Madam Speaker, as I was saying, I am talking about report 8: “Pandemic Preparedness, Surveillance, and Border Control Measures”. The border control measures are the most important and are of great interest to me, because today is an opposition supply day.
We now know, both from public media reports and from statements by the incoming U.S. administration that will be swearing its oath next month, that border measures in Canada are of great interest to the incoming administration, especially with respect to the fact that we have such lax border measures. It is concerned about border measures on two primary issues.
I want to demonstrate to the House how this is connected to the important report I mentioned, because in the previous situation where border measures were found to be lacking by the Auditor General, when she reviewed the conduct of the Public Health Agency of Canada and the conduct of the CBSA, she found it was lacking in a different national emergency at the time, related to the pandemic, with respect to what was done at the time, including the government response to that particular event.
I have a Yiddish proverb, as I always do: “Time is the best doctor.” In the situation in question, it has not been so. If the government proceeds to do the same thing it did with the pandemic response, in order to train up the CBSA officers responsible for border enforcement, then we will likely have a multi-year disaster at our borders. The border disorder will continue.
Madam Speaker, I want to say that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Sturgeon River—Parkland.
I want to draw the attention of the House to recommendation 7 of the committee: “The Canada Border Services Agency should provide the Committee with a progress report regarding the training tool for border services officers.”
With respect to the report and the response that the government presented to the House, I again want to draw the attention of the House to the progress report. It said at the time that CBSA had established a process to monitor decisions made by border services officers as they relate to the application of public health policies. It goes on and on to talk about a case management system, an Order in Council system, developing training tools and developing all types of interesting policy health guidelines that were supposed to make it easier at the border for CBSA officers to monitor and apply the rules for people entering the country.
I draw the attention of the House to a few of the points. The report said that CBSA college in Rigaud, Quebec, had updated its training modules on legislation and resources to include teaching points specific to the Orders in Council and application to the job. It had a part on additional training tools for officers, having created a form of job aids that provide scenarios regarding various quarantine exemptions of non-discretionary travel that officers could reference when making a decision.
We know from public reporting and from the incoming American administration that the two primary issues the administration is worried about, with the border disorder caused by the Liberal government, are fentanyl and other opioid trafficking across our border, the smuggling that is going on seemingly almost unabated; and the immigration visa disorder that the Liberals have created as well over the past nine years.
This is important because we know that 47,000 Canadians have now died from the radical liberalization of hard drugs that the Liberal government has conducted, the experiment over the past nine years. That is a 200% increase of such deaths compared to 2016.
The media is not in a vacuum. Information and facts do not exist in a vacuum. The incoming U.S. administration has been paying attention; it has seen the same numbers. America has an opioid crisis in its country and is looking to its neighbours on both sides, as it is going to increase enforcement and wants our government to increase enforcement at the border. At the previous time when there was a major crisis, the government was slow to react. If all it is going to do is offer training modules and have pieces of paper informing officers at the border what they should be looking at, then we are going to be far behind what our neighbours expect us to do.
We know that since 2024, over 80% of accidental opioid deaths primarily involve fentanyl. We also know that the reduced sentences for drug kingpins and lax borders contribute to the deaths. The situation threatens our trade relationship with our biggest trading partner.
I know that in my riding, there are a lot of businesses that are completely dependent on trade with America for the products and services they provide, which run the gambit. One would think it would be mostly oil and gas, which of course it is, but there are also companies in my riding that do things that would be considered to be on the higher end, such as the refurbishment of small aircraft. Small Cessna aircraft are refurbished for the American market by companies in my riding.
Recently, a major new construction centre opened just east of my riding of Bow River, which will now be making new firefighting equipment. Firefighting aircraft in the DHC series of aircraft will again be made by De Havilland right in Calgary. Some of the parts companies are located in the industrial areas of my riding. They are dependent on the American market in order to ensure that they will have future contracts. A lot of European countries have purchased these aircraft, but the American market is also incredibly important.
If our trade relationship with the U.S. continues to sour because the government is not capable of cutting down on the fentanyl trafficking across the border, if all it does is similar to what it did during the pandemic with little training modules, then I am sorry to say that the border disorder will continue. It will not be enough and will not assuage the concerns of the American administration, and in its crosshairs would be regular, everyday Canadians who would pay the price for the NDP-Liberal government's incompetence.
We have seen over the past few years what can happen. Hundreds of thousands of Albertans lost their job through the radical policies the Liberals have introduced targeting energy workers and their families. We cannot risk losing tens of thousands more jobs in my riding and also throughout Calgary, in Edmonton, all across western Canada and in fact anywhere in Canada because the NDP-Liberals are simply too slow to act when they hear serious, logical concerns over what is going on with fentanyl trafficking in Canada.
We know that CSIS has also found that synthetic drugs are increasingly being produced in Canada, using precursor chemicals largely sourced from the People's Republic of China. CSIS has identified more than 350 organized crime groups actively involved in the domestic illegal fentanyl market. I mention that because I also happen to be the vice-chair of the Canada-China committee. That committee, at the call of the chair, twice now has not met.
As far as I know, there is no meeting of the China-Canada committee set for next week, which means three meetings are now cancelled where we could be looking at issues like fentanyl. The committee's mandate is to look at the Canada-China relationship and the fact that precursor chemicals are coming from the PRC and entering our country, seemingly without a lot of border controls being applied.
This is not to blame the CBSA. The agents are doing the best job they possibly can under their circumstances, but if all they are being offered are training modules and little OICs, their hands are really tied. I am sure that if we go to see rank-and-file members, we would see that they are just as frustrated as we are on this side that we have such lax border controls for precursor chemicals.
The Liberals have kept cancelling the meeting of the Canada-China committee, which should be meeting to talk about issues like fentanyl smuggling across the border and like precursor chemicals coming into Canada. We know that the incoming American administration is concerned, but we should also be concerned. Tens of thousands of Canadians have died because of the opioid crisis and especially the fentanyl crisis, so why should we not be concerned?
We are not the only ones saying it. There are also police chiefs across Canada, like the London police chief, who has said that thousands of deaths have happened and “confirmed that taxpayer-funded hard drugs” that the NDP-Liberals have supported “are being diverted to communities across Canada. In fact, over 30,000 hydromorphone pills were seized in 2023, with most being diverted from so-called ‘safe supply’ programs. He later went on to say that Canadians ‘are being targeted by criminals who exchange these prescriptions for fentanyl, exacerbating addiction and community harm.’”
A lot of this is related to the original report. The government lurches from one crisis to the next. There is border disorder today. There is a crisis at the border and we know this. There is an incoming American administration that is now, in the wrong way, focused on and interested in what the NDP-Liberals have done over the past years and how they have exacerbated the problem.
If we look at past conduct as future conduct, what we see now is that things are going to get worse next year for the residents of my riding and the residents of all our ridings. That is why I have moved concurrence on the report today. It is important and substantive. We need to debate the issue; we need to get to the bottom of it and have a better way of ending the border disorder that the NDP-Liberals have caused.