The federal government is refusing to disclose how many firearms it has actually collected under its gun “buyback” program, or what the confiscation scheme costs per gun.

The stonewalling came in a response to an order paper question from Conservative MP Eric Melillo (Kenora—Kiiwetinoong), tabled January 26, asking for basic accountability on the Liberals’ firearms confiscation effort.

Melillo asked how many firearms the government has collected since the program was created and, for each one, the brand and model, how much it cost to acquire, where it was taken, how much was spent storing or processing it, and whether it was destroyed or otherwise disposed of.

Instead of answering, Public Safety Canada claimed the funding referenced in the estimates was only for firearms licensing agreements with provinces and “is not related to the collection of firearms or the Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program.”

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In other words: no number of guns, no cost per firearm, no details at all.

The refusal comes as other parliamentary answers show Ottawa has already spent nearly $1 million just on a web portal for the buyback program, with $2.3 million budgeted for the system alone — despite the government still being unable or unwilling to say how many firearms have passed through it.

The buyback program stems from the Liberals’ 2020 order-in-council banning thousands of models of legally owned firearms, followed by years of delays, shifting rules, and ballooning administrative costs.

Critics say the latest response proves the program is long on spending and short on results — and that Ottawa is deliberately avoiding the most basic performance metric: how many guns it has actually taken and what each one costs.

So far, taxpayers know what the website costs. They just don’t know what it’s buying.