Thank you, Chair.
As I said, we are here because of the Liberals not following, as was already indicated, due process. They're bringing a significant amendment to a bill that was already contentious to many Canadians. They've now added a whole new scheme to this bill.
I firmly believe that the Liberals did not decide to throw this amendment in at the last minute. I believe very strongly that when Minister Mendicino made these comments back in May, there were already conversations and already plans in the works to try to manipulate and pull a fast one on Canadians, and now, because of the enormous response from Canadians and from the opposition, they're trying to backtrack and save face. This is a complete sham, to be honest with you.
Firearms have dominated a lot of my email correspondence over the last several weeks. I think we're above 6,000 already. I have not had one in favour of what this government has tried to do—not one. In fact, the majority of the phone calls we've received and the thousands of emails we've received have suggested many things, most of which I can't repeat here. The ones I can repeat are asking this: If the government is so intent on going after hunters, why don't they propose a stand-alone bill? Pull this right from Bill C-21. Let's have the conversation about what Bill C-21 was intended to do, which was to deal with handguns, and let's go back to it.
As Mr. MacGregor indicated in his subamendment, and I agree, we need a substantial number of meetings. I don't want it to be prescribed and remain at eight. Ms. Dancho in her amendment to this bill proposed 20. If the government doesn't have the good common sense to pull this amendment on their own, then the committee has to do the consultative work this government failed to do.
As a result, I don't think eight meetings will suffice either. There are multiple groups from across this country—hunting and sporting groups, industry, indigenous Canadians, you name it—and we're not going to get them all in eight meetings, which will only be 16 hours. Even with two different groups per hour, that won't be a significant number of groups. We'll be able to hear only about 30 groups speak. I think we'll just be scratching the surface.
There's a reason why Canadians don't trust this government. There are many reasons, actually, but this is just another example of trying to manipulate or pull a fast one—or whatever name you want to call it—to get Canadians to buy into something that is their ideological agenda.
Again, I will have more to say on this as we get to the regular amendment. Suffice it to say that while I agree that we need more than two meetings—many more—I am certainly not favourable to trying to get everybody in within a process of eight.