Premier, Winnipeg mayor have some explaining to do on firearms buyback

Both Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham and Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew vehemently oppose a federal program to buy back military-style firearms from law-abiding gun owners. The question is why.

At first examination, it’s not entirely clear.

Both claim to be law-abiding gun owners. Both acknowledge that gun violence is a serious problem. However, both have condemned a program to get military-style firearms out of circulation without offering a clear explanation.

Kinew has said the program is “inefficient” and “an overreach.” In particular, he echoed the concerns of the gun lobby about federal legislation that sought to prohibit guns that accept a magazine with five or more rounds of ammunition, a provision that would have outlawed many popular sport hunting rifles.

However, Ottawa withdrew those provisions when it passed its law in 2023. What is Kinew still concerned about?

Gillingham has also been vague, even if his predicament is a bit more complicated.

The Winnipeg Police Service is participating in the buyback program and Ottawa has provided $2.4 million to help with administration costs. Gillingham voted to approve the police budget, which contains the federal funding, but then went to great lengths to assure gun owners that his vote for the police budget didn’t mean he supports the federal buyback.

Gillingham even drafted a form letter for aggrieved citizens that explains it wasn’t his idea to participate in the buyback. That is, in case you were wondering, a rather extraordinary gesture by the mayor to disavow support for one type of gun control.

So, what’s really going on?

For political reasons, neither the mayor nor the premier wants to be responsible for taking any kind of gun — even military-style assault weapons that are designed for maximum carnage — away from so-called law-abiding gun owners.

The gun lobby believes any attempt to take any kind of weapon away from licensed gun owners is a direct attack on their rights to own a firearm. They believe that, even though owning a gun is not a constitutional right in this country, and Ottawa has only tried to control handguns and certain kinds of military-style rifles.

Why would Kinew and Gillingham shy away from removing guns from law-abiding owners?

For Kinew, support for most gun-control initiatives would lessen his chances of stealing rural seats from the struggling Progressive Conservatives. The NDP, which has always prided itself on being able to win seats within and without Winnipeg, has consistently taken a hands-off approach to gun control.

For the mayor, the politics is less clear.

He is a longstanding conservative and, given his enormous success in municipal politics, he may have designs on a run at the federal or provincial level. If you want to carry Tory colours into some future election, you can’t carry the burden of having supported a Liberal gun-control initiative.

However, by opposing the buyback, both Kinew and Gillingham ignore a fundamental truth about gun control in this country: if you want to control the kinds of guns being used by criminals, you have to limit the kinds of guns you are allowing law-abiding owners to possess because far too many of those weapons end up in the hands of criminals.

Every year, roughly 3,000 firearms are stolen in Canada and many eventually, and perhaps not surprisingly, become involved in crimes.

Although guns used in crimes are not always recovered by police, 43 per cent of those that are recovered were legally registered weapons, either used by the legal owner or stolen from a legal owner. In 2022, for example, eight homicides were committed by someone armed with a legally registered gun that had been stolen.

Ottawa has directly spent more than $1.6 billion since 2016 on broader measures to reduce the amount of gun-related crime. That figure does not include the $3 billion Ottawa spends annually to support the Canadian Border Services Agency, which is in the front line of protecting Canadians from gun smuggling.

Some provincial leaders, such as Kinew, have said the money spent on buybacks should be diverted to front-line policing. There is a good case to have Ottawa spend more on policing in general, not just on reducing gun crime. However, the need to spend more on policing does not eliminate the need for a buyback program to get prohibited weapons out of the hands of law-abiding gun owners.

Therein lies the big question both leaders have failed to answer: do they support efforts to take military-style assault rifles away from law-abiding gun owners? For the purposes of this column, staff for both Kinew and Gillingham were asked that question. They were unable to offer a clear answer.

The failure to answer that fundamental question suggests both the mayor and premier — for their own political reasons — would prefer to let gun owners keep their prohibited weapons, even if we know that some will end up in the hands of criminals.

If that’s the case, they should just come out and say it. Both sides of this debate deserve nothing less.

» Dan Lett is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist.