Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister and officials, for being here today.
Minister, I want to begin by thanking you for bringing this bill forward. Obviously our job as a committee is to take a good piece of legislation and make it better. What I'd love to be able to do today is just dig in with you on a couple of issues that I think are worthy of consideration.
The VPD—the Vancouver Police Department—presented to us during the course of our guns and gangs study, which I think was a very good piece of work done by this committee. One of the things that we learned about from them—and I've had the subsequent opportunity to dig in on it with them and other police forces—is ghost guns. The fact is that people can manufacture weapons at home using components that they can buy online or buy at local stores or, worse yet, they can use a 3-D printer to make their own weapons.
I'd love to know if you're willing to strengthen or open to strengthening the legislation in front of us to address ghost guns and how we can prevent them from becoming an even larger problem than they are, realizing that we may be dealing with a problem today that looks a certain way, but this is, in reality, in my view, the problem that we're going to be facing one, two or five years from now. Can we start to think about that more meaningfully?