Thank you, gentlemen, for coming this morning.
I'd like to carry on on the theme of firearms, but also the theme with regard to what Mr. Ménard said about villages and towns on the border. Both of those are akin to the loss of innocence in our society. In the last couple of days we've heard tremendous horror stories of multiple deaths from south of the border and from Europe.
I think back to just a few years ago—I guess it's a lot of years ago now--when I was just old enough to go hunting and carry a firearm. I can recall vividly just up the valley here, being able to go down to the basement, open up the cabinet, go rabbit hunting with a couple of my friends, and just walking down the street, as it was a small town. We headed into the bush and we met people there and nobody got excited. If we were lucky, we brought home a couple of rabbits.
Today, if a couple of 17- or 18-year-olds went down to the basement and did the same thing, they'd have an OPP or a city police SWAT team out there surrounding them, although they were just going to do something we used to take for granted. That's a loss of innocence in our society, very similar to the loss of innocence in the life of a village on the border of our two great countries, the U.S. and Canada, where people didn't see a difference between going across the street, whether it was the border or not. Today, you can end up in jail or with a big fine, so I can understand Mr. Ménard's point.
I think it's important for us to see in our society, because of fear or because a few individuals in this world such as terrorists or members of organized crime have changed our lives significantly, we can no longer do the things we used to do that didn't cause a problem. Innocent people, people who just want to go hunting and people who just want to do some target shooting, are now made to feel as if they're criminals and they go through all these processes. Why? Because somebody's broken the law, and now everybody has to suffer.
Going on a little bit further, to the seizure of firearms at the border, I think Mr. Rigby touched on it. Wouldn't the reduction in the seizure of firearms also have to do with a reduction in the number of people from the U.S. coming to Canada to go hunting who just failed to have the proper documentation? Could one of the reasons be because there's a reduction in the number of those persons, or in that particular part of our tourism industry, and could another reason be because the criminals are getting smarter in their ability to hide firearms from detection?