Mr. Speaker, if we are going to talk about this piece of legislation, we should put a couple of things into context.
The first thing I would put into context is that this is another bill the Liberals are trying to bring forward to allegedly do something to deal with the massive surge in crime that has gone on in Canada over the last 10 years. It is a remarkable turnaround. I still recall when former minister of justice Arif Virani sat in this chamber. He would get up in question period and say we were trying to scare Canadians and were engaging in typical Conservative fear on the issue of crime when we raised the staggering increase in crime and violent crime. That was his answer. Now it seems like the Liberals have had their reckoning and realized that over the last 10 years, due to their policies, we have had a massive surge in crime.
If members do not want to take my word for it, I have a few statistics that I would like to go through so that Canadians can understand just how bad crime has gotten. in this country under the Liberal government. Total violent crime is up 49.84%. Let us round that up to 50%. There has been a 50% increase in violent crime after a decade of the Liberals running the country. Homicide is up 28%. Gang-related homicide is up 78%. Sexual assault is up 74%. Extortion is up 357%. Let that sink in for a moment. A decade ago, we had a certain amount of extortion and it is now up 357%. We know the terrible things that happen when people are trafficking in persons. That is up 83%. All of this has happened over the last decade with the Liberals running the country.
They introduced a massive omnibus bill, Bill C-2. To get to Bill C-12, we have to talk a little about Bill C-2. I am old enough to remember when the Liberals used to say it was a terrible thing to introduce omnibus pieces of legislation, and they would never do such things, but here we are. Bill C-2 was going to amend 15 statutes and had 120 pages of technical statutory changes. As Conservatives, we said, “That is a no go.” In fact, it is due to Conservative pressure, because of a number of things that were included in Bill C-2, that we ended up here with Bill C-12, which actually has some things that we think might do some good. I know it is a strange thing to say, but as they often say, a broken clock is right twice a day, so they may have gotten a couple of things right in Bill C-12.
To go back to Bill C-2, I really want to talk about some very deeply troubling things that were included in that piece of legislation. It shows the mindset of the Liberals, who have turned around on some of these issues.
One of these is how Canada Post would be able to search mail. In and of itself, it is problematic, but the statutory change the Liberals were trying to bring in said this could happen with reasonable suspicion. Bill C-2 reads, “reasonable grounds to suspect”. That is the lowest threshold in law that could be used to do this. Normally, to be able to search something, we need the much higher standard of “reasonable grounds to believe”. The Liberals were putting in the very lowest standard possible of reasonable suspicion.
Because this was about the corporation, it would mean that any employee of the corporation who had a reasonable suspicion could be opening mail. It is a particularly troubling standard that they were trying to put into the bill. It has been through hard work from the Conservatives, who said “absolutely not”, that those parts of the legislation remain in Bill C-2 and are not included in Bill C-12.
It is also very interesting to note what is not included in any of these pieces of legislation which is trying to deal with the issue of crime that the Liberals are belatedly waking up to. For example, there is nothing in Bill C-12 that would deal with the issues of fentanyl trafficking and sentencing for fentanyl traffickers. Something like that could have been incorporated into it to crack down on fentanyl trafficking. We believe it needs to be done, but it is not in there.
The Liberals also did not take the time to eliminate, for example, house arrest for drive-by shootings, which is still okay. They put together a massive omnibus piece of legislation, in part to deal with crime, but they left things like that out of it. It is available, so somebody engaging in a drive-by shooting is eligible for house arrest.
If we go back to the statistics I talked about, gang-related homicide is up 78%. Generally speaking, the kinds of people who are engaging in drive-by shootings are people in gangs trying to cause homicides. The Liberals had so much opportunity to do better, and they failed on that.
Another thing they failed to do is make it crystal clear that so-called safe consumption sites should not be allowed anywhere near schools. We know the effects of these safe consumption sites. They become a blight in a neighbourhood, and having them near schools and children is not the kind of thing we want. Again, this was a simple place for the Liberals to have made that change, and they chose not to.
Let us quickly switch and talk a bit about some of the changes to immigration. I was around when Stephen Harper was prime minister and changes were made to the asylum system, and we brought asylum claims down to about 10,000. It sounds like a lot, but it is 10,000. If we look at where things are now, again, after a decade of these Liberals and their absolute and utter mismanagement of the immigration system, asylum claims are now at a whopping 296,000. Think about that. A decade ago, they were at 10,000, and now they are at 296,000. I think the estimate to process these 296,000 cases in the backlog is 25 years. Let that sink in. That is the backlog on asylum claims that has been created by the Liberals' absolute mismanagement of the immigration system.
What we are now hearing from some experts is that the proposed changes would not fix the broken system. This problem would be transferred to the courts, because they have decided they cannot fix it. The fix is not to figure out a way to quickly process the backlog, because we know so many of these claims are bogus asylum claims. In fact, one of the things we did under Prime Minister Harper was try to eliminate bogus asylum claims from certain countries by imposing visa requirements. One of the first things the Liberals did was eliminate those visa requirements. Surprise, surprise, we are up to 296,000.