Public Safety Committee on Feb. 14th, 2023

[Mark Ryckman]

Thanks for the question.

I'll admit that I am not an expert on gun violence. I will say that I think you'd be hard pressed to find any Canadians who don't think the government can do more to reduce gun violence, even though we are not America by any stretch of the imagination, despite the onslaught of American media stories we get every day. Canada does have very robust gun laws, a very robust legislative framework that dictates the use and ownership of guns, so we are not America in that regard. There is always more that the government can do.

The question becomes, what is the threshold? What is the goal of the policy that the government is trying to enact in this case? It started out as a handgun ban and, as I said earlier, unexpectedly morphed and evolved into something that was a direct impact on the hunting community. While I agree with you that gun violence is an issue, I think everybody would agree with you as well.

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Dr. Hanley.

I will now give the floor to Ms. Michaud for two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to continue with you, Mr. Ryckman.

You are probably aware that after the amendments were introduced by the government, members from all parties received hundreds and hundreds of communications in the form of emails, letters or calls from people who were angry of felt they were not understood.

Obviously, people talked to us about this at official dinners in our ridings, and over meals with family and friends. Everyone has an opinion about it, and that's fine.

I was surprised to see, speaking of hunters, that they sometimes reacted like this: if the firearms they use for hunting is banned tomorrow morning, they will just buy a different one.

We understand that not all hunters reacted that way, and that's also fine. It's also quite reasonable that hunters be able to make themselves heard. I understand that the government didn't consult hunters before introducing these amendments and so it's quite legitimate for them to make themselves heard.

Do you think that the fact that hunters feel they have to do something and they don't know what the next steps will be may have fuelled the discontent?

Hunters don't know what will happen the day after the bill is passed, particularly if these amendments were adopted and included firearms commonly used for hunting. Are they going to get arrested by the police because they have a banned item in their home? Is there going to be a buy-back program or not? Are they going to be able to sell their firearms back to the government? Are the police going to enter their house to search for their firearm?

There were no answers for them when the amendments were introduced.

Do you think that may have added to the discontent, somewhat legitimately, I would say, among hunters?

[Mark Ryckman]

Yes, absolutely. It's been mentioned a couple of times already, in that not only was there some disinformation but there was some misinformation. There was simply a lack of clarity, and the responsibility for that lies mostly on the government for the way it was introduced.

You're absolutely right, in that the OFAH did not provide comment on Bill C-21 originally. Even if we had, we would not have been speaking about the amendments because they didn't exist at the time. We would have been speaking about the content of the bill in front of us, which was entirely different from what I'm here to talk about today.

Uncertainty is absolutely a driver of concern. It's not just uncertainty about how to interpret some of these provisions that are being proposed, but uncertainty about whether or not the RCMP was going to be knocking on somebody's door and taking their gun, or whether they were going to be properly compensated for property they legally owned the day before.

You're correct, and I would agree that confusion drives some of that concern—absolutely. We made a concerted effort to get as much information as possible from Public Safety and the government, and we put that out there.

I will say before I finish that you're welcome for all of those emails. We did not create this issue. We did not create the anger and the distrust in the hunting community. The process did, and the content of the amendments did. We simply gave people a very straightforward and easy way to contact their members of Parliament.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Ms. Michaud.

Mr. Julian, please go ahead. You have two and a half minutes.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to go to you, Mr. Ryckman.

Just so I understand where your organization was prior to the amendments being tabled, what was the position of your organization on Bill C-21?

[Mark Ryckman]

That's a great question.

Without going into a huge summary of our submission, there were some concerns about Bill C-21—for instance, impacts on people having their firearms taken away through the red and yellow flag laws without a proper hearing or without notice. It was not necessarily anything that couldn't be assuaged through amendments.

I will also say, though, that the amendments I'm here to talk about today are clearly an impact on the hunting community, and that is our mandate. Part of our mandate is to promote hunting in Ontario and to do what we can to protect that heritage. A lot of the content of Bill C-21 itself lies outside of our charitable mandate. While we may have some concerns, there isn't a whole lot of lobbying that we would necessarily do on some of those provisions.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

The amendment certainly changed that.

[Mark Ryckman]

Absolutely.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

I may have misunderstood, so please correct me if I'm wrong. You said you had done a survey and there were 64 models that members of the organization had indicated were impacted by the amendments.

[Mark Ryckman]

I'm sorry. Just to be clear, I was going back a little bit in time to say that this survey was conducted in response to the May 2020 order in council, which banned a bunch of firearms.

If we were to conduct a similar survey today or, let's say, a month after those amendments would have passed, for instance, the answer would have been much different because the list of firearms is much different from what it was as a result of the OIC.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Okay.

Let's come back to the 64 models with the OIC. Can you extrapolate or do you have an idea of how many of your 100,000 members would have been impacted?

There's the model side and then there is the actual number of the people who have those models.

[Mark Ryckman]

That's a great question.

I don't have those details off the top of my head. I do have a copy of the report. It's fairly extensive. I could provide it to the clerk if there's interest in me doing so.

Again, I would just add the caveat that it was in response to the May 2020 OIC. The response would be different as a result of the amendments.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Yes, I think it would give us a better idea of the impacts.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

That's three seconds. That's good.

We'll go now to—

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

I'll take the three seconds. My time was up on my side, I thought.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Well, I appreciate the three seconds back.

Mr. Motz, we'll go with you for four minutes, followed by Mr. Chiang with four minutes. We'll cut it back a little bit.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'll go to Dr. Langmann.

Doctor, the government tries to convince the Canadian public that they employ evidence-based decision-making. Based on your testimony and extensive, credible, non-government-funded research, there is no evidence to support that firearm prohibitions have any impact on public safety, homicides or suicides. It seems to me that the government is rather involved in decision-based evidence-making.

I think the committee really has to ask itself if we would rather have fewer firearms in our community—as they are proposing—or if we would rather have fewer criminals committing crimes with illegal firearms. It seems to me that the lazy approach is to just outlaw firearms, as they're trying to do.

In your research, this would have a corresponding effect. You say, it has nothing to do with ending gun violence, homicides, mass homicides, suicides and domestic violence. In the time that's left, can you please explain your thoughts on that?

[Dr. Caillin Langmann]

Sure. The current proposals even confuse me because they're talking about assault weapons. In terms of research, it's really hard to know what that even means. In my mind, they're probably talking about semi-automatic rifles.

If you look at all the research, including what I've done and from other countries—actually, Australia and Great Britain did ban a majority of these—there's no evidence that it has reduced the homicide rates there. The fact is that people can still use other types of firearms, like bolt-action rifles. In 2010, Derrick Bird drove around Great Britain with a shotgun and a bolt-action rifle and killed 12 people. It's possible to commit these acts with any type of gun.

What the legislation seems to do is target legal gun owners. It doesn't seem to target...although it did in terms of some of the mandatory minimums. For the most part, it seems to target legal firearms owners with a variety of legislation and restrictions. You're targeting a group of people who are rarely involved in criminal behaviour.

It would seem to me that your best target would be to try to reduce demand in the criminal area. It would be to try to reduce the movement of youth—usually male—into gang behaviour and to try to deal with some of the proliferation of street drugs that have accrued in this country. We are at a dangerous level in terms of methamphetamines now. This is what I see in the emergency department all the time.

All I hear is that we're targeting a bunch of hunters. It doesn't make any sense to me. It almost seems like we have our blinders on to what's going on around us.

I could go on, but I think that's—

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Please do. I have a minute left. The floor is yours.

[Dr. Caillin Langmann]

Very well.

To go back to this assault weapon, it's no wonder to me that we have this strange list and we have some guns on it, some not, and it doesn't seem to make sense to anybody. It doesn't make sense to me as a researcher, because to me, it would be based on the action of the actual rifle: Is it a semi-automatic rifle or a bolt-action rifle we're concerned with? Then are we concerned with the fact that most hunting rifles actually use high-calibre, high-velocity, high-energy projectiles that can cause serious damage? We're talking about those as if they're not a concern, yet these assault rifles, like an AR-15 that uses a small calibre, are somehow our big concern.

You need a better definition if you're going to do anything, and if your definition is whether semi-automatic rifle bans result in reductions in homicides, the answer is no. There's no good research that shows that from the United States, from Australia or from this country, so choose something else.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Doctor. Thank you, Mr. Motz.

We go now to Mr. Chiang.

Mr. Chiang, go ahead please, for four minutes.

[Paul Chiang, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I cede my time to the committee. If you'd like, we can adjourn the meeting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Very well.

Thank you, all, for your time here today.

Thank you to the witnesses. It's been most helpful. Your expertise and experience will help us a lot, so thank you.

With that, we are now adjourned.