Madam Speaker, I know members were disappointed that I had to wrap up during the previous rubric, so they can hear another 10 minutes.
It is great to be back in the new Parliament. Parliament has not been the most active this year. We had prorogation then an election, and the government briefly came back for a spring session. Our position as Conservatives was that we should be prepared to work at least at the committee level over the summer, but Liberals loved not working and wanted to further extend that through the summer. Hopefully we will actually be able to get down to the nation's business in an effective way in the current Parliament.
Conservatives are eager to get to work. We are calling for action on the critical challenges that are confronting Canadians, which is why before Parliament even came back, our leader sent a letter to the Prime Minister, articulating four critical priorities for the current Parliament, things that we need to tackle. These are crises that were in many ways caused by policies of the Liberal government and that we hope to see change and reversal on.
We will certainly be doing everything we can to push for results in these areas. We will oppose the things that are wrong about the government's agenda. We will support legislation and policy change that reverse the failures of the last 10 years that have brought us to this point.
In particular, the four priorities we articulated were addressing, first, the Liberal job loss crisis, the catastrophic levels of unemployment, particularly affecting young people, which result from Liberal policy failures. Confronting that will be a critical priority for us in the current Parliament.
Second is addressing the cost of living crisis. There are so many Canadians who are struggling to afford homes and to afford basic essentials. The Prime Minister has said that he would be judged by the price of groceries, yet we continue to see escalation in costs at the grocery store, for those people buying homes, in transportation and in so many other areas.
There is the job loss crisis and the cost of living crisis. There is the immigration crisis, the failure of the government to align our immigration system with the economic interests of this country. This has led to all kinds of problems. I think there is a lot of concern from Canadians on that issue as well.
Fourth, speaking to the particulars of the bill before us, there are particulars I do not think are addressed fully by the bill, and it incorporates some other problems and distractions. However, the fourth issue we are tackling in the current Parliament in particular is the crime crisis. On the crime issue, it is more difficult for the Liberals to muddy the waters by blaming other factors.
When it comes to economic issues, they often say that there are all these other things going on around the world that are causing them. In many cases, we can demonstrate how that is not true in fact. It is hard to blame events outside the country for the fact that we are building fewer homes in Canada than we did in the past. It is hard to blame events outside the country for the fact that unemployment has actually been steadily going up for the last three years. We are reaching catastrophic levels, especially for youth unemployment, but this is a trend that has been escalating ever since we came out of the COVID period.
It is hard for the government, even on economic issues, to perpetuate the continuing charade of blaming external events, but in particular as it relates to crime. I would encourage people to look at the data, in particular for violent crime. We can see, if plotting on a graph the years and rates of violent crime in this country, that violent crime was going down, and then something happened in 2015.
A new government, a Liberal government, came in in 2015. We are now in the fourth term of that government. It had a different approach with respect to criminal justice. Violent crime rates were going down, and then violent crime rates started going up. Crime rates started going up in particular in response to policy changes that the government made around bail, sentencing and, I think, some changes in the way it approached the issue of crime more broadly.
There was a downward trend and then an upward trend. What we need to see is the reversal of those bad Liberal policies and the return to an approach that we took when crime was actually going down. I know we have put forward various constructive announcements and proposals around reversing the Liberal crime trajectory.
There is a bill before us today, Bill C-2, that purports to be about these kinds of issues. Unfortunately, the Liberals are sort of stepping on their own agenda in lots of ways, because they are weaving in, into some provisions that are supportable, some provisions that we are concerned about and I think that many Canadians are concerned about as well. The Liberals do this a lot; they want to have a nice-sounding announcement about a bill, but they do not actually do the things they say they are going to do, and they weave in other aspects of a different agenda.
Let me highlight some of the things that are in the bill that I think make a lot of Canadians wonder, “Why is that there, and what is the government trying to do with this here?” The bill includes a provision that would limit the use of cash. A lot of us probably use cash a lot less than our grandparents did, because of changes in technology, but on the other hand, cash use does remain a legitimate and vital part of our economy. I think it is something that tends to be relied on more by seniors and by people in rural areas. There are situations where the use of cash is more practical.
We have talked a bit, in the context of the unemployment problems, about what our first jobs were and about the importance of a first job. One of my first jobs was working at, believe it or not, the travelling fair. I worked at the Calgary Stampede and the Edmonton Fair.