I don’t like it when people trot out the number of red flag orders that have been issued as evidence that the red flag law in question is working. That’s not a sign of the law’s effectiveness. That should be things like a drop in violent crime, a drop in suicides, or even a second round of the order after the initial issuance.
In other words, something that shows the people getting hit are, in fact, a danger to themselves or others.
But that starts with tracking the orders themselves, so the numbers matter.
Unless, apparently, you’re the Canadian government.
Bill C-21 was presented as part of a comprehensive plan to “keep Canadians safe from gun violence” and, in March, Frank Caputo, a Conservative Member of Parliament, inquired how these orders contributed to public safety and at what cost. His written parliamentary question requested the details of federal government spending “on the ‘Red Flag’ Awareness Initiative 2025 and on other measures promoting the laws” (along with a cost breakdown), the number of “red flag” orders issued since Bill C-21 went into effect, and the total number of firearms obtained or seized by way of these orders.
The response of the Minister of Public Safety was telling, both in what was disclosed and what was not.
As of mid-March, CAD$728,829 had been spent to “raise awareness” of red flag laws, out of a total of CAD$4.8 million committed to the awareness project. In the last two and a half years, though, only a single“red flag” order, in Ontario in 2025, had been reported to the RCMP’s Canadian Firearms Program and recorded in its database. No information was given about that order or the firearms seized, if any: the government-speak the response was couched in advised that categories for seizures “do not provide the level of details necessary to associate a specific firearm to an emergency prohibition order. As a result, the Canadian Firearms Program does not have the information to provide the number of firearm(s) obtained.” Translated into plain English, it seems government records don’t specifically track gun seizures due to “red flag” orders, a peculiar omission if there’s any interest in assessing the purported effectiveness of the new law and the related multi-million dollar investment it has forced on taxpayers.
So, they have no clue what’s going on. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation confirmed that “eleven provincial and territorial chief firearms officers (responsible for gun license revocations) had no data on red flag-related seizures, and neither did the Ontario Provincial Police or Sûreté du Québec.”
In other words, no one has a clue what’s going on anywhere in the Great White North with regard to red flag orders.
That’s troubling, because when it comes to a measure that essentially strips people of basic rights, including their right to keep their own property and their right to due process–which the Canadians seem to claim to respect, even if they don’t think gun rights are real–it would be important to evaluate just how useful the law itself is.
If it’s not doing anything, then it should be repealed.
Granted, it should be repealed regardless, but for the sake of argument, I’m going to pretend that the imaginary validity of these laws is real rather than a figment of someone’s fever dream.
As such, it seems tracking should be obvious and mandatory, so we can review what’s happening, why it’s happening, and hone the system if needed or, if there’s no hope of that, scrap it entirely. Even if you think the right to keep and bear arms, to maintain your own property, and the due process of law should be secondary to public safety, can’t we agree that if public safety isn’t benefited, the law should be repealed?
Seems like an obvious thing.
However, that’s simply not happening in Canada, which I think is telling.
It’s telling because it’s evidence that the law was never really about public safety and was always about making people think the government took their concerns seriously. We’ve already seen one mass killing up that way by someone who’d been hit with one of these orders, which clearly didn’t accomplish much, but where else are they failing? We can’t know because the Canadian government doesn’t care to know itself.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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