Thank you, Chair.
Minister, your government keeps telling Canadians that you are committed to evidence-based decision-making. In fact, your mandate letter even contains that same statement. Yet, without any evidence to support the following decision, you told Canadians on May 1, through an order in council, that you were banning military-style assault rifles under the guise of improving public safety. You and your government invented the term “military-style assault” rifle to deliberately mislead Canadians not familiar with Canada's already vigorous gun laws into believing that we have a problem where none exists. In fact, military and assault rifles are already prohibited in Canada—you know this already—and have been for over 40 years. Everyone knows that taking the lazy approach and attacking Canada's law-abiding firearm owners will do nothing to improve public safety. Most Canadians are left to wonder what the real motive is behind the Liberal's misguided gun ban plan.
As I said, on May 1 you banned 1,500 types and models of firearms. These firearms, up to that point in time, had been approved by the RCMP as safe and legal to own. Since then nearly 500 more firearms and numerous variants have been added to that banned list—almost 2,000 now. Is that number fairly accurate?