The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Where Are Canada's Undeclared Firearms?

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Only about half of prohibited assault style firearms were declared under Canada's federal buyback. Tens of thousands may remain outside the system ahead of a 2026 ban that will make possession a criminal offence. Police Chief Mark Campbell and Professor Wendy Cukier examine what low compliance means for enforcement, public safety, and the credibility of the policy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Nam Kiwanuka, host and producer of mistreated, a podcast on women's health. There just hasn't been a lot of money put into researching women's health issues. If women are in pain, it's hysteria, it's an emotional issue. And this is what you see consistently. Women's health is not taken seriously. How did we get here? Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to check out the video version of the show on the TVO Today YouTube channel. Hope to see you then. The first deadline in Ottawa's gun buyback program has passed. Federal government has banned 2,500 makes and models of what it calls assault-style firearms.

And Canadians had until March 31st to declare them for a chance at compensation. So, how many guns were declared by the deadline? 67,000. Now, that may sound like a pretty big number, but it's way less than the nearly 140,000 the government was aiming for. So why haven't the others been declared and what will happen after the amnesty period ends on October 31st? We look at the program's goals and track record and what this all means for public safety. Then, many of the guns used in crimes here are smuggled in from the United States. That was the case with handguns found at the scene of a November 2024 shootout outside a recording studio in downtown Toronto.

The incident led to dozens of arrests and more than 100 charges. We look at how this affected the community and at efforts to fight gun violence on the ground. This is the rundown. The federal government's assault-style firearms compensation program hasn't brought in nearly as many guns as they were hoping. And as of October, the amnesty period will end, meaning people who still have banned guns could risk criminal liability. So what comes next? Mark Campbell is chief of the Strathroy Caradoc Police Service and president of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police. Wendy Sukhir is a professor of Toronto Metropolitan University and president of the Coalition for Gun Control. Both join me in studio. Thank you so much for

joining us. We really appreciate it. Thank you for making the drive as well. Let's start off with the buyback results. Public Safety Canada says that more than 67 thousand firearms have been reported through the buyback program, well short of the roughly 136,000 the government expected. There are estimates that in reality there are about 500,000 or more guns that would have fallen into this category. But I do want to ask, is Canada safer with these results so far? Chief? So obviously, first of all, thanks for offering the invitation to come and speak on behalf of Chiefs of Police for the province of Ontario. You know, any gun that we can take off the streets will make our communities safer.

You know, the purpose of this program to remove and to identify long guns, assault-style firearms, which generally are sort of connected to school-related shootings and those types of events, we want to ensure that those types of guns and firearms are removed from our communities. Is our community safer? I think there is other areas of gun violence and criminal activity that are occurring in our communities that maybe fall outside the scope of long guns. And I think as police leaders, we've really tried to bring attention to those issues, the propensity for handgun shootings that are occurring in our communities,

particularly some of the large urban centers, that are really having an impact. we're also starting to see some of those crimes disperse out into some of the smaller rural areas as well. You know, we'll often refer to it as disruption and displacement. So as policing organizations in and around the large urban areas are being successful in dealing with home invasions, guns and gang, repeat firearm offenders, those criminal elements are moving.

moving out into some of the smaller jurisdictions in our province. So, you know, we need to remain focused and continue to bring resources to curtail those issues in our smaller communities. All right. Wendy, when it comes to the buyback and the results there, is Canada safer with those results? I mean, again, just to echo what the chief said, the focus of the buyback was to remove firearms that are not reasonably used for hunting. and the type of firearms that we see in mass shootings very infrequently,

but when they're used, the results are devastating. So for sure, this has been a promise of the government for decades, and we're pleased to see it's moving forward. But I would agree with the police chief that there are other issues that we also have to focus on and remember the legislation that was brought in. had a lot of focus, for example, not just on cross-border smuggling, but also on curtailing the proliferation of legally owned handguns, because often legal handguns are diverted to illegal markets or used illegally. It also had a big focus on reducing the risk that dangerous

people would have access to guns. And frankly, when you look at things like domestic violence, when you actually look at murders of police officers and so on, it's a very different context than gang violence, which is often tied to drugs and human trafficking and so on. I want to get a better understanding of perhaps maybe the failure of this buyback program in terms of the numbers that the government's expecting. Chief, help me understand what are some likely reasons someone wouldn't report a prohibited firearm now, but are we talking to is it passive non-compliance?

Is it confusion over, you know, where it falls under? Or is this perhaps a deliberate resistance? I think the safe answer is probably to say a little bit of all three of what you are outlined are articulated there. You know, certainly as Chiefs, you know, we were first introduced to the concept of the buyback just over a year ago when we met first with the Federal Public Safety Minister, who really outlined the program how it was going to work. So I think that they have tried to certainly message and inform those who are gun owners as to how the program is going to work. You know, there's compensation that is sort of obviously aligned to the program.

I think for some gun owners, those who chose not to participate perhaps didn't like the value that they were potentially getting for their firearm. Some, I think, we're just never going to participate. And some, I think, just have a political position that they feel that this law is not applicable or shouldn't be put into law. And I think have just a position that this is something that the government is overstepping in relation to that.

You know, from a policing perspective, we were hoping to see, I think, more participants. through the way that the government program was laid out. A lot of police organizations have opted not to participate as the collection agency. And if you look at the details of the program, you know, the federal government really had other options available for the collection of those firearms.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Your police force was one of the forces that opted not to be heard. And was that because of the resource concern, Was that the administrative concern? Again, I would say a couple of those issues. So, you know, when this program sort of first became available for police organizations to make those decisions on, and these are all local decisions made by a local police service and certainly in this province, their police services board that are the governance to police agencies, you know, some of the challenges were,

was it aligning to the priorities of your local issues? was there resource-based concerns for a police organization? And so for our own organization, we have other pressing community concerns that our community members have clearly identified as being priorities outside the scope of the gun buyback program. That being said, as a police organization, and I can speak with all confidence

for every organization in this province, we will still take and collect guns that people wish to turn in as part of this program? I think it's also important to understand the buyback program is not the law. The law is these firearms are going to be prohibited, and as of I think it's October 31st, it is illegal to possess them. The other thing that just to explain a little bit more, most of the firearms that are being prohibited are already restricted firearms,

which means they're registered, which means it's not a secret. someone has an AR-15 or someone has a grandfathered AK-47 or whatever. So it's important to understand that the buyback was intended to be an incentive to sort of sweeten the pot for gun owners, and if they choose not to participate, that's their choice. I think the factor that perhaps hasn't been mentioned is many gun owners thought, I think, it's a minority government, maybe the government will change and we'll get a reprieve. We have a challenge before the courts.

Maybe that will go through and the law will be overturned. So I think there were a lot of gun owners encouraged by elements of the gun lobby to not comply because they were hoping that the law would change. But I don't think there's any evidence that that will be the case. The guns are going to be prohibited. And if you chose not to get compensation, that doesn't exempt you from the law. So I think it's important to understand the buyback was an incentive program.

It's not the legislation. Well, as you mean. Sorry, and if I can just sort of add an additional detail, sometimes timing is essential. And unfortunately, we had a school-related shooting in British Columbia that speaks to the issue that this government was really trying to address. And so that, you know, along with some of the things that Wendy has mentioned, maybe on the hopes of current gun owners.

Some of these things are mounting against the government probably reversing or changing their direction in regards to this issue. All right, I want to talk a little bit about enforcement in terms of where we go from here. As we mentioned, October 26, at the end of the month, these firearms that have not been declared or effectively are illegal overnight.

Where does that put police and your services in terms of enforcing this in reality? Well, it puts it right. right on the front burner for police organizations. Again, as Wendy mentioned, there is a registry of who these gun owners are. So police organizations are going to have to really put their mind to, how are we going to prioritize this as a community safety issue in our community? They are challenging investigations for a police organization to potentially go and retrieve a firearm,

particularly one from a gun owner who really may not be. that well intended to turn that gun over. There are some challenges with, and I'm also going to outline our current justice system. So this is going to introduce more potential offenses in our communities. It's going to be attacks on some police organizations and their ability to resource this as an initiative. Then we have to deal with what are we going to do once a firearm is seized? are we proceeding through with charges?

In a system, a justice system that is maxed to capacity with, you know, volume of cases currently. You know, in this province, every single year there are 250,000 new cases that arrive at the Interior Court of Justice every single year. This new area potentially is going to even increase that volume of which the courts perceive as serious cases. those are gun cases. So those generally get high priority emphasis in the justice system.

So there are some challenges, and we don't want to sort of fall into an area where we start seizing, laying charges, and then have a system where some of these charges go away because of capacity-related issues. All right. I want to talk next steps. If Canada has already banned 2,500 models of so-called assault-style firearms, we've got the handgun, freeze on those sales, what is the next lever? So if you look at the results of the Port-a-Peake inquiry,

which is the largest inquiry to gun violence in the country, and you look at the recommendations, it included the ban on military-style semi-automatic firearms, it included restrictions on handguns, it included the red flag, the yellow flag, other kinds of legislation. From my point of view, the legislative framework we have in Canada is, I won't say it's the strongest in the world,

but it puts us in line with most industrialized countries. So our laws now are way better than the U.S., but that's a low bar, and comparable to what you would see in Europe. With respect, there is often a lot of focus on gangs and guns and drugs and so on, and that's completely legitimate. But in rural communities, even in smaller cities like St. Catharines, the risk to youth is very different. It's suicide with firearms. Even in the policing community, suicide is one of the big risk factors.

If you have a mentally ill young person in your home and it's full of guns, you're just asking for trouble. And so what we see is there's a lot that has to be done if you look at domestic violence, the inquiry into intimate partner violence in the province of Ontario really highlighted issues around the enforcement of gun laws and understanding that if someone, and typically it is a man who is the perpetrator, if someone has a history of violence against their partner, the chances of her being killed are increased dramatically if they're guns in the home. So there are a lot of issues. I think our laws are strong and solid. The issues to me are around implementation, enforcement, and community engagement. Because public safety is a community issue. The police can't do it alone. The courts can't do it alone. The justice system

can't do it alone. All right, Chief, well, Wendy laid out a bunch of issues there that could perhaps, when we talk about implementation, perhaps some dollars could go behind some of that stuff. So I do want to ask, where should the next dollars actually go? Is it perhaps more of these by backbrowments? Is it border measures? Is it community-based prevention or anything that Wendy has laid out? Yeah, so I really liked a lot of the things that Wendy touched on. If I can, just real briefly, administratively, you know, the registry and the licensing pieces, I think that we continually find areas to enhance and improve those areas, in particularly regarding intimate partner violence pieces where, you know,

there are some challenges sometimes to not get the firearms, but sometimes be able to secure them and keep them from being returned. The community engagement piece is paramount, particularly in this program. There's a bit of a bruise, I think, to some of the gun owners out there, and I think that us as police, I think we have a role to play and an ability to play in ensuring that we continue to build strong relationships to make sure that they receive accurate and clear information so that we can potentially start to see more and more of these firearms turned in.

the area in regards to youth and some of the mental health challenges, I think that's an area that really needs a lot of attention because I think if you dissect a lot of school-related shootings, the common element tends to be some severe mental health-related areas that have led to someone who has obviously become or gotten possession of a firearm, and that combination turns into a deadly event for those pieces. But to get back to you, I think, your original question about funding, you know, policing is always willing to, and supports additional funding that is going to enhance, whether it's programming or intelligence-led information to help sort of understand where, you know, the real gun issues are lying. You know, I had a conversation just the other day talking about the importance of intelligence.

led policing, understanding, again, where are the flow of illegal firearms, whether they're handguns or long guns coming in, once those firearms are in our country, how are they being dispersed and shared? Again, I don't want to sit here at this table and just pretend that policing need all the dollars. There's other areas, again, justice,

there's social services that really need to be supported because this is a community, based response to crime that goes on in our communities. All right, very quickly, I would like to know, one of the most important things is knowing where we're headed and sort of what those metrics are to get us to what we consider success. So five years from now, what does success actually look like to you? Well, from my point of view, you know,

the principal measure of success are the crime stats and where we are in terms of homicides in particular, but also other gun-related crimes. Suicide for us is a big metric, and that's a huge problem that doesn't get nearly enough attention, and I'm sure in smaller communities, I know growing up in Niagara, it's a much bigger issue than some of the things

that get attention in big cities. So we have to look at the data. We have to look at those trajectories. And I think there is a big gap in my view, between what people think risks are and what the risks really are. So while a lot of the oxygen gets sucked up by big cities and the problems in big cities, there are other problems like domestic violence, like suicide, like youth violence, in smaller communities that often don't get the tension that they deserve.

And the final thing I wanted to say is when we look at the rise of hate crime, in particular, when we look at the potential for political violence, There's a real intersection with access to firearms that we really can't overlook. Chief, you have the last word? That's a really complicated question. Again, you know, how do we measure success? If we can see less crime being reported, if we can see a dramatic decrease in intimate partner violence crime that are related to guns, because in parts of this province and certainly in parts of this country,

it is getting to a point where it is very serious. And, you know, Wendy also mentioned some of the racial divides. I think if we as society started to sort of see more in common with each other and became less hateful, you know, made attempts to sort of understand, know who your neighbors are, because there is so much more we have in common than differences. And I know it's a little bit outside of maybe the topic we were talking about today,

but it's really, it's part of, just like this table is around, it's a lot of different areas that we need to sort of move into, to lower the temperature and to, you know, just really be more decent to one another. I think a lovely place to leave our conversation.

Chief Campbell, Wendy, thank you so much for your insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks. On November 11, 2004. Gunfire broke out at a recording studio on Queen Street West in Toronto. Police say rival gangs were involved. I got insight into the factors that fueled this violence

and at how people are trying to make change. On November 11, 2024, a shootout broke out just off of Queen Street West right behind me in this alleyway. What started off as a late night jam session in a music studio ended up with nearly a hundred shots fired. Amazingly, no one was injured. Now surveillance video later showed a group of young men inside the studio prior to the shooting, holding and even dancing with the guns. Police say three people then arrived in a stolen vehicle and opened fire outside the studio. They were met by return fire, people scattered, tossed guns into nearby laneways and garbage

bins. By the end of it, police seized at least 16 guns, including handguns and assault-style weapons. The gathering was supposed to be a party. Who brings a gun to a party? But we know that it was live streamed, that the group that was there down on Queen Street in the studio came from the northwest of Toronto. There's a group in central Toronto

that claims that area of the studio is their turf and were offended because this was all, live streamed. And this is one of the things the ACE talks about in terms of what we call digital violence accelerants, explicit or implicit threats that evolve to a situation where there's going to be gun violence. In a matter of minutes. My understanding in terms of the research that we've done because we're trying to mitigate this as a clear and present threat to what we call get back killings and reciprocal violence. So the party, started at about 10 to 11 and by 20 after 11, three of the individuals from central

Toronto would come down and 100 rounds were fired and eventually and you know thank God nobody was hurt and there's still people outstanding from that matter. Some people can look at this probably with your background and say this is perhaps some form of organized crime in some sense. 100% because those firearms aren't free right and so if we want to begin then to look at organized weapons trafficking, definitely there's a connection to it. The Queen West Shootout could easily have been much worse. For the neighborhood and for Toronto's music community, however, this one hit close to home.

For a lot of young artists in Ontario's capital city, a music studio is supposed to be a creative space. Some would say even a safe space. So what happens now? Hey, it's the track. Yes, sir. How's it going? Nice to meet you. It's a recording studio, so like anybody can come here and make music.

I kind of just like created a space for just like people to be able to make music without like breaking their pockets. You might see some of your friends here or you might see a famous rapper here. It's more of like also like a meeting grounds for people. The shooting that happened. Obviously even just pulling up you can still kind of see remnants of it. Was this studio operating at the time that that happened? I literally just moved in, maybe like a month before. It was horrible.

I thought it was done. I was like, this is terrible. I spent so much money trying to like renovate and do whatever, whatever, and like shooting happens. I wasn't here. I was in Los Angeles, but some of my engineers were here. And they ended up just like locking themselves in the bathroom. So let's help clarify it. Was there, there's a studio upstairs that's separate from yours?

Yeah, there was a studio upstairs, two floors upstairs. Okay. And that's where the, that's where it happened. Yeah. What were those messages? I'm just curious, like, what were the messages from your engineers to you being like, what's happening? They were frightened as, like, they were scared, rightfully so. But they were safe.

Like, yeah, but it's just, yeah, not something that anybody should, like, kind of go through. Do you think the music reflects the violence, or is it driving it? When there's violence behind music or whatever, when it gets, like, tied together, it's like, it's the real life stuff first. Like, the music is after. The real life stuff is already happening. What do you mean by it? It's not like someone's making a song and then violence is happening after that.

They're making songs about stuff that's happening in real life. Do you find there's an unfair connection between sort of hip-hop and violence that when people see hip-hop videos, music, they automatically are like, okay, well, there is a connection. These shootings, for example, that shooting is not an anomaly. It's not a one-off. I don't know, I guess a little bit, but it's understandable. Music should just be entertainment. Like it's an entertainment business at the end of the day.

There is this stereotype that there is a sort of a connection to violence and hip-hop. Does hip-hop and music have a violence problem? I don't think so. I think what the issue is, because if you look at the lyrics, right? So are those lyrics provocative or in other ways conveying threats or insults that then is going to raise the stakes?

So that's where it is. Not necessarily the genre itself. It's what you choose to use it for in terms of conveying things that could cause a problem. As someone who works directly with youth, how much of this conversation and the problems here is really about a lack of opportunity for you? This is all about a lack of opportunity. I teach part-time in a police foundations of public safety course at one of local colleges. One of my students, 18, 19 years old, came to me and said, sir, I just put out 40 resumes looking for a job. and I can't land a part-time job.

Youth unemployment. Youth unemployment, 100%. And the point with him is he's in college. He's exercising the right decisions and options, and he can't. And what he said to me is that I understand why these kids carry guns or sell drugs. It's the only job you don't need a resume. You don't have to subject yourself to an interview, and you're always the successful candidate.

That to me was profound. How do you turn that negativity into positive? That's just me naturally. I'm just like naturally a positive person. I like to help people and I want the entire economy of our Toronto music scene to go up. Obviously there's a lot of young people who are eager and hungry. They're in this space working on music What could this scene potentially look like? Around 2016, we must have had at least like 15 artists that were like touring around the world and doing a bunch of crazy stuff and they're all like upcoming people I feel like that's about to happen again right now. Toronto hip-hop was looked at a certain way

way before, just like how everybody else knows it. And now it's like, it's a real like positive group of people that all mess with each other. And it's just like, it's the new Toronto. It's a bunch of young kids that are like making some noise and they're all performing at these big shows and like meeting big artists and like, yeah, a bunch of kids doing cool stuff.

And if you've got some type of pull in the music industry and you want to get involved in something really cool before it kind of takes off and you just gotta watch, like, come see what's going on in the city. I love my city, man. I love this city to death. I'm Jan. Thanks for watching The Rundown. What topics would you like to see us tackle? Send us your suggestions at rundown at tbO.org or as always, you can leave us a comment on YouTube.

Until then, I will see you tomorrow. If you're enjoying this series, please consider supporting TVO with a donation to make more insightful and thought-provoking podcast possible. TVO is a registered charity and you will receive a tax receipt for your gift. Visit TVO.org slash give TVO to make your donation. today.