Thank you for your question, Ms. Michaud.
The first mistake was how the government introduced its amendments, I believe on second reading of the bill. It was as if a magician had pulled a rabbit out of a hat. The public was clearly surprised, as were perhaps the committee members, and lots of other people.
I think it was ham-fisted, even though, in the government's defence, it had been announced in 2020 following the Portapique tragedy, when the government decided by an order in council to withdraw access to 1,500 models of military-style assault rifles, to use the nomenclature of the day. So it was expected, but perhaps not the way it was actually done.
The other problem, in my view, was that both amendments introduced by the government were difficult to enforce, challengeable and rather complex. The purpose of the first amendment was to provide a definition of what a military-style assault rifle was, and the second consisted of all long list of several hundred pages, which I found, by the way, to be extraordinarily exhaustive and impressive. It was obvious that a lot of work had been put into this. However, the problem with this kind of list is that the industry is always looking for ways to get around it while sticking to the letter of the law. New models could be introduced to get around the classification and the list would have to be continually updated, which of course amounts to a lot of work.
Those were my two main criticisms with respect to these two amendments.