Public Safety Committee on Oct. 18th, 2022

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Did you receive government support for this program, or was this something industry took on itself?

[Wesley Allan Winkel]

This is something that industry took on all on its own. We receive no government support and no government direction.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Would government support help you to make that program stronger?

[Wesley Allan Winkel]

Absolutely. We have requested it and we have not received it, but it would definitely help out.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

That's a shame.

In my last few seconds, can you give examples of what kind of straw purchasing you have seen?

[Wesley Allan Winkel]

There have been a couple of examples of individuals purchasing handguns in volume from different retailers, thus making it hard for the retailers to identify them. However, every one of those transactions was approved by the chief firearms office and the RCMP. It seemed more concerning to us—and that's why we took it on as an industry to look into it—because we could not understand how the chief firearms office and the RCMP were not able to identify this before they approved the transactions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

I'm sorry; I have to cut you off there. Thank you.

The bells are ringing for a vote, so I need unanimous consent to carry on if there's a will to do so. We have three more six-minute slots left in this round. Would we have unanimous consent to carry on that far?

Okay, we have unanimous consent for 15 minutes, so we'll maybe shorten the six-minute round to five minutes apiece if that's okay. Then we'll be able to finish the first round.

We'll go now to Mr. Noormohamed for five minutes, please.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

I'm sorry, Mr. Chair; before we start my time, I'm curious about why we are cutting the time. Do we have unanimous consent to cut the time? Why are we doing that if we're willing to keep going?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

We don't have unanimous consent to cut the time, but it is sort of a chair prerogative to try to fit things in where we can.

We have 15 minutes with unanimous consent to carry on, so we can finish the round if we do five minutes apiece. Perhaps we can make it up later somehow.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Thank you very much. I will speak more quickly than I ordinarily would.

I want to thank all the witnesses for being here. I'll start with Dr. Maggi.

I think you touched on something really important in talking about suicides and mental health. In your professional opinion, do you think that reducing the number of guns in homes or guns available to people will reduce the number of suicides?

[Dr. Julie Maggi]

Thanks for the question.

We know that if you live in a home with a gun, you're five times more likely to die by suicide. Further, most suicides are impulsive actions. By impulsive, I mean the suicidal crisis passes in 10 minutes to a hour. Reducing the means by which someone can do something drastic in that period of time is one of the most important interventions that we can have for suicide risk reduction.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

In other words, making it harder for people to kill themselves makes it harder for people to kill themselves.

[Dr. Julie Maggi]

That's correct.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

I've got it. For you as a doctor, that's an important intervention because of...what?

[Dr. Julie Maggi]

For me as a doctor, it's an important intervention because suicide is the end result of many different illnesses. A lot of factors go into the final moment.

Being able to actually limit the means is one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have to actually decrease the number of people who die by suicide. For an individual, if I'm working with an individual, removing the means often allows me to keep them out of hospital for extended periods of time. It allows me to have more time to treat their mental illness, if they have one. Keeping them alive opens up a lot of options.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Thank you.

Can you give a brief answer to this question? I represent a riding with a lot of medical professionals, a lot of doctors, a lot of nurses. Tell us what it's like for you, as doctors, when you have to deal with gunshot victims. What is it like? What does that do for you? What does it do for the families? Why should we take that into consideration when we're making decisions around this legislation?

[Dr. Julie Maggi]

It's extremely difficult, as a physician, to see someone who has had a gunshot wound, but it's not just me. It's the people who surround that individual who has had the gunshot wound. It's the family. It's the community. This is an injury that has multiple rippling effects. Again, it doesn't just keep the individuals who are injured out of work and decrease their own lives and productivity, but it does so for their families and communities.

All the statistics we look at that are just about the one person who may have died do not capture the rippling effects of gunshot wounds.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Thank you for that.

I'd like to turn for the couple of minutes I have left to our friends from the airsoft industry.

I think that everyone in this room understands that airsoft doesn't kill people, but they do get people killed because of the way they look. They might not be used in the way that you intend them to be used, and then perhaps their aesthetic causes law enforcement to respond in a way that law enforcement should if they see something that looks like a lethal weapon.

I don't think anybody here wants you to shut down your industry. What is the industry willing to do to help ensure that the airsoft guns you manufacture or that you use don't look like lethal firearms?

We heard the nerf analogy earlier, but a nerf gun looks nothing like an airsoft gun.

We don't want to shut your industry down. We do want to make it something that doesn't get people killed, so tell us what you would be willing to consider so that we can find ways to work together to make sure that people who are playing this sport are not able to inadvertently become the cause of people dying, particularly young people.

[Brian A. McIlmoyle]

I'm going to pass that question over to my technical specialist, Mr. Ziming Wan.

[Ziming Wan, Member, Airsoft in Canada]

Thank you for the opportunity to answer your question.

We've actually consulted many active-duty law enforcement officers from multiple agencies across Canada, and the general consensus is that we would like to reduce these occurrences in the first place. The consensus is also that when this difficult situation does arise, the determining factor generally is not whether or not a person had an object that may or may not have looked like a firearm; the general consensus is that the determining factor is the body language and the mannerisms displayed by the person in the situation.

There also have been many cases in which objects that were clearly not firearms have been mistaken for firearms. An example of that would be from Sean Arbuthnot, who is the founding director of ASIC, our organization. He was actually taken down at gunpoint in a city over a camera tripod that looked nothing like a firearm.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Just to interrupt, with the time we have, we are trying to find ways to find solutions. Rejecting the premise of the question doesn't help. What I'm trying to say to you is that we have heard from law enforcement saying that this is a problem, so we are trying to find ways to be helpful here.

Tell us what you are willing to do to make sure that things that look like AR-15s that might shoot nerf darts don't actually end up getting people killed. That's what we're trying to get to.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

You have 15 seconds for that answer.

[Ziming Wan]

With that opened, I think that reducing these instances in the first place would be the best scenario, so we recommend liability waivers and the 18-plus requirement to reduce these instances in the first place.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you.

I now give the floor to Ms. Michaud for five minutes.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Before we begin, Mr. Chair, I understand that we all agreed to continue the meeting, but the NDP and I have had our time cut by one minute. One minute is basically a lot, because we don't have much time. Given that it was the Conservatives who were proposing to go to the House to vote, could we not cut their time rather than ours?