Thank you, Mr. Breitkreuz.
Despite the constitutional guarantees that Canadians have of equal application of the law in all provinces and territories, I can assure you that the chief firearms officers right across the country make it up as they go along.
We've had more issues with chief firearms officers making arbitrary decisions than you could ever imagine. I'll give a couple of very fast examples, if I may. The Ontario chief firearms officer said a few years ago, and this is a quote. Mr. Farrant was in the room when he said this. He said, “I woke up one morning and decided that people needed to have an invitation to go to a shooting club that wasn't their own”, despite the fact that your federal permit says you can.
He said that he didn't care if it's written on the back of a cocktail napkin or if it's an email and he didn't even care if clubs put out blanket invitations, not having that invitation is a violation of the terms and conditions of your authorization to transport, with a mandatory minimum of three years in jail.
What bureaucrat in this country has the power to arbitrarily make up a rule that can put Canadians in jail for three years? This is insane.
The House of Commons repealed the gun show regulations back a couple of years ago, and that's good. They were never implemented because they were absolutely ridiculous.
The chief firearms officers of British Columbia and Alberta decided that they would implement the regulations anyway, regardless of what the House of Commons said. We had to actually appeal to the commissioner of the RCMP to step in and ask his employees to comply with the law, because they were arbitrarily applying these rules to gun shows within weeks after the House of Commons had repealed those same rules. That's the kind of thing we're facing all the time.
Every single province has its own rules as to how gun clubs and shooting ranges are run and how stores are inspected and approved. We actually had one case where a store had completely redone a wall, but in the original specification there had been a door there at one point in time, and the CFO was insisting that the door be alarmed, but it didn't exist anymore. He was actually threatening the business with pulling its business licence over that.