House of Commons Hansard #386 of the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was conservatives.
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his speech. As always, it was remarkable. I would like to ask him a question.
If the Conservatives want to defund CSIS, does my colleague see a connection between that and the Leader of the Opposition's refusal to get his security clearance?
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question. Here in Canada, we have a political leader who is refusing to get his security clearance. That has never happened in the past because every political leader, regardless of their party, has always put the interests of Canada ahead of the interests of foreign powers.
Now, we have a Conservative Party that seems to be influenced by the Russian government, the Modi regime and the MAGA movement. The Conservative Party does not seem prepared to really put Canada first. The fact that the member for Carleton is refusing to get his security clearance is proof of that. He will be a threat to Canada's security.
Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC
Mr. Speaker, my colleague, the NDP House leader, raised a lot of really excellent points. Most of them actually highlight the fact that the Conservatives consistently say one thing and then do another. Persistently, they vote against critical services for the community, in support of the community. Even though they make the argument that they are there to support ensuring that border security is in place, to ensure that drugs do not cross the border, they made cuts to the CBSA. In Vancouver East, we have a port. A lot of the drugs are, in fact, brought in through the port right in the Downtown Eastside, to my community. However, it was the Conservatives who made those cuts to the CBSA services at the port.
Could the member share with us what one would call a party leader who consistently says one thing and does another?
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
Mr. Speaker, I want to pay tribute to the member for Vancouver East, who has been consistently defending the interests of her constituents at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. She has always been an inspiration to many people across the country. She is one of the most effective and experienced members of Parliament in our country.
I appreciated her question; the reality is that she saw first-hand the devastating effects of the massive and irresponsible cuts by the Conservatives. They were indiscriminate cuts, including to border security. Conservatives are just incredibly dull-witted when it comes to the simple mechanism of government. Tragically, as she pointed out, the Liberals have not restored the cuts that the Conservatives put in place. This has now led us to a situation in which only an NDP government will make the kinds of investments that are important.
Yes, I know the Conservatives are saying that means billionaires will get less money. That is true. We want to be very clear about that. What this means is that we will be able to make the investments that count in such things as health care, affordable housing and simple border security to ensure that we do not have this influx of drugs into this country.
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Mr. Speaker, one thing I find strange about this debate is that we are discussing a border between two sovereign nations. Such a border is required to be defended by both sovereign nations. We know that illegal handguns have been flooding into Canadian society from the weakness of the U.S. border. We know that we must fortify our own border. We know that drugs, and so on, come across the border from the U.S. into Canada. However, why is this focus, in the opinion of the member for New Westminster—Burnaby, solely on what CBSA is able to do? What about what the U.S. side of the border is doing to protect Canada from the illegal migration of harmful substances and dangerous weapons to our country?
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
Mr. Speaker, the member makes a good point, but the reality is that this flood of illegal weapons and drugs started when the Conservatives wrecked border security. They walked in, as a government, and destroyed the infrastructure that actually provided support for Canadians. To this day, not a single Conservative MP has apologized for wrecking border security.
Doug Shipley Conservative Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to this important motion on behalf of the great people of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, and I just want to remind the Speaker that I will be splitting my time with the great member for Chilliwack—Hope.
I am always happy to discuss the issue of border security and how we can maintain and improve our relationship with the United States. Given that Canada and the United States share the longest undefended border in the world, addressing the very real and very serious public safety issues we are facing at home are of the utmost importance to managing our relationship with our biggest trading partner and greatest ally.
U.S. President-elect Trump has made it very clear that he will impose a crippling 25% tariff on all Canadian products if Canada does not fix our chaos at the border and get a handle on the fentanyl crisis that is plaguing our country. While Conservatives agree that these issues must be addressed, we do not want to address these issues for the sake of the United States but for the sake of Canadians.
For far too long, the Liberal government has taken a soft-on-crime approach to drugs at our borders, and as a result, Canadians are suffering. The Prime Minister made a deal with the British Columbia NDP to decriminalize fentanyl, crack and heroin. He lowered jail sentences for drug kingpins and did nothing to prevent the import of the deadly precursor chemicals that are cooked into poison in drug superlabs and sold on our streets.
The Prime Minister has also broken our border. Since the Prime Minister came to power, there has been a 632% increase in U.S. border patrol encounters with people illegally attempting to enter the United States from Canada. In the first 10 months of 2024 alone, the U.S. border patrol has intercepted more than 21,000 people illegally crossing the border from Canada into the U.S.
The NDP-Liberal government sat back and watched as the backlog of the number of asylum claims in Canada skyrocketed from 10,000 to 250,000 over the past nine years. There are as many as 500,000 people in Canada who are here illegally. Statistics from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that roughly twice as many suspected terrorists have tried to cross from Canada into the U.S. as from Mexico into the U.S. in recent years. Additionally, in the 12 months leading up to September 2024, U.S. border agents seized about 11,600 pounds of drugs entering the United States from Canada. Seizures of fentanyl doses more than tripled between 2023 and 2024, rising from 239,000 doses to 839,000 doses.
The issue of fentanyl production in Canada has skyrocketed under the Prime Minister. Drug kingpins and gangsters are allowed to operate with impunity, and if they are caught, many of these criminals can serve their sentences in the comfort of their own homes under his soft-on-crime policies. A memo drafted by CSIS to the Prime Minister recently stated that CSIS identified more than 350 organized crime groups actively involved in the domestic illegal fentanyl market, and “China continues to be listed as the main source country for a variety of precursor chemicals intended for the illegal production of drugs in Canada and some illegal drugs smuggled into Canada.”
We are producing so much fentanyl here in Canada that we have become a net exporter of fentanyl rather than an importer of the product. According to the RCMP, the fentanyl threat in Canada has shifted from one of importation to one of domestic production. Almost all of the fentanyl consumed in Canada is now “produced in Canada”, according to a criminology professor at the Université de Montréal, and there is actually a production surplus.
While we are certainly exporting fentanyl to the U.S. and distributing it in the domestic market here in Canada, the RCMP's federal serious and organized crime program has stated that the fentanyl that is produced in Canada is also destined for export to southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, where drug users pay considerably higher prices for fentanyl than in Canada and the U.S.
How did we get here? Why have we become a net exporter of fentanyl? Before 2019, fentanyl was effectively legal in China. We could go on the Internet and find legitimate Chinese companies selling fentanyl online. This Chinese-made fentanyl flooded Canadian streets throughout the mid-2010s.
In 2019, Beijing finally caved to pressure, primarily from the United States, and blanket-banned the production and sale of all fentanyl analogues. However, it continued to fuel the fentanyl crisis by directly subsidizing the manufacturing of the precursor chemicals and materials that are used to make the drugs by traffickers.
In April 2024, U.S. investigators discovered a Chinese government website that revealed tax rebates for the production of specific fentanyl precursors as well as other synthetic drugs, as long as those companies sold them outside of China. We know this had a significant impact on the Canadian production of fentanyl, because seizures of precursor chemicals increased dramatically between 2020 and 2021.
In the first half of 2021, our border officers seized 5,000 kilograms of precursor chemicals, up from 500 kilograms the year before. Last year, the U.S. sanctioned several Chinese companies and individuals who have profited from the trade of precursor chemicals without facing consequences in China. So far, Canada has not sanctioned any of these individuals.
The enforcement of both exports and imports at our west coast ports is also dismal. The public safety committee recently did a study on auto theft and learned just how little we are searching and seizing at our ports. In 2023, the mayor of Delta, British Columbia, called out the Liberal government for its failure to address the rampant crime at the port of Vancouver.
He stated, “We're witnessing a relentless flow of illegal drugs, weapons and contraband into Canada through our ports and that threatens our national security.... They need to recognize this. We have a fentanyl crisis going through our community here in Delta, through Metro Vancouver, through the province, across the nation”.
Just recently, Mark Weber, the CBSA union head, was on Global News and stated, “We search less than 1% of what comes into Canada”. It is clear that something must be done. We must act to fix our borders and stop the rampant production of fentanyl within our borders.
Many constituents have been writing and calling to ask the following: Why did it take so long to address these very real issues? Why did it take the United States president-elect threatening crippling tariffs for the Prime Minister to take any meaningful steps to address the chaos at our borders and the scourge of fentanyl on our streets? Was it not enough that parents were seeing their children overdose on fentanyl in homeless encampments, that Jewish communities faced threats from ISIS sympathizers who came to the country on student visas or that Canadians were being gunned down by gangsters with illegal guns that had been smuggled over our borders?
All these terrible realities that Canadians are facing should have been enough for the Prime Minister to act. Instead, he stood by and told Canadians over and over again that they have never had it so good. Only Conservatives have a real plan to address the crime and chaos at our borders and to bring our loved ones home drug-free. Today, we are asking all parties to support our common-sense plan calling on the Liberal government to address the illegal importation of fentanyl precursors and the illegal production and export of fentanyl here at home.
Conservatives are calling on the government today to reverse Liberal Bill C-5, to reinstate longer jail sentences for drug kingpins, to ban the importation of fentanyl precursors, to buy high-powered scanners, to put more boots on the ground at our ports to stop fentanyl and its ingredients from coming into our country and to stop buying unsafe supply of opioids.
Conservatives want to stop drug overdoses so that not one more parent has to bury their son or daughter, after 47,000 other Canadians have died. That is more than we lost in the Second World War, and it represents a 200% annual increase in drug overdose deaths since the Prime Minister's radical liberalization of drugs.
The Liberal government and everyone in this place must put partisanship aside, not just for the sake of team Canada but for the sake of the families who are suffering, and support our common-sense Conservative plan. We must secure our borders and bring our loved ones home drug-free.
Kevin Lamoureux LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
Mr. Speaker, the Conservative Party's approach of giving the false narrative that it supports Canada's borders is disappointing, when, in reality, well over 1,000 jobs were cut. Significant other cuts were made while the leader of the Conservative Party today sat around the cabinet table and made those decisions, and now there are consequences. We, as a government, have restored those cuts and added an additional 300 staff, yet the Conservative Party seems to believe that its actions previously had no consequences. How silly is that?
Can the member opposite stand in his place today and guarantee that the Conservative Party will never cut border control services again?
Doug Shipley Conservative Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON
Mr. Speaker, I have heard this banter quite a bit, so I have some facts and figures. There were the exact numbers of full-time employees in the CBSA. In 2006-07, there were 12,383 employees and in 2015-16, which is the period the member opposite is talking about, there were 13,774 full-time employees. That is a net increase, so we have proven that one wrong today. The budget itself, in 2005-06, for CBSA, when Stephen Harper took over, was $1.236 million. In 2015-16, when Stephen Harper left, it was almost $1.8 million. Those are the facts.
Yves Perron Bloc Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
Mr. Speaker, I do not often have a chance to put a question to this colleague, whom I truly appreciate. I have two questions for him.
I asked the first question a few times this morning, but I did not get an answer from the Conservatives. Quebec felt it was necessary to deploy resources to protect the border, even though that is a federal responsibility, not a provincial one. Is that a sign of complacency and incompetence on the part of the federal government?
I also have a supplementary question, if my colleague wishes to answer it. I heard him repeat a few slogans that we hear quite often. Can he tell me how many points he earned with this speech?
Doug Shipley Conservative Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON
Mr. Speaker, I think those are good questions, although I am not sure about the last one. I will mention that he is talking about the border. The border is a problem right across Canada. We heard that in the public safety committee. We have been talking about the border and how porous it is. We know that there is not a lot of security going on at a lot of points.
We have been hearing, lately, in our committee that CBSA has had no jurisdiction, since 1932, between border points. There is talk about putting them in place over that. We need to do some stuff. We need to not just be getting threatened with tariffs to finally take action. This has been going on for a long time, for far too long, and it is a shame that it has taken a president-elect to bring this to our Prime Minister's attention.
Michelle Ferreri Conservative Peterborough—Kawartha, ON
Mr. Speaker, it is always a delight to hear from my hon. colleague as he represents his constituents. I would love to hear him share some stories of what the opioid crisis and what fentanyl has done, in particular, to his community.
Doug Shipley Conservative Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON
Mr. Speaker, it has been absolutely terrible what this nasty drug has done in Canada. I would just like to mention a couple of the statistics. Since the Prime Minister was first elected, over 47,000 Canadians have died from drug overdoses. Just last year, 8,049 Canadians were killed by opioids. That is a 184% increase since he became Prime Minister. One of these was Brianna MacDonald, who died of an overdose in a homeless encampment in Abbotsford, British Columbia. She died only a month after her 13th birthday.
Greg Sword lost his 14-year-old daughter Kamilah to a drug overdose in 2022. It has been absolutely horrific and painful to hear what has been going on. We need to deal with this. We need to get our border under control, and we need to make sure good, healthy, all-age Canadians can live a healthy, good lifestyle without fentanyl in it.
Lindsay Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
Mr. Speaker, in response to the Conservatives continuing to talk about the drug epidemic, which is an epidemic, absolutely, there is, seemingly, no conversation as to its connection to poverty. The opposition has not really spoken about those impacts and how they are actually going to deal with the fact that we have billionaires in this country who take billions out of the economy as opposed to reinvesting it. A lot of what is linked to people turning to escapes, to drugs, to illegal drugs, to violence, to crime and theft, is actually poverty.
How would he explain how his in-the-pockets-of-billionaires party is going to deal with poverty?
Doug Shipley Conservative Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON
Mr. Speaker, I would just like to draw to our attention to something that just came out from York Regional Police. It was Project Skyfall. This is amazing. This is what is going on in Canada. These are facts. This is truth. This morning, York Regional Police announced that they arrested 17 individuals, all on robberies and drug trafficking. They said it was a multi-faceted criminal organization. There have been 83 charges laid. They seized over 14.4 million dollars' worth of drugs and weapons.
This is going to be the part that is not shocking. Of those 17 who were arrested this morning, seven were currently out on bail. We have a serious problem in Canada. Let us deal with it.
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a pleasure to rise in the House of Commons on behalf of my constituents of Chilliwack—Hope.
I have listened to the debate this morning, in which we are talking about a committee report on the pandemic preparedness and border issues. It has been very interesting to watch how the NDP has taken this opportunity and this debate to essentially cheerlead for the government by saying that there is nothing wrong, that there are no issues.
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
The NDP House leader, who talks about breaking the rules, heckles as I am in the opening paragraph of my speech. He breaks the rules all the time and lectures others. As we saw yesterday, what the NDP says and does are two different things. We can even put together a motion with the NDP leader's own words and the New Democrats will vote against that, because nothing is more important to them than supporting the Liberal government. That is all that matters. To use a phrase from the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader, at the end of the day, they will always support the Liberal government. It does not matter what the issue is, how important it is or how grave the situation is, they will be there to support their master in the PMO. We have seen it time and again, and we have certainly seen it in the debate this morning.
I remember being a newly elected member in 2011, when Stephen Harper won his strong, stable, national Conservative majority government. There were 101 NDP MPs at that time.
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
One hundred and three, he says. I do not think they ended the session with that many, but there were more than 100 NDP MPs, with Jack Layton as the leader of the opposition.
Mr. Speaker, what has happened in every single election since then? They have cratered with Canadians, because when Canadians see how the New Democrats act and when they are given the choice to support what the NDP does in Ottawa, every election, more and more Canadians have rejected them.
The NDP moved from the official opposition, and I do not know if they even made it to the third party, and now it has been upgraded to the window seats in the House of Commons. After the next election, the way the NDP is going, it likely will not retain party status. What is the point of the NDP? Canadians might as well vote Liberal if they are going to vote NDP because they get the same thing in Ottawa. The same policies are promoted, the same rhetoric is spewed and the same tired talking points are issued in debate.
For 19 minutes, we heard the NDP House leader make a joke out of the estimates process and say that because the Conservatives did not support the estimates, we would empty out all the jails. What a bunch of nonsense. That is what passes for clever debate in the NDP. Of course, when he was in the opposition, I do not recall that member supporting the estimates for the Canada Border Services Agency or the Correctional Service of Canada. I guess he wanted to free all the prisoners, open up the borders and eliminate air security—
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. We never proposed cutting those programs like Conservatives—
The Deputy Speaker Conservative Chris d'Entremont
That is debate.
The hon member for Chilliwack—Hope.
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
Mr. Speaker, I would think that after 20 minutes the member would have gotten his point across, but I guess he needs more time, just like he wants to give the Liberal government more time. Every time he gets the opportunity to cause an election, he signals his confidence in the Liberal government.
I know that the member does not want to talk about the NDP record in our home province of British Columbia when it comes to the opioid crisis, because the B.C. NDP has been on the leading edge of making things worse. We have the most drug overdoses in the country, not the least, as he tried to say in his remarks. We saw the NDP giving out drug paraphernalia in candy dispensing machines outside of hospitals. We saw soccer fields that could not be used in Abbotsford because of the drug paraphernalia. We saw parks completely shut down in British Columbia because of the drug paraphernalia and the open drug use in our communities. However, that member wants to celebrate the record of the B.C. NDP, which saw its majority reduced to a single seat after the last election. That is the record of the NDP, but its members do not seem to care.
On the border, when Roxham Road was an open, unofficial crossing, the NDP thought that was just fine and that any attempt to shut that down was somehow an affront to the democratic process. Those members stood for a completely unregulated border crossing and fought every attempt of the official opposition to draw attention to the matter. They are not serious when it comes to border security.
The member for Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte gave the statistics, which unlike some members in this place, are in black and white and are true. They say that after the Harper government, there were more CBSA full-time equivalents. After the Harper government, more money was spent on the border. Even if that were not the case, the Liberal government has been in power for nine and a half years and its members hearken back to the Harper era as though they have not had any time to make changes. The only thing the Liberals have done is make change for the worse. They have increased the size of the public service by 40%.
As the member from the NDP said, when Stephen Harper cut some back-office positions in the CBSA, that was when the guns started flowing across and we had all this unregulated immigration. What a load of nonsense. We have seen the statistics. There is a 200% increase in the number of Canadians who have died of overdoses since the government took office in 2015, 47,000 Canadians. At the border, seizures of fentanyl doses have more than tripled between 2023 and 2024, rising from 239,000 doses to 839,000 doses. That is the record of the government.
Because the Liberals have been so incompetent in managing the border, now the provinces are feeling compelled, right across the political spectrum, to step up and do things on their own to patrol the border, even though that is not their mandate. They have said that if the NDP-Liberals will not do it, they will have to do it themselves. Wab Kinew has said that he will be looking at conservation officers to help patrol the border, because he recognizes it is so bad. Danielle Smith has said that she might have to use Alberta sheriffs. The Quebec government has proposed measures to bolster border security, because it is a disaster.
The numbers have shown exactly how this is trending, and it is trending in a direction, where U.S. border patrol is encountering more and more people coming from Canada trying to get into the U.S. illegally. Now we have President-elect Trump saying that we better fix it. Instead of saying that this is as serious as a heart attack, that he proposing 25% tariffs and what should we do about it, NDP members are saying that we should ignore him, that he is just blowing smoke, that there is nothing wrong with our border and that if we address the border, we are somehow kowtowing to the president-elect.
Canadians had better get serious about what has been proposed. A 25% tariff would be devastating to our economy, so we had better come up with a Canada-first plan that addresses things like the fentanyl crisis and the border crisis. We had better come up with a plan—
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
Mr. Speaker, I am getting chirps from the Liberals. Their own Minister of Public Safety has admitted that they need to do better.