Thank you for the opportunity.
Basically, I would like to remind the committee of the stats on homicide: 0.2% per 100,000 people is the homicide rate in Canada. This is StatsCan talking. That narrows the impact of why you're proposing this law. The law itself affects the public and you're providing public safety. Unfortunately, the public is not well informed about firearms.
Prohibited firearms compared with legal firearms in our testing in the Canadian firearms safety course...and indeed that's one of my credits. I was representing British Columbia and the Yukon territory in the rewrite of the text we use currently in Canada. There is no provision for questions on what constitutes the difference, for the public, between a non-restricted firearm—which is legal, a rifle or a shotgun—and a prohibited firearm. There's very little information to question the new students on.
We have approximately two million licences in Canada at this point in time. Those people go through the Canadian firearms safety course training, and you have the provision there to improve the questioning so that the general public is more aware of the differences in firearms. An assault rifle constitutes fear in the general public, yet an assault rifle in Canada is prohibited. This is a gun where the operator is able to change from a semi-automatic, which is a legal non-restricted firearm, to an automatic, which becomes a machine gun at the operator's discretion. If we look at President Clinton's 2004 law that prohibited these firearms, there is a legal description of assault rifles. I think we should bring that description forward and say that right now certain firearms are legal in Canada but assault rifles are not. We should make the general public, at least graduates of the Canadian firearms safety course, aware of that description.