Mr. Speaker, the government seems confused as to why Canadians are unimpressed by its approach to terrorism. We are unimpressed because we know the Liberal history of being soft on criminals but tough in times of crisis on the civil liberties of innocent Canadians.
Allow me to take members on a guided tour: first, from 1914 to 1920 the Union Conservative-Liberal government dispossessed Ukrainian Canadians and sent them to internment camps; second, in 1940 the Liberals set up a firearms registry that included a question on racial origin and then confiscated guns belonging to German and Italian Canadians; third, in 1942 the Liberals sent 20,000 Japanese Canadians to internment camps; and, fourth, in 1970, 400 Quebecers were arrested and held without charge, without compensation and without apology because of imagined connections to the FLQ.
The record shows a congenital Liberal preference for maintaining order by suspending the civil liberties for thousands of law-abiding Canadians rather than by securing our borders in the first place.