Liberal incumbent and former Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair won his riding of Scarborough Southwest in the federal election. He is seen at his victory party near Markham and Kingston road in Scarborough. Richard Lautens/Toronto Star

Public Safety Minister Bill Blair says gun owners who possess military-style rifles that will eventually be prohibited under a new gun-control regime told him they preferred a buyback compensation system rather than a prohibition that would let them keep their guns — without taking them out of their homes.

Blair on Monday also indicated the new prohibition law and regulations will take a long time — up to two years — to be put into place.

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The former Toronto police chief disclosed the views of rifle owners as he responded to questions about his intention not to release the makes and models of semi-automatic rifles that will fall under the prohibition orders until the makes and models of all the guns are ready to be published. Blair told reporters last week he wanted to avoid a run of rifle sales before the regime is in place.

Under a Liberal gun-control initiative passed through Parliament last June, two makes of semi-automatic rifles for which the previous Conservative government had lowered the level of restriction were reclassified as prohibited but possession was grandfathered, allowing owners to keep the weapons but not use them.

The Firearms Act allows owners of prohibited rifles to keep them, but transport them only in exceptional circumstances.

In the new regime for restricted semi-automatic rifles, current owners of the type of rifles the government plans to prohibit will have to give them up.

Asked why a gun owner would want to acquire a firearm with the knowledge they were going to have to give it up, with compensation, Blair said: “One of the things that we have seen in other jurisdictions is that even when there’s talk about putting additional restrictions or even prohibitions on a certain type of firearm, manufacturers and retailers use that as a sort of ‘hurry up and get this.”

“And if people think that there is going to be a buyback, then that enables them to acquire the firearm for a period of time with reasonable assurance that, you know, even if they have to surrender it two years from now, they’ll get their money back,” Blair said.

“I went across the country, I spoke to people who own these weapons that could be included on this list and many of them said to me ‘rather than prohibit them and grandfather them, because we cannot use them, we can’t bequeath them, we cannot sell them’, rather than do that, they thought it would be fairer if we had some system of allowing them to surrender the weapon and be compensated for that, that was fairer to them,” he told iPolitics.

“I’m not trying to disadvantage Canadians, especially if they’ve been law-abiding, what I want to do is make sure we treat them fairly.”

“There is still a great deal of work, it’s one of the reasons we’ve said there will be a period of amnesty while we bring forward the legislation and the budget necessary to do that, to effect the buy back,” Blair said, confirming a requirement for legislation as well as new regulations.

“There’s a process and legislation and that work will begin in earnest in the coming weeks. I just want to remind everybody the throne speech was last Thursday, and less than 24 hours later people were demanding why we hadn’t brought these measures in,” he said. “They take time to do it right and we will take the time to do it right.”

“We have to make sure those public officials, police and others who would have a role in effecting that program, have the resources they need to do it right.”

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When the Liberal prohibition plan was unveiled during the campaign for the October federal election, Blair said it could cover an estimated 250,000 rifles and cost more than $400 million.

The Liberals have modelled their proposed prohibition of what the government describes as military-style rifles on New Zealand’s prohibition of certain semi-automatic rifles following a deadly shooting attack in Christchurch, N.Z. last March that left 51 people dead.

The New Zealand Parliament passed legislation within just over three weeks of the massacre to ban more than 500 makes and models of semi-automatic rifles. The bill took only 10 days to receive royal assent after the government introduced it on April 1.

By the end of October, more than 32,000 prohibited weapons had been turned in, with compensation based on the condition and age of the rifles. A report from the minister in charge said $62 million had been paid out as compensation for the weapons whose owners turned them in.