The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - RPAL？ Never Heard of It

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome once again to The Blueprints. This is Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm your

00:00:08.040 host, Jamie Schmael, Member of Parliament for Halliburton Caworthalikes, with new content for

00:00:11.800 you every single Tuesday, 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time. Don't forget to like, comment, subscribe and share

00:00:16.440 this program. Tell your friends. They can download it on platforms like CastBox, iTunes, Google Play

00:00:20.800 and Spotify. On today's show, we are going to ask the question, what is an RPAL? Who has that

00:00:27.920 answer? The Member of Parliament for Elgin St. Thomas, London South, Andrew Lawton does. Thanks

00:00:32.960 for coming on the show. Hey, it's my pleasure, Jamie. Good to be with you. Mr. Viral, it feels weird

00:00:36.960 interviewing you because of your media background, so I appreciate you taking the time. And

00:00:41.700 congratulations on your questioning of the Minister. Almost like, what were we, a week or two into

00:00:46.160 Parliament? Yeah, I think it might have been the second week, yeah, when we had that Committee of

00:00:50.480 the Whole and I inadvertently stumbled upon a rather revealing moment in the government's approach to

00:00:56.360 a very significant issue. All right, well, let's go to that clip, which I think has been famous,

00:01:00.940 infamous, depending on how you want to look at it. And we'll ask a bit about this because it does

00:01:05.480 go into the larger conversation about the liberal approach to crime, to firearms, legal firearms that

00:01:12.840 our hunters and farmers use. So let's go to the clip and then we'll expand from there. Play cut one.

00:01:17.560 Does the Minister know what an RPAL is? No, Minister. I do not.

00:01:21.360 Member. Does the Minister know what the CFSC is? I do not. No. Member. I'll stipulate, Chair,

00:01:33.620 that is the Canadian firearm safety course that all gun owners in Canada have to do to get their

00:01:37.860 firearms license. Has the Minister ever done the Canadian firearm safety course? The Honourable

00:01:42.440 Minister. Speaker, is my third week on the job? No, I have not. The Honourable Member. Does the

00:01:48.840 Minister know what safety classes and safety demands are expected of law-abiding Canadian gun

00:01:53.480 owners? The Honourable Minister. This is not about law-abiding gun owners, Mr. Speaker.

00:01:58.880 I remember. How can the Minister make that claim when he doesn't know the basic fundamentals of law-abiding

00:02:04.360 gun ownership in this country, Chair? Holy smokes, there's so much to unpack there. I don't even know

00:02:09.420 what to start. The funniest to me also, but in the chair was John Nader, our colleague from Perth,

00:02:16.200 Wellington, unless his writing boundaries have changed or the name has changed. The look on his

00:02:20.300 face was like, holy smokes, I can't believe the Minister didn't have the answer. John, who does a

00:02:26.360 tremendous job of being impartial and was a very good chair on that, he ended up getting memed because

00:02:31.100 of that. The facial expressions as he too could not seemingly shelve how surprised he was that the

00:02:38.140 public safety minister didn't know what a firearms license is. Yeah, like unbelievable. And this is the

00:02:43.600 guy that's charged a lot about the confiscation, we can go into that real quick, of legally owned

00:02:50.360 firearms. And he doesn't know the classifications, he didn't know really how the licensing, like that's

00:02:55.720 incredible. It is. And to be honest, like that wasn't the direction I was going to go. Yeah, tell us

00:03:01.780 about that. What I was trying to do is lead him down a path. I mean, as an interviewer, this is what you do.

00:03:07.600 You lead someone down a path to getting him to acknowledge that he didn't know about how safe

00:03:14.540 law abiding gun owners are. That was the intention, because we do know statistically, the law abiding

00:03:19.360 gun owners are the safest people in the country. They are regularly vetted, they're screened, they pose

00:03:24.880 no safety or security threat when we're talking about the sources of gun crime. And I was trying to

00:03:31.360 walk him down that path. And I had asked him originally, we didn't see it in that clip, if he

00:03:37.080 had an RPAL. And then when I saw the blank stare on his face, as he asked me to repeat the question,

00:03:44.260 I knew in that moment, I was pretty confident he didn't know what it was. So I just changed tack

00:03:51.180 immediately. And it ended up being a shockingly revealing moment in the course of this government's

00:03:58.160 approach to an issue. Yeah. And his writing is from Scarborough. And in the greater Toronto

00:04:02.500 area, we've seen crime rates go up, more people feeling unsafe, still shootings are going on. And

00:04:08.120 I guarantee you that they're not legally owned firearms being used in these shootings. And the

00:04:13.620 minister had no idea that legally, you know, firearms owners, properly licensed, vetted, have a whole

00:04:20.220 slew of stringent requirements that they must meet. Correct. What a blank. Yeah. And he fell back later

00:04:26.260 on on this, oh, I've just been on the job for three weeks. Well, the reality is he had been the

00:04:31.860 parliamentary secretary on the justice file before. And he had actually spoken on firearms legislation

00:04:38.400 before in the House of Commons as a member of parliament. So this idea that he had had no exposure

00:04:43.240 to it whatsoever was false. It was just flat out false. But even if so, I feel like on the public

00:04:49.860 safety file in three weeks, you could learn at the very least what a gun license is. Like I have

00:04:55.660 very low expectations for some members of the Liberal cabinet. But learning what the program

00:05:00.580 is that you oversee is, I feel, a very low bar that he should have been able to clear.

00:05:05.020 Well, now we're also looking at the gun confiscation or the buyback. I like to say

00:05:08.820 confiscation because as a legally, you know, firearms owner myself, all legal, vetted, licensed.

00:05:16.260 You know, I didn't buy my firearms in the government. So really, I don't know how it can be a buyback,

00:05:20.600 but whatever. Again, just like the old Chrétien years, we're going to go way over budget again.

00:05:27.520 Will it even work? I don't even think they know. I think it's just cheap political points at this

00:05:32.500 point, just trying to seize upon a problem, which is violent crime, shootings and whatever.

00:05:38.320 It just seems like, well, we'll just go after legal firearms owners because they're the easiest.

00:05:43.140 Yeah. And I think the important context here is that the initial Order and Council

00:05:47.420 Confiscation Directive came about in May of 2020, and it was supposed to be done.

00:05:52.940 Every last firearm was supposed to have been seized by the government within two years.

00:05:56.840 That would have been in May 2022. We are now in July of 2025, and not a single law-abiding gun

00:06:05.260 owners' firearms have been claimed from them under this program. The government has managed to bring

00:06:09.820 back some guns that were in the custody of businesses, but the buyback scheme, as they call it,

00:06:15.440 does not exist. They have not had any clue this whole time, yet they've still spent tens of

00:06:20.960 millions of dollars on it, which is even more ridiculous. So I would love the government to just 0.68

00:06:26.200 say, we're going to cut our losses. We're going to stop this. It was never a sensible idea in the

00:06:30.660 first place. We aren't prepared to do it. We had no plan, and that's the hope I still have.

00:06:35.860 Well, I think the solutions are right at our fingertips, and we campaigned on this quite a bit,

00:06:40.660 right? Have bail reform. Let's look at what the Liberals did, and actually reverse pretty much

00:06:46.220 all the damage. Also, let's actually have longer sentences for those convicted of repeat violent

00:06:52.680 offenses. I think those are pretty good places to start. Yeah, and that's the problem, is that law-abiding

00:06:57.800 gun owners have always been used by the Liberals as a cudgel, where there's some incident that takes

00:07:03.060 place, a tragic gun incident in, you know, Portapig, Nova Scotia, and downtown Toronto, wherever,

00:07:08.660 and the government will just point to law-abiding gun owners and say, okay, well, we're going to

00:07:13.780 solve this by scapegoating them, and people are learning, I think, and Canadians are starting to

00:07:18.900 realize, huh, well, all of these additional restrictions aren't affecting gun crime. They

00:07:22.800 aren't reducing gun crime. Maybe there's no correlation between lawful gun ownership and gang

00:07:28.500 firearms violence in inner cities. Yeah, and if you are living in the cities, you just want the

00:07:33.500 shootings to stop. Yes. So kind of hearing the Liberal message will be like, yeah, okay, they're going to

00:07:37.800 take the guns, but leaving out the part that the gangs and the criminals, they have them, and they're

00:07:43.080 probably not giving them back unless they're actually seized in a raid or something like that.

00:07:46.960 Yes, and one of the big issues we've seen here is the lack of really good data on the origins of

00:07:52.480 firearms used in crime. There isn't a national data set that we can look at, but when information

00:07:57.820 has been made available by CBSA, by individual police agencies, overwhelmingly guns used in crimes in

00:08:04.740 Canada, have been smuggled in across the border from the United States. They have not come through

00:08:09.780 a chain of custody that involved a licensed gun owner or a standard sporting goods store. Yet those

00:08:16.480 are the organizations and people who end up bearing the brunt of this policy. Well, actually, you struck

00:08:22.320 on something there I was going to talk about later, but let's get into it right now. The small businesses.

00:08:26.480 Yes. Again, right? Many are family-owned or very small, maybe a couple people,

00:08:31.980 that have been in the community or in the area for years. They've been hurt really hard by the

00:08:38.620 liberal policies to the point where I'm sure you hear it and anyone watching or listening now knows

00:08:43.640 maybe a store on the verge of closing because of this. So they're actually hurting small businesses

00:08:48.220 in the midst of all of this. Yeah. So I actually, before jumping into politics, I was in media and I

00:08:53.600 did a documentary about this, which was in 2021, I believe. And I interviewed some of the gun owners

00:08:59.880 who at that time had, in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of

00:09:04.460 dollars in inventory in their warehouses, which in small businesses are not large spaces,

00:09:09.800 that they could not legally sell. They had no mechanism to return. And the so-called buyback

00:09:15.040 the government promised didn't exist. And they had, in this case, we're now looking at five years

00:09:20.440 after the Order and Council. Some businesses are still saddled with inventory that the government

00:09:24.660 is not letting them sell. They have no mechanism to return and the government isn't set up to deal with.

00:09:29.620 So this was a half-baked policy from the get-go and businesses are still paying the price for it.

00:09:34.360 And it's a shame because this government's overall agenda, you know, before we rose in June,

00:09:39.880 we had C5 dubbed as a nation-building piece of legislation. We'll see if it actually does that.

00:09:44.620 But when they're talking about nation-building projects, it's projects that the government

00:09:48.040 approves, right? You can bypass all the bureaucracy, all the hurdles that's in the way of normal

00:09:53.640 progression through the process, the regulatory process to get to a permit, which hopefully in this

00:09:58.960 country speeds up. But you can bypass it if the government approves. But same thing with what

00:10:04.000 we're dealing with here on the firearm side. The government doesn't approve of small businesses

00:10:08.060 that are selling firearms to the licensed public. They don't agree with that. I think that's their

00:10:11.960 general, you know, they hide it a lot, but they close down these businesses through regulation rather

00:10:18.300 than just saying, you're out altogether, right? It's just a death by a thousand cuts.

00:10:21.900 Yeah. And, you know, on the weekend, I was actually at a IPSC, it's a handgun competition

00:10:26.780 that was taking place in a gun club in my riding where I'm a member. And I was chatting with people

00:10:31.660 and these are competitive athletes, some of which have, you know, trained to be Olympic pistol

00:10:35.800 shooters in the past. And one of the things that stood out to me that one person shared is that, like,

00:10:40.800 I'm not even telling people to get into the hobby anymore. I'm not even telling people to get into

00:10:44.940 this sport because it's just too cumbersome. There are too many regulations. And there's always the risk

00:10:49.880 that the government might one day just overnight outlaw something that someone has trained for

00:10:54.260 years and years to be a world-class competitor in. And that's saddening, considering how much

00:10:58.920 incredible talent there is in the Canadian shooting sports community.

00:11:02.420 Yeah. And many times, even the sports shooting community is so heavily regulated, they say,

00:11:07.620 okay, you can do it if you sport, but to get into it is so hard.

00:11:10.680 Yes.

00:11:11.360 You know, they shut it down from the beginning, right? Like, why bother?

00:11:15.340 Yeah. And you get foreign competitors that come to Canada and they learn, like,

00:11:18.620 how they have to transport and they're like, you have to do what?

00:11:22.780 Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't make much sense, but you over-regulate something, you usually see less of

00:11:29.040 it. Yeah, exactly.

00:11:29.780 And that seems to be what the Liberals are doing. But at the same time, again, not addressing the

00:11:34.660 core issue of repeat violent offenders being released on bail 10 seconds after they are arrested.

00:11:40.320 What, the biggest drug bust in Peel region history, that's in Ontario for those outside the

00:11:45.540 province. And what, five of the seven or five of the eight were out on bail by the afternoon.

00:11:50.800 So the biggest drug bust in the history of Peel region, and they're out on bail.

00:11:54.340 Yeah. In my St. Thomas, which is the largest community in my riding, we had an issue in this

00:12:00.720 month, actually, where a historic building, 144-year-old building, it happened to be where

00:12:05.700 my campaign office was, although that's not connected, was burned down not long ago, within

00:12:11.120 the last couple of weeks. And the arsonist who's been charged was out on bail and had

00:12:16.680 a previous arson conviction. Days later, someone was arrested for arson at the St. Thomas Hospital

00:12:22.640 on bail for arson charges. This is happening across the country. In St. Thomas, the police

00:12:29.580 chief came out with a very strong statement saying, we urgently need bail reform. I have

00:12:34.000 the honour of sitting on the Justice Committee. And our colleague, Larry Brock, at our one Justice

00:12:38.860 Committee meeting before the Parliament House of Commons rose for the summer, he tried to

00:12:42.800 put a motion forward on bail reform. And after a 16-minute meeting, the Liberals moved to adjourn

00:12:48.100 the committee, shut it down for the summer, without discussing a single matter to do with

00:12:52.420 crime. This is something that Canadian communities, policing agencies, police chiefs, associations,

00:12:58.260 they are crying out for action on. And so far, we're the only ones talking about it, the Conservative

00:13:03.440 Well, wait, wait, the Liberals have a Minister of State for stopping crime, or what was it

00:13:08.800 called, auto theft, or I don't know, it was something made up and new, but it made no sense

00:13:13.340 because the solutions were right in front of them. Yeah, you know what, it was, the only

00:13:17.340 thing that really came out of that substantively was someone got a contract to print new business

00:13:21.700 cards. Right, that's right, and a few more. Yeah, a new title, but no action on crime. Well,

00:13:26.080 of course, well, exactly. And it's weird, because many of the Liberal seats, where they won

00:13:29.860 in the last election, we're in areas that are being impacted by, not all, like the suburbs,

00:13:34.580 we did very well in, but the inner cities where a lot of this violence is happening,

00:13:39.720 like downtown Toronto, downtown Vancouver, still voted Liberal, which, you know, maybe

00:13:45.000 they're getting caught up in that talking point, right? We're going to get the firearms. Well...

00:13:48.760 Well, and I think that's a crucial point, because, you know, gun owners are a minority in Canada,

00:13:54.000 even though firearms are a long-standing pastime, a way of life in some communities, they are still,

00:13:59.400 as far as gun owners go, a minority. So it becomes very easy for the Liberals to use them 0.82

00:14:04.560 as a political wedge, and exploit the fact that a lot of people living in the suburbs or in the

00:14:10.400 cities just don't know about guns, and they don't actually know how safe gun owners are,

00:14:14.880 and they don't know that lawful gun ownership exists in Canada, and is very common in some parts

00:14:20.100 of the country. So I think the education component on this is key, because when people learn about what

00:14:25.620 licensed gun owners have to go through, they're not worried about them. They know they aren't the

00:14:29.820 problem. Yeah, exactly. And I think we spoke about this a few times off air, when all this broke out,

00:14:36.000 but for those in Toronto, downtown Union Station, the main transportation hub, for about 80 years or so,

00:14:42.460 they had a firing range, and nobody knew about it. Nobody knew about it. You know, the people who are

00:14:48.300 members knew, but the general public had no idea. People were walking through the station with guns.

00:14:52.660 And the mayor at the time didn't even, once he learned, he was like mortified and just wanted

00:14:57.740 to do whatever he could to shut it down. It was crazy. But for 80 years, nothing. No incidents,

00:15:02.820 nothing. Exactly. That to me, when I got researching into that and read about that, I thought, like,

00:15:08.780 that's, you know, nobody knew about it, but yet it went through incident-free. And you're right,

00:15:12.920 people were walking by with firearms, and nothing was happening. And I think we need to do more to

00:15:18.560 support these legal ranges. We're pretty much out of time. You flew by really fast. Again,

00:15:24.300 congratulations on you for striking gold, like, on your first couple of weeks.

00:15:28.640 I will say the one great moment, I was talking to someone the other day who learned I was a member

00:15:33.920 of parliament, didn't know who I was. He said, I got a question for you. Do you know what a pal is?

00:15:38.100 And I said, yeah, and I'm the reason you know to ask that question of your pal is. He's like,

00:15:42.520 yeah, that was you. You're right. You're the guy. So I'm putting Gary and Andes angry and all the

00:15:47.400 other liberals who want to regulate our firearms on notice. Learn about what you're regulating,

00:15:52.020 and you'll find you won't need to regulate it. Exactly. Why don't you take the course? Yeah.

00:15:56.240 Take the course yourself. Figure out what legally, you know, licensed firearms owners have to go

00:16:01.340 through. Yeah, congratulations. Thank you, Jamie. You know, the minister should know, but my goodness.

00:16:07.660 And good to have the backstory. And one thing, oh, one more thing before we go. A couple minutes later,

00:16:12.660 Frank Caputo, our public safety critic, asked another similar line of credit. We should have got the

00:16:16.940 video. I apologize. And the bureaucrats were handing him notes on what the answer is. And he

00:16:21.480 called them out. Is it a classroom? Yeah. You're sharing notes? Yeah, exactly. That was crazy. And

00:16:26.340 the question was so basic. It was, what are the classifications of firearm? Non-restricted,

00:16:30.800 restricted, prohibited. Didn't know that either. Yeah. Unbelievable. Well, thank you very much for

00:16:35.460 your time and your insight. Thank you, Jamie. Congratulations for everything you're doing,

00:16:38.220 standing up for legal, you know, licensed firearms owners, the right way to do it. So thank you very

00:16:42.820 much. Andrew Lawton, Member of Parliament for Elgin, St. Thomas, London South. Have to get your new

00:16:47.360 writing correct. And thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for your time. Thank you for yours. Don't

00:16:51.280 forget, new content for you every single Tuesday, even throughout the summer, 1.30 p.m. Eastern time.

00:16:55.740 Don't forget to like, comment, subscribe, and share. And until next week, remember,

00:16:58.740 low taxes, less government, more freedom. That's the blueprint.

The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - July 25, 2025

RPAL？ Never Heard of It

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