a pen, the federal cabinet has outlawed nearly 9,500 models and variations of rifles and shotguns. That’s as many as 400,000 guns.
The best-case is that compensating owners for all those guns will cost about $400 million. The worst-case about $1.2 billion.
And the administration will be very complicated.
For instance, a gun with a custom stock could cost hundreds more than the same model without tailormade parts. But whose valuation do the scheme’s administrators accept and who covers the legal costs of owners who feel ripped off and have to go to court?
Although the Liberals undoubtedly think they can succeed at getting enough guns turned in to lower Canada’s crime rate, they surely must know, for instance, that New Zealand’s recent attempt at a similar ban and buyback only encouraged about 20 to 30 per cent of gun owners to turn in their firearms.
And the buyback has had no impact on NZ’s crime rate.
So the Liberals will do what they do with most of their promises. They will do a lot of virtue-signalling about how they are making Canada safer, while doing almost nothing to follow through.
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