The Border Agency Called the Guns and Gangs Unit, Not the Other Way Around: Durham Police Charge Jason Birarda, 40, of Brock After Two Rifles Come Out of a Beaverton House and He Turns Out to Hold No Licence at All (September 9, 2026)

BEAVERTON — Almost every firearms file this beat covers starts with a gun and works backwards toward where it came from. This one runs the other way. Durham Regional Police say the Canada Border Services Agency contacted them in August 2026 to advise that a man was importing unregulated firearm parts from the United States. The Guns and Gangs Unit opened a file on that basis, and on Tuesday, September 1, 2026 it executed a search warrant at a residence in Beaverton, on the Lake Simcoe shore in the Township of Brock at the far northern edge of Durham Region. Two rifles came out of the house, along with magazines and ammunition. The man police arrested nearby does not hold a firearms licence at all.

The service published the file on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, eight days after the warrant.

Two Counts, Two Rifles

The arithmetic here is unusually clean: two rifles, two counts, one per firearm. The charge is possession knowing the person is not the holder of a licence — not unauthorized possession, not possession contrary to an order, not trafficking, not importing. It is the count that follows when the guns are in the house and the paperwork is not.

What is absent from the charge sheet is the thing that started the investigation. The CBSA information concerned imported parts. There is no importing count, no smuggling count and no count that references parts at all. The release does not explain the gap — it does not say whether the imported parts were recovered, whether they were the same items as the two rifles, whether any part was assembled into anything, or whether an importing charge remains under consideration. None of that is asserted here, and readers should not fill it in.

The word the release uses for the parts is “unregulated.” That word does a lot of quiet work: unregulated parts are, broadly, the components that can move without a licence precisely because they are not themselves classified as firearms. The point of importing them is what they become. The release stops short of saying so, and so does this briefing.

The Guns and Gangs Unit, Eighty Kilometres From Oshawa

Beaverton is rural. It sits at the top of Durham Region, closer to Orillia than to Oshawa, and it is not where the service’s Guns and Gangs Unit ordinarily spends its time. That the GGU took carriage rather than a divisional criminal investigations bureau is a signal about how the file was classified internally — as a firearms-supply matter rather than a local possession one.

It is not, on its own, an allegation about anything larger. Durham Regional Police have named no gang, no criminal organization, no motorcycle club and no network in this file. None is named here. The release does not describe Birarda as connected to anyone.

What the Release Does Not Contain

There is no make, model or calibre for either rifle, and no statement of whether either is non-restricted, restricted or prohibited. There is no round count for the ammunition and no count of magazines. There is no description of the imported parts, no statement of how many shipments the CBSA identified, no date range for the importation and no port of entry. There is no street address in Beaverton and no occurrence number. No officer is quoted.

Birarda is presumed innocent. Both counts are allegations that have not been tested in court.