Thanks very much for including me. I'm joining you from the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishinabe, Haudenosaunee, Chippewa, and Wendat peoples.
I want to start by thanking you for rescheduling me and allowing me to speak. I will follow up with a written brief.
There are a few things I think are important to mention. The Coalition for Gun Control represents 200 organizations, including the Canadian Public Health Association, as well as community organizations, groups like the Canadian Labour Congress, victims organizations and more than 75 women's groups.
Our focus is public safety. Seventy per cent of Canadians support a complete ban on handguns and have for 30 years. In our view, this law is very important in addressing the issues of public safety that have been raised by experts as well as in translating the will of Canadians into action.
We've heard a lot about the cost to sport shooters and the cost to the gun industry. I'd like to remind the committee that the last analysis done of gun death and injury in Canada estimated the annual cost at $6.6 billion, in an article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
We support the provisions that strengthen licensing. We think some of the provisions, however, need to be reconsidered. If the government is responsible for issuing licences, the government should be responsible for removing licences and expecting citizens to go to court for emergency revocations. I think that's misdirected. We need to strengthen the responsiveness of the government and firearms officers to exercise their obligation to remove firearms from people who, in their opinion, are a threat to themselves or any other person. It's important that we recognize the legislation's role in suicide prevention, not just in preventing domestic violence, mass shootings and murders of police officers.
The second area in which we think the legislation could be strengthened is with respect to the ban on semi-automatic military-style weapons. We think that a definition should be included to make very clear the evergreen requirements for this legislation. We know from the 1995 orders in council that gun manufacturers will circumvent any lists that are provided, so it's important to have a clear definition, perhaps like those in the California laws, in the legislation along with the OIC.
We actually oppose anything other than a very narrow exemption to the ban on the sale and transfer of handguns. Again, the proliferation of handguns in the last 15 years has seen more than double the number of restricted weapons legally owned in Canada. We've seen a dramatic rise in gun-related death and injury. It's simply not true that all gun violence is a function of smuggled guns; the facts do not support that.
Finally, I would invite members of the committee to take a really close look at what sport groups like the International Practical Shooting Confederation do. While active members of the armed forces and police officers need to be able to undertake defensive shooting and to perhaps shoot at targets shaped like people in scenarios as part of their training, there's no need in Canada for civilians to be involved in such activities, and they are very much at odds with Canadian values and culture.
In closing, there is ample evidence in the peer-reviewed research from around the world that stronger restrictions on guns save lives. Canada, the U.K. and Australia have the same rates of murder without guns. They have problems with poverty. They have problems with drug abuse. Last year, the United Kingdom had fewer than 30 gun murders and Australia had one-fifth the number we had in Canada. It's very clear that restricting access to firearms has an impact on the misuse of guns as well as on the diversion of legal guns to illegal markets. Those things are worth sacrificing people's hobbies for.
Thank you very much.