Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale has formally rejected an unusual petition launched by a gun coalition calling for a requirement that all members of Goodale’s public advisory committee on firearms obtain gun licences.

The e-petition was sponsored in the Commons last year by Conservative MP Michelle Rempel.

Rempel recently found herself in a sticky spot when an in-house lobbyist for the same gun coalition posted a video of the Calgary MP accepting a pistol carrying case, a gift certificate for a pistol holder and two T-shirts from the lobbyist.

Rempel returned the gifts after the video of the birthday celebration involving Tracey Wilson — an in-house lobbyist and a vice-president of the Canadian Firearm Rights Coalition — was posted.

But by that time, a complaint from Liberal MP Mona Fortier had prompted federal ethics commissioner Mario Dion to conduct a preliminary inquiry into the gift giving.

Rempel sponsored the gun petition on May 17, 2017, and it gathered 16,330 signatures by the time signatures were closed on Sept. 14, 2017.

Wilson reported lobbying communications with Rempel in May and October, 2017, and last March, eight days after Goodale tabled the Liberal gun bill.

Wilson’s other reports to the lobbying commissioner, before and after Goodale introduced the bill, have included lobbying communications on four occasions with Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, three times with Conservative MP Rob Zimmer, the party’s lead critic on firearms, other Conservatives MPs, and six lobbying communications with Goodale’s director of communications, Dan Brien.

By coincidence, Wilson and Rod Giltaca, president of the firearm coalition, are scheduled as committee witnesses on the government’s new gun-control legislation, Bill C-71, on Thursday.

Goodale tabled his negative response to the petition in the Commons on Tuesday.

“Since its establishment in 2006, Canadian Firearms Safety Course training has never been a requirement for CFAC (Canadian Firearms Advisory Committee) membership,” Goodale said in the response.

The course is a requirement to obtain a firearm possession and acquisition licence.

“Committee members now include civilian firearm users, farmers, hunters and sport shooters as well as representatives from conservation organizations, law enforcement, public health organizations, women’s groups and the legal community,” Goodale said.

The committee membership is impressive, despite complaints from the Conservative party and gun owners since the Liberal government replaced the past appointments by Stephen Harper and his government.

The committee is chaired by former Supreme Court of Canada judge John Major, who was named to the Supreme Court by former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1992 and who led a four-year commission of inquiry into the Air India bombing.

One of the committee’s two vice-chairs is Lynda Kiejko, a Commonwealth Games and Pan Am Games medalist in pistol competition, now a civil engineer in Calgary.

The other vice-chair is Nathalie Provost, a mechanical engineer who graduated from Polytechnique Montreal in 1990 and is a spokesperson for PolySeSouvient, a gun-control advocacy group and remembrance forum for the 14 women who were killed in a gunman’s attack against female students and staff in 1989.

The advisory committee has five women as members and five men, representing rural and urban Canada and a range of distinguished community services. It includes the chief of the City of Saskatoon police service and a diverse array of high-profile women who have won recognition and awards in a range of community and health service occupations.

The petition, which the Canadian Firearm Rights Coalition has on its lists of accomplishments since it was founded in 2015, argued that since the unelected committee will “shape the future of firearm regulation in our country” its members must “adequately understand and represent the very people affected by its recommendations, being Canada’s shooting community.”

The petition then called on the Public Safety Minister to “require individuals appointed to the Canadian Firearms Advisory Committee to have earned the Possession and Acquisition Licence (PAL), without which they lack a baseline understanding of the activities they are tasked with regulating.”

The committee, as an advisory board for the minister, has no direct role in regulations passed by the federal cabinet.