As an outfitting industry, one of the biggest obstacles we face is—and I see it probably as a little bit of a plan by some people in power—the restriction my clients from the United States or somewhere else in the world face in transporting wildlife home. It gets a little more difficult every year. It's almost like somebody says if we make it hard enough, they'll just quit coming.
The same with guns. In Canada, we thankfully have gotten rid of our registry. Canada is very simple. We know what the rules are and it's easy for our clients to come to Canada with guns. We just had a recent scare. The United States was not going to let any hunters export their firearms unless they did an electronic export application, which basically they had to hire a lawyer to do. That's been temporarily suspended because they really didn't have the technology in place to implement it.
We see those things all the time. CITES for instance, allows us to hunt wolves. We do a wolf hunt in the spring at our camp. We have one officer in all of the Northwest Territories who can issue a CITES permit, and unless he's in the office the day my clients go home, then the hides have to be tanned somewhere in Canada and an application filled out. It's about a three-month process and winds up being about 500 dollars' worth of fees to take a wolf hide back to the United States. It's ridiculous.
Wolves are not endangered in Canada. They're really not endangered anymore in most places in the United States where they have habitat for them, yet we have these rules that have been implemented that are so rigid that we can't bend them, and it's a problem.