We’ve received many phone calls and emails asking, “What’s the big deal? All this does is layout the terms of our surrender!”
Comments like these tell us a lot of people didn’t read our press release, and even fewer bothered to read the proposed Saskatchewan Firearms Act.i
Saskatchewan is making it cost-prohibitive for the federal government to confiscate firearms in that province.
It wasn’t the registration of rifles and shotguns that caused Canadians to elect the majority conservative government that got rid of the hated Long Gun Registry.
It was the cost.
Allan Rock promised the registry would cost a mere $2 million, and instead the federal government wasted well over $2 billion.
This massive waste of taxpayer dollars for zero increase in public safety is what sealed the fate of the Liberal’s Long Gun Registry.
Saskatchewan’s proposed Act sets forth a strict set of restrictions for how a firearm confiscation scheme must be implemented in Saskatchewan.
It will become so expensive to seize firearms in Saskatchewan that even Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government will be forced to abandon this nonsense due to public outrage over the price tag.
Why? Because it will not prevent a single drug dealer or gang-related shooting.
Pick any one of the dozens of shootings in the Greater Toronto Area this year alone. Not one of those crimes were committed by a licensed firearm owner using a registered handgun.
Every one of those crimes was committed by a violent person using an illegal firearm, almost always one smuggled into Canada from the United States.
Our Top Ten Favourite Sections
1. To seize and confiscate a firearm in Saskatchewan, an individual who wishes to become a seizure agent must:
Be licensed by the Saskatchewan Minister of Corrections, Policing and Public Safety using “the form approved by the minister” and pay the application fee set by the minister.
Every company who wishes to provide seizure agents must apply for a licence to the minister in the form approved by the minister for each employee who is to be employed as a seizure agent.
2. Members of any police force, including the RCMP, are prohibited from becoming seizure officers.
3. Seizure agents are prohibited from working alone. Seizure agents must operate in pairs, at a minimum, while conducting firearm seizures.
4. Seizure agents are prohibited from transporting more than three (3) firearms from the place of seizure to a licensed storage facility at one time. [4-18(3)]
If they want to seize 60 firearms from one location, they are forced to make 20 trips with three firearms each. Depending upon the location of the closest seized firearm storage facility, this could take days to complete, or 40 seizure agents and twenty vehicles to accomplish this seizure in a single day.
5. Seized firearm storage and/or destruction facilities are prohibited from being constructed within 1,000 metres (1km) from any home, facility, farm, daycare, school, college, university, place of worship, hospital, restaurant, sports training or event facility, grocery store, shopping mall, etc.
In other words, the federal government must build a new facility somewhere outside of every city and town that is at least 1km away from any other building or farm that meets the stringent guidelines for such facilities as specified in the Act.
6. This legislation proposes to create a Saskatchewan Firearm Compensation Committee which will be responsible for setting the compensation cost for all firearms to be seized – cutting off Ottawa’s attempt to devalue firearms so they can seize them without paying compensation.
This means that if a person or company or federal government entity is able to successfully jump through all the hoops created by this legislation, they will be forced to pay the prices set by Saskatchewan, not the federal government.
7. No seized firearm may be destroyed within 45 days of seizure, and only after any appeal process by the firearm’s owner is completed.
8. Compensation for a seized firearm must be paid within 45 days of seizure.
9. Every firearm seized must be sent for ballistics testing, adding even more to the cost to the federal government.
10. Section 2-2(3) of the proposed legislation says, “The minister may impose any terms and conditions on a delegation pursuant to this section that the minister considers appropriate.”
If, somehow, Saskatchewan’s proposed Firearms Act doesn’t make the seizure of firearms onerous enough, the Minister may add even more cost-prohibitive terms and conditions deemed appropriate.
We would love to see every province enact similar legislation because it would make Trudeau’s gun confiscation scheme dead on arrival.
