As you say, this could take a little while.
In Nova Scotia, to take the training required to hunt, a person has to take the registered Canadian firearms training course as well as a hunter education course. They're both separate components. In some provinces they're joined together.
The training required in the Canadian firearms training course takes a person through all of the needed material with respect to the ethics surrounding firearms and the proper handling of firearms. When you go through that process you'll learn the different types of actions, the different types of ammunition, what's prohibited, what's not prohibited, what we're allowed to use in Canada, what we're not allowed to use in Canada. Those are the main components and are built for understanding.
At that particular point, though, it only makes you safe to use the firearm itself. In order to get the licence you have to go through another chapter, and that is to apply to the RCMP, basically, for permission to get the Canadian firearms card so that you can buy guns and buy ammunition. That is a little bit more onerous in that the information, the questions, are about your mental health, your marital status, things of that nature. All the questions that are there must be answered properly or you'll get your application back pretty darned quick. We have to have a picture of ourselves sent along with that application. That, in turn, is placed on the card, if the card is granted to that particular person.
The hunter education portion in Nova Scotia is about a seven-hour course, and most of it surrounds ethics and safe hunting. There are some components of field stuff like map and compass, identifying animals and traps, and things of that nature. A lot of it is circled around the relationship between the hunter and the farmer, the landowner, the ethics surrounding it, the ethics surrounding your hunting partner, the ethics surrounding responsible taking of an animal in a fair chase, so yes, those components are looked into.
With respect to the range, I'm not much of a range shooter myself, but the basic guidelines will be seen, probably in every club, up on the wall as you walk through the door, such as no shooting unless there's a range officer around. There's ongoing training within an organization, a shooting club for different types of calibres to ensure that a person who buys a new firearm becomes familiar with it before they actually get a chance to start shooting it. In most clubs, their regulations are over and above anything that would be required by the chief firearms officer. Most of them are pretty stringent. That's why one of the safest places to be is at a gun range, because their safety record is impeccable.