Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Easter, for recognizing that the gun community involves hunting and angling. It was obviously a little disheartening for all of us to watch in the House members on your side chastise and criticize our government for entertaining a study on the value of hunting and conservation in the environment committee.
Outside of that point, I think we continue to put on the public record here things that simply aren't true. It needs to be clarified that when we're looking at what the minister can do now in terms of classification, the minister and cabinet can always move a classification of firearms in one direction, and what we heard in clear testimony was that they couldn't do it in any other way.
We talk about special interest groups and their influence. There are special interest groups that want to ban guns in this country. When you can classify a firearm in one direction and not another, that would leave any government, present or future, in the sights of one particular special interest group interested in banning firearms in this country.
Outside of that, we did hear clearly from the Canadian Shooting Sports Association and other witnesses that those decisions ultimately would be made on the basis of technical advice, not by a group of politicians sitting in a room and making their best guess at the specs of any given firearms that we're looking at classifying.
With that, I have the confidence that any minister, present or future, will make decisions based on expert and technical advice provided. It only makes sense that if they can do something in one direction, they can do something in both directions, which is the situation now.
Thank you.