Madam Speaker, I rise today to raise very serious concerns about Liberal legislation, Bill C-3. This legislation proposes to create a new system of unlimited chain migration into Canada at a time when Liberal immigration policies have already skewed population growth to the point where public services are under great strain. I believe this is not only bad policy, but also immoral policy.
The Liberals would like to make it easier for people who have never stepped foot in Canada to obtain Canadian citizenship. It is absurd. It is outrageous. The population growth the Liberals have already inflicted upon our country has put us in a vulnerable position on many fronts. The reality is that they want to hand Canadian citizenship out like candies at the counter.
By treating Canadian citizenship this way, the Liberals will further increase the number of people who are trying to access social programs, housing and health care. This is already a growing problem where we have more people than we have services available for the people who are here. The quality of life for Canadians is threatened to be further eroded by Bill C-3. It would make many of the problems in our country even worse.
I am particularly concerned about the implications this would have for our health care system, which is already in a state of degradation because of the surge in population growth across the country. We do not have enough hospitals. We do not have enough beds. We do not have enough doctors. We do not have enough nurses. The prospect of Liberals wanting to bring even more people into Canada is truly concerning to many.
I would like to share with the House a story to illustrate just how population growth is lowering the quality of life for Canadians across this country, and it is a personal story of my family dealing with the hospital system. On Monday of last week, my dear mother, who I love, went into the hospital for hip replacement surgery.
As has become the norm across Canada, she had to wait far too long for her surgery date. In fact, by the time my mother went in to have her surgery, the surgeon said the damage to her hip had reached the point of being a 10 out of 10. That means that my dear mother was dealing with a lot of pain for a long period of time while waiting for the chance to have a surgery that everybody in the health care system acknowledged she needed much more urgently than it was provided.
The state of our health care system becomes even more clear with the experience we had in the hospital itself. The morning of the surgery, everything went smoothly. I was with my mom. The surgeon was awesome. The nurses were awesome. They took great care of her. We are very thankful for the excellent work they did. We are also very grateful to be in a country where someone does not have to go into debt to see a doctor. It was a very good experience in the morning.
I was with my mom in the afternoon and in the evening. Around 10:00 p.m., I decided I was going to go home to get some sleep. I hit the 401. I was driving east on my way back home, and I got a phone call from my mom, who was frantic and upset. My mother is a very calm, cool and collected lady. She does not get upset easily, but she was freaking out. She was freaking out because she awoke from her rest while recovering from surgery to the sounds of hospital staff moving a male patient into her room.
I appreciate that some people in the House might not see that as a big deal, but a lot of people across Canada would. When someone is recovering from a surgery in a hospital, they are in a physically vulnerable state and can barely move. The idea that hospital staff would move a dude into my mom's room in the middle of the night with no notice and no acknowledgement, and not even recognize that this was a bizarre and weird action to take to begin with, made my mom quite unhappy. The male patient who was moved into the room was also very uncomfortable with the situation. The only thing dividing them was a thin curtain pulled between the hospital beds.
Naturally, when my mom is upset, it is like the bat signal going up. I got off the highway, headed westward and got back to the hospital. I went to speak to the supervising nurse. After some persistence, and I think, Madam Speaker, you know me well enough to know what my persistence might look like, the staff did move my mom to a new hospital room with a female patient.
I asked the supervising nurse what the hospital policy was that allowed it to force a male patient and a female patient to share a room without their consent. The supervising nurse printed the policy off and handed it to me. I looked at it, and it was a policy that said that, due to overcrowding and under-resourced hospitals, the hospitals in Toronto had made the decision that they would have to give themselves that power.
I am not of the belief that this makes it a good choice for them. I do not like the policy, but in that moment, I could see very practically what population growth has done to our hospitals. I did some research, and I found that this has become a common practice in hospitals all across Canada. They give themselves the ability to pair male and female patients in the same room against their will because they do not have enough space.
A week later, after that whole ordeal, I came back to Ottawa, and what was the first thing on the legislative calendar? The Liberals want to make it easier to bring even more people into our country, increasing the demands on our health care system even further and continuing to demonstrate a quite objectively observable pattern of policy-making that indicates the Liberals would rather bring new people into this country than take care of the people who are already here.
My mom and seniors like her built this country, paying taxes for decades on the promise that they would be looked after when they needed it. However, we have a series of policy choices continuously being made by the Liberal government to make life harder for people like my mom. Forgive me, but I cannot get down with that. It is not right.
I appreciate that Liberal MPs may want to dismiss or deflect this. They might say this is a provincial issue, asking why we do not take it to the provincial government and claiming they have no responsibility. Well, my response to that would be this: Maybe that is a message they could deliver to the Prime Minister, as he is the one having fireplace chats with the Premier of Ontario. He is the one sipping Chardonnay by the fire with the man who is in charge of the government in this province. If the Liberals want to make health care funding an issue, by all means they should encourage the Prime Minister to do so. I am not able to. I do not get invited to the fireplace. I do not think the Speaker does either. Most Canadians do not get to go to the fireplace.
What do we have control over in this House? We have the ability to control what we vote for and what we stand for. We get to represent our constituents and say to them that we are going to take a stand for what is right and what is good for the people of this country. With Bill C-3, the Liberals cannot even tell us how many new people they would bring into the nation. They cannot give us an answer. They expect us to just rubber-stamp their legislation when the basic information required to know how it would affect our families, our communities and the people who send us here to Ottawa is not being provided by the Liberal government.
It is unacceptable. It is an unacceptable way to do business, and the reality is that the Liberals are going to continue this approach of valuing bringing more people in instead of taking care of the people who are already here. We will all lose. That is what will happen. We will all lose in that situation.
My request of every Liberal MP here and every Liberal MP who might hear my words is for them to please do their job, please take care of the people of this country, join the Conservatives in pointing out how reckless Liberal policies are in growing our population and join the Conservatives in pointing out that, at minimum, the Canadian people deserve to know how many new people will be entering this country.
My mother did not deserve what happened at the hospital. I do not think anybody's mother deserves it. That is a good enough reason to say this legislation is just not good enough.
