Thank you.
We received a detailed explanation, which is very short.
At a committee meeting, we heard from some officials and we asked them to provide us with an explanation in writing of the proposed amendments.
It's fairly easy to understand, but we had a lot of trouble understanding the explanation, which is still not entirely clear.
It's interesting to see that Schedule 1 to amendment G‑46 deals with firearms that have been banned since the 1990s, since the Order Declaring an Amnesty Period (2020).
Then, in Schedule 2 to amendment G‑46, the focus is on paragraphs 97 to 232, which deal with firearms that would be banned by adding these amendments. It talked about approximately 480 makes and models of firearms that are currently not banned, which added only a small number.
I agree with my colleagues about the enormous amount of disinformation that has circulated. For example, if you pressed Ctrl+F to do a search in the document and came to a model, you immediately got the impression it was banned, when it was talking about a model with a totally different power. On top of that, if you had not read the introductory paragraph first, you missed the information that said "with the exception of these models". That created a huge amount of confusion.
To try to unravel it all, I tried to see what is being done elsewhere. Sometimes, it's a good idea to compare ourselves to other countries to see what they have done and how they went about things.
The analysts at the committee and the library were kind enough to quickly prepare a little document for me.
I'm going to give you the example of New Zealand.
The way New Zealand went about it is fairly similar to what the government proposed with amendments G‑4 and G‑46 to Bill C‑21. However, one passage particularly caught my attention, in which it says that the bill was also intended to preserve access to lower-capacity semi-automatic firearms recognized as being used by hunters and farmers.
We see that New Zealand went about this in a similar way, but paying attention to farmers, hunters and maybe even indigenous people, who use certain models.
We understand that the government is going to start over from zero with its examination of the issue and is going to try to propose something.
In this new proposal, do you think the government should give the same attention to hunters, farmers and indigenous people as New Zealand does?