Mr. Speaker, we are back today, again, to do something we do a lot of in this place, which is cleaning up yet another mess that the Liberal government, the government for the last 10 years, has created.
This time we are tackling a broken border security regime that lets guns, drugs and criminals flow across the border with absolutely no consequences. When we tie that together with an equally broken criminal justice system that provides no accountability for the offenders and no safety for innocent Canadians, we get a disaster and crisis-level mess. How did we get here? That is pretty simple. We will walk everyone right through it. For everybody watching, for those who might listen this time around, we will start with Justin Trudeau and his ministers. By the way, they are still there on the front bench. They prefer giving rights to criminals over law-abiding Canadians. Pieces of legislation such as Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 codify this ideology and let convicted criminals roam free through a revolving-door justice system of bail with no punishments and no accountability whatsoever.
We see it every single day with every story on the news, story one, two, three, four, five, particularly in my region of the GTA. Piled on that are weak immigration policies that deliver outcomes such as a 632% increase in people trying to cross into the country illegally from the U.S. Sprinkled on that is a healthy dose of free drugs, courtesy of the taxpayer, available to anyone, anywhere, even when we know these drugs end up in the streets or in our schools and, frankly, make the plight of addiction much worse and not better. This is all topped off with a broken federal bureaucracy that has ballooned; it is so weak and so detached from reality that literal terrorist organizations, in some cases, can fundraise, recruit and operate with impunity here in Canada from coast to coast to coast. Some of them have charitable numbers even still.
It does not take a genius to realize that all of these ingredients would set us up for a ginormous, if that is a word, border security and crime crisis in the country.
We get stories like those of Raj Kumar Mehmi, who was convicted of smuggling 80 kilos of cocaine in 2023, sentenced to 15 years and released. He escaped, hopped on a plane and is now gone forever.
Arjun Sahnan, a 19-year-old, was arrested for drive-by shootings and extortion. He got bail, booked a flight and is now gone too. This is the reality of the system that the Liberals designed. They actually designed this. They thought about it and thought these were good changes, which then resulted in chaos.
Apparently, no one on that side saw this coming, not even from a mile away or from their work from home set-ups. We flash forward to right now, a few months later, and what do we see? Once again, we see that the Liberal government is showing up with a bill that does not actually deliver on what Canadians want, what they have asked for and what they are screaming about in the streets. It is a bill that claims to fix a problem but instead proposes things that no Canadian would ever sign off on.
They have cooked up legislation that keeps a broken border and immigration regime in place while also punishing law-abiding citizens with massive expansions in federal power. Bill C-2 keeps in place the catch-and-release for criminals who traffic fentanyl and firearms and takes advantage of the weak laws that hurt Canadians. It does not add mandatory prison time for fentanyl traffickers. It does not add mandatory prison time for gangsters who use guns to commit crimes.
There have been several shootings in my community in Vaughan. In just three weeks, there have been seven. An innocent man literally gave his life to save his family from a random violent home invasion. He was shot to death in his living room, but the legislation would not guarantee that his killers or any other people terrorizing our communities would actually be behind bars. We are told to wait, that it is going to happen.
The same people who created the crisis cannot be trusted to fix it. Even worse, it still allows house arrest for even the most serious offences. A person can commit grand theft auto and still be in their living room playing the video game. At the same time, Bill C-2 puts new limits on the use of cash in our economy, ostensibly to target gangs and criminals.
Do we really believe that gangs and criminals, the ones pushing fentanyl, the ones running guns and laundering money, are suddenly going to start following the law? Of course not. We make those assertions, and we make criminals out of law-abiding citizens.
Instead, seniors and small businesses are the ones who will be unfairly punished by this massive overreach in government power. It even goes farther, with massive new powers of the federal government that threaten Canadian civil liberties.
We know this. We have seen this movie before. It is what the Liberals do every single time. They find a problem, but they do not solve the actual problem; then they massively expand their power to take more rights away from Canadians. We have seen how this happens.
There is no limit to the government's hunger for power. It tried to give itself unlimited spending power during COVID. Just two months ago, it sneakily removed privacy provisions from the online streaming bill and called it an accident. Now, it is burying conditions in the back of the bill that have nothing to do with border security and clearly show Canadians that it wants more power.
This is not just overblown rhetoric. Bill C-2 will let Ottawa open people's mail without oversight, force Internet companies to hand over private information and allow them to search without a warrant in certain scenarios. This is not fixing our borders. It is not protecting Canadians. It is a government power grab, plain and simple, and it should make everybody very uncomfortable.
Canadians did not give the Prime Minister a blank cheque to take more power away from Canadians and infringe on their rights. Instead of that, what we should do in the bill is hire more border agents, the ones who are on the front lines, as was done in the past. They can patrol the entire Canadian border properly, not in an Ottawa office but on the ground. We should have people in uniforms who would enforce the laws that are there.
Let us install scanners at major ports to stop the flow of guns and stolen cars in and out of our country. Maybe we should actually keep track of who is coming in and who is leaving this country so that we do not have another situation where the government actually loses count of everybody it has let in.
We should end the soft-on-crime provisions in Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 and put criminals in jail, restoring the rule of law in our country, rather than letting them out on bail minutes, hours or days after they commit a crime. While we are at it, let us stop handing out lethal drugs for free, paid for by the taxpayers, and put people in actual treatment.
The government is coming here to talk a big game about the bill, but once again, the actions do not match the words. The public safety minister should probably have a conversation with the justice minister. He does not seem to think there is a problem with crime at all. He mocked Canadians who are fed up with what is going on in their communities, in their neighbourhoods, in their homes, in their businesses.
He might not think Canada is the Wild West, but when people are being shot in their own homes, when cars are getting carjacked at random, when people are being mugged in the streets, it is a lot closer to the Wild West than we should ever be comfortable with here.
This is a guy who broke the housing market, who broke the long-held consensus on our immigration system. Now he is putting his talents to use at the justice department. I hope we spare all Canadians from that going on for a very long time.
To get to what is at the core of the Liberal government is that they put the same people who broke everything in charge of fixing it. The way they fix it is by bringing forward a bill; they tell us they have good intentions in the bill, yet it is a power grab. It is a power grab to look at our mail, to ban cash, to do things they never had the power to do before, all under the guise of protecting Canadians and protecting our border.
Everybody should take that very seriously. Everybody should look at their intentions with the bill very seriously. They say they are going to do one thing, but they do the exact opposite, and there are no results ever for this.
