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—