Gun ownership in Canada

While some may assume that, due to its laws requiring universal licencing and registration of all firearms and owners, estimating Canadian firearm ownership rates would be relatively simple, this is not the case at all.

Ineptitudes in the Canadian Firearms Program and with the Canadian gun registry, as well as rampant non-compliance with mandatory licencing and registration, particularly in rural areas, has made accurate estimation of the actual numbers of firearms and their owners in Canada a nearly insurmountable task.

Gun owners

Canadian Firearms Program figures

Since the introduction of the Canadian Firearms Act (aka Bill C-68) in 1995, Canadian law has required that all firearm owners in Canada both have a valid firearms license at all times and register all firearms in their possession with the Canada Firearms Centre (CFC). Failure to do so can result in severe criminal penalties up to and including imprisonment.

The Canadian Firearms Program (CFP), under the authority of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), maintains records of all valid firearm licences in Canada. Information in the tables below — for the numbers of Possession Only Licences (POLs), Possession and Acquisition Licences (PALs), and Minor's Licences) — was retrieved from the CFP website on April 28, 2009. Both tables contain the same information; the table on the right is merely sortable for easy reference and comparison.

REGISTERED Firearm Owners in Canada, per CFP, March 2009

Table 1: non-sortable Province Pop. Active Licences (March 2009) Rate POL PAL Minor Total Alberta 3,632,483 86,553 125,342 936 212,831 5.86% British Columbia 4,419,974 98,728 113,424 240 212,392 4.81% Manitoba 1,213,815 37,431 43,488 232 81,151 6.69% New Brunswick 748,319 51,767 25,218 111 77,096 10.3% Nfld. 508,990 32,748 38,200 143 71,091 13.97% Northwest Territories 42,940 1,071 4,043 35 5,149 11.99% Nova Scotia 939,531 50,877 26,418 1,164 78,459 8.35% Nunavut 31,556 120 2,675 1 2,796 8.86% Ontario 12,986,857 238,513 272,877 4,002 515,392 3.97% PEI 140,402 4,362 2,537 7 6,906 4.92% Quebec 7,782,561 213,954 277,280 34 491,268 6.31% Sask. 1,023,810 43,225 48,658 70 91,953 8.98% Yukon 33,442 1,631 4,164 54 5,849 17.49% National 33,504,680 860,980 984,324 7,029 1,852,333 5.53%

Table 2: sortable Province Pop. POL PAL Minor Total Rate Alberta 3,632,483 86,553 125,342 936 212,831 5.86% British Columbia 4,419,974 98,728 113,424 240 212,392 4.81% Manitoba 1,213,815 37,431 43,488 232 81,151 6.69% New Brunswick 748,319 51,767 25,218 111 77,096 10.3% Nfld. 508,990 32,748 38,200 143 71,091 13.97% Northwest Territories 42,940 1,071 4,043 35 5,149 11.99% Nova Scotia 939,531 50,877 26,418 1,164 78,459 8.35% Nunavut 31,556 120 2,675 1 2,796 8.86% Ontario 12,986,857 238,513 272,877 4,002 515,392 3.97% PEI 140,402 4,362 2,537 7 6,906 4.92% Quebec 7,782,561 213,954 277,280 34 491,268 6.31% Sask. 1,023,810 43,225 48,658 70 91,953 8.98% Yukon 33,442 1,631 4,164 54 5,849 17.49% National 33,504,680 860,980 984,324 7,029 1,852,333 5.53%

Guns

Registry figures

Table 3: Firearms Registered as of March 2009

Province	Non-restrict	Restricted	Prohibited	Total
Alberta	821,205	76,310	24,394	921,909
British Columbia	772,094	84,561	28,868	885,523
Manitoba	326,885	15,949	6,478	349,312
New Brunswick	264,635	10,946	5,519	281,100
Newfoundland and Labrador	187,362	3,512	1,615	192,489
Nova Scotia	285,216	15,050	7,599	307,865
Northwest Territories	17,982	1,022	323	19,327
Nunavut	10,232	142	38	10,412
Ontario	2,009,989	172,223	90,197	2,272,409
Prince Edward Island	21,568	1,483	801	23,852
Quebec	1,550,758	53,801	35,233	1,639,792
Saskatchewan	378,206	23,104	8,510	409,820
Yukon	21,264	1,534	410	23,208
Other	23,396	452	115	23,963
Total	6,690,792	460,089	210,100	7,360,981

Main article: Canadian gun registry

If determining the number of gun owners in Canada is a daunting task, then determining the number of actual firearms is a Gordian knot most sane people would rather not fiddle with.

Prior to the implementation of the long gun registry, most estimates of the numbers of long guns in Canada were based on examinations of import and export records. This was, needless to say, less than accurate due to the fact that:

1. the method did not take into account domestic production and sales and,
2. when domestic production was taken into account, estimates were compromised by the fact that, in the absence of serial numbering, many Canadian manufacturers did not provide accurate information.

Estimates based on import records, however, show that many more guns enter Canada than leave it. From 1970 to 1998, Canada (a nation of only 21 million in 1970 and 33 million in 2009) imported 4,974,028 firearms but exported only 1,668,506. Canadians imported nearly three times as many firearms as they exported. Some extrapolations of imports, if correct, would place the current number of firearms in Canada at over 18.5 million.

Registration of handguns in Canada has been mandatory since 1934. The RCMP Revolvers and Pistols Unit recorded a total of 222,053 registered handguns in Canada in 1944-45. Since the implementation of C-68, however, the question of tracking the number of handguns in Canada has been complicated by the fact that they are no longer in a category of their own: they have almost all been lumped into the "restricted firearms" category, along with a large number of "scary" long guns.

Presently, the only quantifiable measurement of the number of firearms in Canada is the Canadian long gun registry (administered by the CFP), the numbers for which are provided in the table to the right. These figures, however, must be taken with a very large grain of salt due to the facts that:

1. they reflect ONLY the numbers of firearms which Canadians have voluntarily registered and,
2. the bureaucratic structure of the registry has been known, on numerous occasions, to lead to a single weapon having multiple entries in the registry.

Because criminals do not register guns and civil non-compliance with the registry is rampant, the numbers only reflect a fraction of Canadian gun ownership.

Validity of CFP figures

To say that the CFP's figures are subject to skepticism is a gross understatement. The problem with it is that it tracks ONLY those gun owners who have voluntarily submitted to licencing and registration. In addition to the criminal element, there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions(!) of Canadian gun owners who have refused to comply with the post-C68 regimen of onerous Canadian gun laws. Many estimates have placed the non-compliance rate amongst Canadian gun owners at over 50 percent, with some estimates as high as 65 to 70 percent.

For example, the CFP lists the total number of all types of licences in Canada at 1,852,333 as of March 2009. The Canadian Justice Department, however, placed the number of firearm owners in Canada at over 3,000,000 ... in 1994! The notion that Canada has seen a drop of nearly 40% in firearm ownership rates in a mere 15 years is simply not credible.

The same CFP source lists the current number of registered firearms in Canada as 7,360,981 as of March 2009. The Justice Department, again, estimated the number of firearms in Canada to be as many as 11,000,000 in 1998. This number, however, was arrived at through examination of import records and does not properly account for firearms manufactured domestically. The H. W. Cooey Machine & Arms Company alone manufactured more than 6,000,000 firearms from their plant in Coburg, Ontario, before closing in 1979. And this number does not include shotguns manufactured by Cooey for Iver Johnson.

Paper criminals

Additionally, the CFP statistics (as well as their policies and personnel) don't seem to quite know what to make of or do about the 185,925 Canadians who, while in possession of registered firearms, have allowed their licences to lapse or have had their licences revoked — because, for example, the applicant had not correctly replied to a question about his love life:

"Arrest 200,000 peaceful Canadians, then? Or selectively persecute some of them, as the police have (still timidly) started to do, in order to scare the others into submission? The whole episode shows that it is impossible to enforce a liberticidal law with means that are consistent with a free society. One has to yield: the liberticidal law — the whole liberticidal law — or the free society. The jury is still out."
-Pierre Lemieux, Western Standard - April 8, 2009

What DO we know?

Based on the extremely limited empirical data available, there are very few things which can conclusively be said about the current rates of civilian firearm ownership in Canada. This does not mean that there is nothing that can be said, however. Taking in mind both the information provided on tables 1 through 3 and the fact that 20.7% of the Canadian population is currently estimated to be under the age of 18 (making approximately 26,569,211 adults), we can reasonably draw the following conclusions:

1. One in 14 Canadian adults has a valid firearms licence.
2. One in 219 Canadian minors have a valid firearms licence.
3. There is one registered firearm for every 3.6 Canadian adults (22 registered guns per 100 total population).
4. Approximately 10% of Canadian firearm licence holders have become "paper criminals," as of March 2009.

Beyond these facts, all else is mostly speculation...

See also

• Canadian Firearms Program
• Canadian gun registry
• Possession and Acquisition Licence
• Gun politics in Canada
• List of countries by gun ownership