Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Owen Sound for his great work on this file, as well as for being a strong advocate for law-abiding gun owners.
We heard a lot about that here today from the opposition. They are trying to connect the common sense firearms licensing act to criminal activity. I do not care what argument they have, because I could probably find less than 1% of criminals who actually have a firearms licence and have an authorization to transport. They are certainly not going to do those things. To be connecting the common sense firearms licensing act to a rash of criminal activity is just absolutely false. He talked about our not being clear with Canadians; I think that is being very unclear to Canadians.
I grew up on a farm. We certainly used our firearms to protect our livestock from coyotes, wolves, and those kinds of things. These people are not hobbyists, and firearms there are a fact of life. These are things we need to protect our livelihood. For politicians to put us in a category of criminals is simply not fair.
What we are trying to do right now is clean up the damage that was done from the long gun registry. If we look at the statistics since we removed the long gun registry, we see that criminal activity with firearms has gone down by more than 30%. That is a telling statistic, and this is a great step forward to repair the damage that was done to law-abiding gun owners with the long gun registry.