Madam Speaker, it was on May 10 of this year that I posed a question about the Liberals' risky and failed experimentation program in British Columbia with the free distribution of hard drugs to our most severely addicted neighbours. Specifically, I wanted to know whether the Liberal members of Parliament would be voting with us, the Conservative members of Parliament, on a common-sense motion that we had put forward a couple of days earlier to ban hard drugs and offer recovery and hope instead.
I thought it was a fair question because, at that time, it had become abundantly clear that the free drug experimentation program in British Columbia had been an utter failure. Even the left-leaning NDP Premier David Eby was admitting failure and was demanding an immediate stop to the pilot project. The vote came up a couple of days later and the Liberals and the NDP, of course, voted against our common-sense motion, because that is what they always do. They always vote against our common-sense motions.
However, I wonder, if that same motion were tabled today, whether they would vote with us now, being five months later. I ask it in this context. Looking at how these two parties and their counterpart in British Columbia, the NDP provincial government, have been flip-flopping on issues relating to the toxic drug crisis, it is hard to say how they would vote today. They really believe in harm reduction, safe supply and decriminalization, even if those beliefs are based more on ideology than on evidence and data.
The harm reductionists, the academics, the leaders and even the government's own professional advisers were calling on the government not to abandon the project, but to expand it to make more government-issued narcotics available for more people in more parts of the province. It is hard to shake people from their ideologically held beliefs, even if the evidence is clearly contrary to those beliefs, because it is just so easy to dismiss inconvenient evidence to the contrary as misinformation. That is what the Liberals tend to do, except, of course, when the evidence is the latest polling data showing many formerly safe NDP and Liberal seats leaning Conservative if an election were to be held today.
This is particularly worrisome for provincial Premier David Eby, who is facing the fight of his political life right now. An election is just a couple of weeks away. Therefore, what does he do? Well, he takes a look at what the Conservatives are doing right, at what is moving them ahead in the polls. He adopts some of their policies and now he is trying to convince British Columbians that this is what he believed all along anyway and, this time, it really is going to work. I am hoping, together with many other people, that British Columbians are done with the NDP experiment altogether.
Now, I will get back to our Conservative Party motion, here in the House of Commons back in May. I am going to read just a small part of it. The motion states that:
...the House call on the Prime Minister to:...
(d) end taxpayer funded narcotics and redirect this money into treatment and recovery programs for drug addiction.
That is a motion that the Liberals and New Democrats voted against. How would they vote today? Would they change their mind, given that their counterpart in British Columbia flip-flopped on the radical decriminalization program earlier this year and how now, in the heat of an election campaign, he is flip-flopping on what he calls compassionate intervention programs, treatment? The emphasis is now on treatment. Therefore, I am wondering how Liberals would vote today, and their NDP counterparts—