Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak before all of you regarding Bill C-21 and the amendments G-4 and G-46.
I'd like to go back a little bit in time. I'm an immigrant to Canada. I moved here in early 1982 with my parents and grew up in the Virden area. I've always been a Manitoba resident, primarily in the rural area.
I grew up in a shooting family, a hunting family. That involved competitive pistol shooting at a younger age and all the way through. It has led me to compete and shoot across western Canada. I've represented Manitoba in the sport of biathlon at the Canada Winter Games.
Shooting has always been a part of my life, my family's life, and now my own family's life. Following college, I spent a short stint in the Canadian Armed Forces. Then I spent the first part of my career with the RCMP. I spent 16 years in the RCMP across Manitoba. That included uniform policing and plainclothes policing in the drug unit, where I encountered various firearms in drug-related offences, firearms in different communities, depending on the type of policing work that I came across.
I specialized during my career in the emergency response team. Obviously, that deals with high-risk situations where you're dealing with people who are armed and barricaded and all types of other violent offences, firearms included but not necessarily just firearms.
On the training side, as part of that, I became a use-of-force instructor and a firearms instructor. That led me to teach various police officers across the country in pistol, shotgun and rifle use and patrol carbine use, and I was even a guest instructor at the Canadian Police College on search warrant execution.
Following a transfer and a relocation to western Manitoba, I was approached by my family, my parents, to take over Wolverine Supplies, and that brings me to today. Wolverine Supplies is a rural business. We're located in the country. We're not actually even in the community of Virden itself. We have approximately 18 employees and we service Canadian sport shooters, hunters, and the law enforcement and military market from coast to coast with products to suit their needs.
When we talk about Bill C-21 and the impact on our business, it has not made business a simple process. To go back to the OIC, we had over 15 firearms listed. Then, FRT changes by the RCMP in the months to follow added more firearms to the list. Now, our industry is dealing with the ramifications of Bill C-21, the freeze on handgun transfers, in addition to the amendments that were just recently tabled and then removed.
That doesn't even begin to.... In business, you're dealing with your regular business issues, from supply and demand to product shortages, costs of shipping, overhead, staff—your typical business practices. Now, we're wondering what the government is going to do next. Instead of improving the firearms industry, it seems that we're second-guessing. I don't believe it's doing anything to enhance Canadians' public safety at this time.
The government has increased the uncertainty to the businesses across the country, which are forever wondering if their products will be available to sell to their customers, what will happen next, what will be prohibited, what may not be prohibited, what's changing, and what they do with inventory. There are thousands of dollars.... When you talk about mental health and stress, this is just compounded when all that legitimate firearms businesses and owners are trying to do is follow the laws as they're written today.
In the meantime, we have incidents like the ones we heard of earlier where firearms are being smuggled into the country. Those are the ones primarily being found on the streets, and they are the sources of our crime today.
Thank you very much.