Thank you.
I more or less agree with you on the list. By asking the officials who appeared before this committee some questions, I understood that every time a new model was introduced, it would have required an amendment to the Criminal Code. The purpose of the exercise is to include this list in the Criminal Code.
According to what I was told, this was not necessarily the case because whenever the police have to deal with a new firearm, in order to determine whether it's legal or not, they have to update the RCMP list, and that's the list that has to be relied on.
I wondered about why one would include a list in the Criminal Code unless it was up to date and whether the RCMP list was the one that would be updated. Why waste time making a list when you're going to end up with several of them? There were also criticisms of the fact that some exempted weapons were on the same list as the weapons that had already been prohibited since the 1990s, or since the 2020 order in council.
If there are several lists, it will only confuse people, and that's understandable. If I were to compare the reaction of people to the introduction of these amendments to their reaction when the 2020 order in council was announced, it was very different. The reason is that firearms owners did not consult the list in 2020.
If the government is going to propose new amendments, should it continue to use a list or should there be a better definition that would cover not only existing weapons, but others that might enter the market in future?