Mr. Speaker, it is always interesting to hear the arguments from the other side during the debate. It is a packed house for a late Friday afternoon. I want to thank everyone who is in the gallery. Those in TV land cannot see but the gallery is packed today. I want to thank those who are tuning in from TV land for watching this.
I want to remind everybody who is watching and those who are in the gallery listening that the House is their House. The 338 members of Parliament are elected to be their voice, elected to hold the government accountable. We are here because of the theft of about $400 million of taxpayer funds given to the government. The Auditor General found 186 conflicts of interest with respect to that theft of over $400 million for this slush fund.
The other reason we are here is that the Speaker ordered that papers be printed and given to the House so that an investigation can take place. What was seen? What was seen were thousands upon thousands of papers of redacted information. As a matter of fact, the Liberals at the time asked why we did not just let the committee study this. I said, if somebody steals from us, do we go to a committee or do we go to the RCMP? Essentially, that is what we are talking about: theft.
It is interesting. The government is more interested in funnelling money to its Liberal insiders and friends. It is great to be a Liberal insider, a friend, a family member or related to somebody on the front bench or within the House on the Liberal side. They get the contract, the job or the appointment. It is the same thing that we have seen over the last nine years of the government.
Our colleagues from the NDP will stand up and carry the water for the Liberals, of course, because guess what? It is the NDP's scandal, too. It has been propping the government up for the last four years.
NDP members stand up and wax on, that it is the Conservatives this and Stephen Harper that. They are just as guilty as our Liberal colleagues across the floor. They are complicit in the scandals and the corruption.
As was noted earlier on by my hon. colleague, and it was a backhanded slap for all of us here, the 2019 election was his first election to vote in, and, as a matter of fact, he got elected himself. I think he was the youngest member of Parliament ever voted in, or close.
Canadians are struggling to get by, while these Liberals are only focused on enriching the lives of their friends and their families. They would say that Canadians have never had it so good. I will ask all of those in the gallery or those in TV land to take a look at our communities. Take a look just outside this building. Just down the street, does it look the same as it did nine years ago? Does our community look the same as it did just nine years ago? No.
It is the government's failed policies that have turned our streets into war zones, that have allowed billions of dollars to be spent on failed policies. Over 47,000 Canadians have lost their lives to overdose yet the government continues to hand out taxpayer-funded drugs.
In British Columbia, my home province, the leading cause of death for children aged 10 to 18 years of age is overdose. It surpasses suicides, natural causes and death by accidents. That is staggering.
We heard earlier today from reports out of Quebec that it is the same thing there. Children as young as 11 are becoming addicted to government-funded drugs given out at safe supply clinics. It is shocking, but that is the legacy of the Prime Minister, his government and our NDP colleagues. That is what they have supported.
This did not start today with the green slush fund fiasco. This has been a nine-year pattern of incompetence and avoiding accountability and transparency. Unfortunately, the NDP and the Bloc are still supporting the Prime Minister, even after all his blunders and after he has failed Canadians for nine years. As a matter of fact, the government has the most ethics violations in all of our country's history. They include the Aga Khan scandal and the WE Charity scandal, where the Conservatives caught the government funnelling over a billion dollars to a charity. How many recovery beds for Canadians struggling with addiction would that billion dollars have funded?
There was also SNC-Lavalin, where my friend Jody Wilson-Raybould, our first indigenous female attorney general, spoke truth to power. She did not allow undue pressure from the Prime Minister and his officers to interfere in a court case to protect the Prime Minister's friends.
There was blackface. The Prime Minister has worn blackface so many times that he has lost count.
There was the clam scam, where the former minister of fisheries took a fishing quota away from a community, Grand Bank, Newfoundland. I just received a message from its great mayor, Rex, asking how I am. Grand Bank developed a surf clam fishery, but the former minister of fisheries decided he would take the quota away from that community, which almost lost 500 jobs, and award it to an organization that did not have first nations business partners and interests despite saying it did. It also said it had a boat, but it did not. What did it have? It had a member of the minister's family. A sitting Liberal member of Parliament's brother was part of it too, and a former Liberal minister was one of the partners in the business. That is what we have to deal with every day. That is our government. That is the current Liberal government.
We have arrive scam, the cash for access affair and the Emergencies Act too. For the first time in the history of our country, a government instituted the Emergencies Act and turned on Canadians, our own people. We have a Prime Minister who chose during the terrible time of the pandemic not to unite Canadians but divide them based on whether they were vaccinated or unvaccinated. He actually used these words: Why should we tolerate these people? That is unbelieve.
Do not even get me started on reconciliation. In 2015, when the Prime Minister, then the member for Papineau, was campaigning, he promised that we would have the most open and forthwith government in the history of our country under his governance. He said the relationship with first nations would be the most important of his government. He stood there and with his hand dabbed away a fake tear. However, all we have seen is that he has pitted first nation against non-first nation and first nation against first nation. That is what these guys do. The Liberals choose to divide.
If someone does not get along with the Liberals' ideology and does not believe the same thing they do, the Liberals will not respect them for it. They will call them a racist, a homophobe, far right or alt right. Is it alt right to want to make life more affordable for Canadians? Is it alt right to want to bring our loved ones, who are struggling with addictions, home?
We talk about crime being up and time being up. I want to bring this back to my riding of Cariboo—Prince George. My own community is suffering under this radical, incompetent NDP-Liberal government. Instead of dealing with the crime and corruption it unleashed on our streets, the Liberals would rather line their friends' pockets.
Just last week one of my constituents, a gentleman by the name of Bob Hubbard, returned home in the middle of the day to find a bunch of drug-addicted criminals basically looting his house. In his efforts to stop them, Mr. Hubbard was dragged down the road by these criminals, who then ran him over and left him for dead. Mr. Hubbard is lying in the hospital right now in Vancouver. The extent of Mr. Hubbard's injuries are such that he has had to have facial reconstruction surgery. They are considering having to amputate his arm. He has broken ribs and a flail chest. He is going to have to have numerous surgeries. The RCMP managed to catch one of these criminals, but less than 24 hours later, that criminal was back on the streets.
That is this government's record. Criminals who should be locked up are out on bail due to the Prime Minister's hug-a-thug revolving door justice system. We need jail, not bail, when it comes to violent offenders.
After nine years, violent crime is up 50% and gun violence is up 116%. That is this government's record. In 2022, 29% of all murders were committed by offenders who were released from jail early. This week, the police associations in Toronto, Vancouver and Surrey all came out to call out this government's B.S. on its gun policies.
The Toronto Police Association said:
Criminals did not get your message. Our communities are experiencing a 45% increase in shootings and a 62% increase in gun-related homicides compared to this time last year. What difference does your handgun ban make when 85% of guns seized by our members can be sourced to the United States?
The Vancouver Police Union said, “Guessing [the Prime Minister is] not aware of the ongoing gang war here in B.C. which is putting both our members and public at risk on a daily basis.”
The Surrey Police union said, “The federal handgun freeze fails to address the real issue: the surge of illegal firearms coming across our borders and ending up in the hands of violent criminals.” This NDP-Liberal government is turning our communities into war zones, and it is making them unsafe for Canadians.
In other news from my riding, in the fall of 2021, I spoke of a gentleman in the community of Vanderhoof in my riding. He had decided that he was going to go out and hunt RCMP. He terrorized a small community. He shot up the detachment, firing large-calibre rounds into it, narrowly missing both enlisted and civilian members of the RCMP. To this day, despite promises from the front bench, Vanderhoof is still waiting for a new RCMP detachment. The detachment that it has still has bullet holes. That is shameful.
News broke last night of that gentleman who had shot up the RCMP detachment and hunted RCMP members. He not only did that, but also terrorized the streets of Vanderhoof. Last night, we found out that his sentence has been cut in half to only five years, and this is for shooting at a building full of police officers and vulnerable staff. That is staggering.
According to one article,
The union which represents 20,000 RCMP officers across Canada said the appeal decision sends a horrible message to the public.
“This is a slap in the face to all of us,” Jeff Swann with the National Police Federation told Global News.
“This is high-powered rounds that take people’s lives and the verdict is insulting. It’s unfathomable given the current environment that our police officers face.”
Canada's justice system is broken under the NDP-Liberals. Only Conservatives will bring home jail, not bail, and stop the crime.
Two million Canadians are lining up at food banks each month because of the NDP-Liberal government's inflationary policies and carbon tax. I would again ask the people who are listening in how many tent encampments they have in their communities and if they had them nine years ago. Over 1,400 tent encampments have crept up in Ontario. In my home province of British Columbia, we are seeing tent encampments at rest areas along the highways. Life has become unaffordable for most Canadians after nine years. Instead of fixing the problem and what they broke, the Liberals get caught wasting more taxpayer dollars to funnel to their green slush fund. That $400 million could have gone a long way to fixing some of these policies and challenges we face in our communities.
I mentioned earlier that over 47,000 Canadians lost their lives to overdose since 2016. Overdose is the leading cause of death for youths aged 10 to 18 in my home province of British Columbia. This crisis has been exacerbated by failed Liberal-NDP policies, including experiments such as so-called safe supply and the decriminalization of deadly drugs in B.C.
Two weeks ago, we saw the parents of Brianna MacDonald. She had just turned 13 years of age, and she died from an overdose in a homeless encampment in Abbotsford, B.C. Masha Krupp testified yesterday; she is an Ottawa mother whose daughter died from an overdose and whose son is addicted to government-funded hydromorphone. How can the government members live with themselves when they spend a billion dollars on failed drug policies to perpetuate addictions and make overdose worse, rather than investing in treatment and recovery for our loved ones?
The bottom line is that the NDP-Liberal government has now frozen the business of the House with the green slush fund scandal. It could end this right now by handing over the documents that Parliament requested, so we can allow the RCMP to do its job and arrest the Liberal cronies at SDTC. Instead, it is trying to cover its tracks and defend the corrupt behaviour of its friends. Meanwhile, our country is broken and hurting.
Only common-sense Conservatives will fix what the Prime Minister has broken. Time is up. It is time for the government and the Prime Minister to face and call for a carbon tax election. Let us bring it home.
