Originally budgeted at $200 million, the Liberal government’s 2020 long gun ban is now estimated to cost taxpayers almost $1 billion.
Using the Treasury Board’s 2025-2026 Main Estimates, an analysis compiled by Canadian firearm magazine Calibre estimates the updated budget now sits at $803.4 million.
That would work out to costing taxpayers roughly $20,000 per firearm collected.
The government’s latest predictions for departmental spending included an expected transfer of $342.6 million in Grants and Contributions to the Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program.
This $597.9 million lump sum was earmarked in the last Fall Economic Statement for the Liberals’ first three-year commitment to the buyback program.
Operational costs incurred by Public Safety for program implementation were not included in the estimate.
While the Main Estimates don’t provide an exact estimate of these costs, the Public Safety department’s latest quarterly financial statement indicates that the buyback program bore the lion’s share of the department’s operating expenses year-over-year.
This latest estimate remains conservative given that the $30.8 million in new funding for Public Safety’s operation and administration costs is exclusively for serving the retail business aspect of the buyback program.
According to Public Safety, that specific section of confiscation only accounts for roughly 9,000 of the 140,000 firearms that were prohibited when the legislation was initially implemented in 2020.
That would amount to $3,422 in operation expenses per firearm confiscated from a business.
However, many more models have been included in the years since 2020.
In the final days of the Trudeau government, former prime minister Justin Trudeau added nearly 200 additional firearm models to its mandatory buyback program.
Prime Minister Mark Carney also pledged to “reinvigorate” the program’s implementation during his election campaign.
Newly-appointed Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said that 1,000 guns had been collected since the program’s inception while answering questions from Conservative MP Andrew Lawton in the House of Commons on Thursday.
While Anandasangaree was unable to confirm the cost of each firearm collected, he did say the government now intends to collect a total of 179,000 under the buyback program.
Lawton then proceeded to ask Anandasangaree a string of rudimentary questions regarding gun models, licensing and safety practices to test his knowledge, which the minister failed to answer.
Anandasangaree went on to say that the program was “not about law-abiding gun owners” although the firearms included under the ban would have all been purchased legally.