Take This 5-Minute Survey on Shooting, Hunting for OFAH, CSAAA

TheGunBlog.ca — Two of Canada’s leading groups for hunters and anglers and the firearm industry are inviting people across the country to take a 5-minute survey on their spending patterns to assess the size of the market.

The Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) and the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association (CSAAA) promoted the questionnaire on Twitter last week as the government considers mass gun bans against federally licensed firearm owners.

‘Important for Sport Shooters’

“It’s especially important for us to reach sport shooters because this is a new and growing category and one that we have very little data,” Alison de Groot, the managing director of the CSAAA, told TheGunBlog.ca by e-mail on June 7.

The anonymous survey asks how much you’ve spent on each of hunting, trapping, sport shooting and fishing in the past year. It offers a chance to win a crossbow, OFAH said.

You can complete it in less than 5 minutes. If you practice none of the activities, it will take less. If you do all them and need more time to estimate your spending, it could take longer.

Election, Policy

“Understanding how many businesses, jobs, taxes and consumer spending is associated with the hunting, shooting sports and fishing industries in Canada is essential as we move into an election period,” de Groot said.

“We need Canadians and our government leaders to know what’s at stake when they are developing policy that will affect our industries,” she said.

Political Adversary

The October election is critical for gun owners and the firearm industry as they face their most-hostile political adversary in a generation.

The governing Liberal Party has tried to link honest firearm users to murderers and terrorists as a way to drum up support for gun bans.

Read: Liberals Demonize Gun Owners by Copying U.S. Senator Feinstein

The Liberals are also passing Bill C-71 as a new law against gun owners and gun shops, and may order mass confiscation before the election to win votes.

Read: Trudeau May Order Gun Bans, CTV News Reports, Citing Bill Blair

Bans for Votes

Opinion polls show Liberal voters are the most opposed to gun owners in favouring prohibition.

A government advisor said last year that new restrictions on gun owners present an “untapped opportunity” for the Liberals to win re-election this year.

OFAH and CSAAA hired the Conference Board of Canada, an Ottawa-based researcher, to run the market survey.

OFAH is coordinating with all of the angling and hunting federations and wildlife associations across Canada on the survey, de Groot said.

Correction 11 June: Corrects name of CSAAA in second paragraph.