Mr. Speaker, when I look across Saskatoon West, past the shopfronts along 22nd Street, and the family homes and small businesses that built the west end of Saskatoon, I see the real cost of 10 years of Liberal failures on crime, drugs and immigration. The government broke these systems, and Bill C-2 is its frantic omnibus attempt to look tough at a podium while ducking accountability at home. It stuffed sweeping surveillance powers in a de facto war on cash into a border bill, then dares ordinary people to swallow the lot. That might work for Ottawa insiders, but it does not work for folks in Confederation Park, Meadowgreen, Mount Royal, Montgomery Place and every neighbourhood in Saskatoon West that wants safe streets and a fair shot.
Let us start where my constituents live today, with local safety. In our city, there were 13 homicides in 2023, 14 in 2024, and by Labour Day this year, only two-thirds of the way through the year, there were already six people slain. Those are not statistics. They are families reeling and a community on edge. Assaults are up this year. Sexual assaults and violations are up. Most alarming is that there have been 818 weapons charges brought forward in the first eight months of this year. These are not isolated spikes. They reflect a Saskatchewan trend line that has gone the wrong way under a Liberal government.
Since 2015, violent firearms offences in Saskatchewan are up 206%. Extortion is up over 600%. Even motor vehicle theft is higher than it was. These crimes, more often than not, are committed by repeat offenders out on bail or who have had their sentences severely reduced.
Saskatoon police chief McBride summed it up this way. He said, “all of the intervention work that police tried to accomplish through holding them accountable, utilizing legislation is for naught...it is a struggle every day for us with repeat offenders.”
That is what families in Saskatoon West feel every day, in their communities, in their driveways and outside their corner stores. They feel that, whatever happens, the revolving door of criminals will keep going due to the Liberals' soft-on-crime agenda.
While we fight to keep our streets safe, the opioid disaster continues to devastate our province. The Saskatchewan Coroners Service recorded eight deaths by fentanyl poisoning in 2016. That number peaked at 272 in 2021 and was still 252 in 2023. However, last year, it spiked again to 383 deaths, making it a record year, even outstripping the COVID years. What has it been over the first eight months of 2025? It is a whopping 330 deaths already, well on pace to have the most deaths in the history of our province. These numbers are not elsewhere or in theory. They are our neighbours, our coworkers and our kids. If members want a picture of what Ottawa's failed approach looks like on the ground, they can find Health Canada safe supply warnings taped outside a pharmacy on 22nd Street right in our riding. That is how close the crisis is.
There is hope. The solutions are obvious by now: repeal Bills C-5 and C-75 to ensure repeat offenders get jail and not bail and focus our care on a recovery model rather than on keeping people in a perpetual state of addiction. Is that what we are debating today? Sadly, it is not.
What exactly is Bill C-2? The bill has elements to improve border tools, such as compelling export-side co-operation with CBSA, authorizing security patrols and improving interdiction of contraband in the mail. Conservatives can work with that. We all want to stop guns, drugs and stolen cars, but the bill also veers into bundled surveillance powers, a cash crackdown and a political rewrite of asylum rules. Bill C-2 slaps on a blanket cap for cash transactions over $10,000 without offering evidence for why a federal ban, rather than record-keeping, is needed. In Saskatoon West, seniors, small contractors and family-run shops still use cash for perfectly legitimate reasons. Yes, there are abuses of cash transactions as well, but instead of banning cash, we need better tools to stop crimes with cash. Otherwise, the government's overreach will hit hardest on the little guy in places like Saskatoon.
Then there is the privacy hit. The bill would create new pathways for information demands and cross-border data grabs, lowering thresholds for access to subscriber and transmission data. The Supreme Court has recognized a reasonable expectation of privacy in subscriber information and IP addresses, yet the government buries a workaround in a border bill and tells Saskatoon families to trust it. This legislation would create a warrantless runaround for the police to invade our fibre optic networks, something the Liberals hid deep in this 140-page omnibus bill.
Regarding immigration, the Liberals broke a system that used to work. Canada's system was the envy of the world. Countries would come to Canada to see our system so they might implement it in their own countries. In the last 10 years, the Liberal government has broken almost our entire immigration system to the point where those people are no longer coming to see how we do it, but rather how not to do it, so they do not wreck their own.
This, of course, is not the fault of immigrants. Immigrants just used the system that was given to them. This was purely the government's fault. The good news is that it can be fixed, and we know how to fix it.
The Liberals did not think that there should be limits on temporary residents, and guess what. The number of temporary residents exploded to over three million people, nearly 7.5% of our total population. This rapid uncontrolled population growth has led to obvious shortages in housing and jobs, and put enormous strains on our health care and education systems.
Employers turned the temporary foreign worker program into a wage suppression crutch. It was supposed to be for hard-to-fill agricultural jobs, but it ballooned into restaurants, hotels and just about everywhere else. We propose restoring it back to an ag-only policy because, in the first six months of this year alone, the Liberals issued 105,000 temporary foreign worker permits, despite promising a cap of 82,000, which flooded entry-level markets while Saskatoon students struggled to find summer jobs.
That is not compassion. It is a policy that leaves local youth and newcomers alike worse off. Folks in Saskatoon West feel this on both ends. Employers are begging for skilled trades and reliable workers, while at the same time, high school grads and polytechnic students in Saskatoon West tell me that they cannot get their first job, because Liberals allowed a temporary program to become a permanent substitute for Canadian labour. That is on this government.
Let me be clear about what Bill C-2 misses and what Saskatoon West needs.
The first issue is bail and sentencing. The Liberals' catch-and-release approach failed. They repealed mandatory prison time for serious gun crimes and drug trafficking, and instead expanded house arrest for offences such as sexual assault and kidnapping. Instead of jail for serious offences, criminals are told to stay at home. How often can police check up on criminals at home? We can bet that these thugs are coming and going as normal while they serve out their sentences. The results are obvious in the stats and on our streets. It is time to bring back jail, not bail, for repeat violent offenders and restore mandatory prison times for the worst crimes.
The second big issue is fentanyl. Bill C-2 tweaks the current law around drug precursors, which is fine, but it does nothing about the cartel-level producers and traffickers who treat Canadian penalties as just the cost of doing business. Common-sense Conservatives will propose targeted constitutional life sentence provisions for those producing or trafficking fentanyl. That is what a real deterrent looks like, and that is what Saskatoon West deserves.
The third issue is border competence without civil liberties overreach. We must upgrade scanners at crossings and ports, extend CBSA powers along the entire border and track departures so that deportees do not disappear. These are real tools that would have real results, all while protecting the privacy rights of law-abiding Saskatoon families and small businesses.
Here are our common-sense solutions to deal with these issues. One is to fix the border and implement border and enforcement tools that actually help CBSA but stay away from the surveillance back doors and cash bans.
Two is to have jail and not bail to end the catch-and-release for repeat violent offenders, restore mandatory prison for serious gun and hard drug crimes and end house arrest for violent offences. Our community deserves nothing less.
Three is to hammer fentanyl kingpins with life sentences for organized crime production and trafficking with a clear 40 milligram trafficking threshold. We need to flood the zone with treatment and recovery, not failed safe supply experiments.
Last, we must secure fair immigration that puts Canadians first and ends the wage-suppressing temporary foreign worker scheme while keeping a narrowly focused agricultural stream. We need to clear the backlogs and put Saskatoon youth and Canadian workers first in line for Canadian jobs.
The government will say that Bill C-2 is about strong borders, but for people in Saskatoon West, strong borders mean less fentanyl on our streets, not more surveillance in their inbox; more CBSA capacity, not more Ottawa control over family finances; and an immigration system that works for Canada, not for corporate lobbyists and political theatre in Washington.
I like some elements of Bill C-2, which are basically the elements through which the Liberals are trying desperately to undo the ideas that they themselves implemented. However, the bill is a large omnibus bill that includes typical Liberal overreach that I cannot support. I want to see immediate help for the front lines, the CBSA officers, Saskatoon police and community safety partners, while I fight the government's overreach and demand real sentencing reform.
At the end of the day, my job is to deliver for families along 22nd Street, for the seniors in Montgomery, for the small shops, churches and little league teams all across Saskatoon, and that means a Conservative government that will strengthen our borders, protect civil liberties, destroy the scourge of fentanyl and keep our streets safe by keeping criminals in jail. We can make that happen.
