Mr. Speaker, the Liberals say that they want to secure our border, but they have filled Bill C-12 with nothing but half measures that fail to target the core issues. They will be unable to combat transnational organized crime when they value the well-being of repeat offenders over law-abiding citizens. They will be unable to get a handle on our asylum system when they value economic migrants with bogus asylum claims over legitimately vulnerable people.
The Liberal half measures in Bill C-12 stem from their continued inability to both set up and enforce disincentives against bad actors. Fundamentally, the Liberals take the maxim of the three wise monkeys to heart: See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. The Liberals do not see the criminals. They do not hear the vulnerable. When they choose not to see the bad actors and not to hear the downtrodden, they by all means speak half measures into being.
Let us first address how Bill C-12 would fail to secure our borders, from a crime angle. I have a simple question: Do hard drugs like fentanyl just magically appear in our country? No, of course they do not. Some group has to produce them, and some group has to distribute them. The drug dealers should not be the only central target for the legislation.
The problem is that lax Liberal laws have altered our Criminal Code to put criminals first. Law-abiding Canadians live in fear, while repeat offenders serially reoffend against Canadian society, knowing there will be no consequences for their crimes.
The Liberals cannot just paper everything over with Bill C-12 while we still live in the madness legislated into being by Bill C-5 and Bill C-75. They are building bridges to nowhere, upheld by pillars of sand. How much longer must the Conservatives bring up the failures of these two bills?
Bill C-75 forces judges to apply a principle of restraint that puts repeat offenders back on the streets. Bill C-5 repealed mandatory jail time for serious offences, like extortion with a firearm or trafficking hard drugs like fentanyl. Thus, not only are we letting criminals with many offences roam free; we are also letting the ones who have performed the most serious offences at the highest frequency roam free. This is the pro-criminal world that the Liberals have legislated into being.
How do we stop the Liberal madness? The first step is clear: Put law-abiding Canadians above the well-being of repeat offenders. When we put hard-working, law-abiding and tax-paying Canadians first, at the top of our hierarchy, the policy suite to serve them unfolds naturally. We must disincentivize the crime that harms our law-abiding society, by locking up the repeat offenders rather than letting them roam free.
It is not hard to understand how disincentives work. When a toddler touches a hot stove and burns their hand, they will learn not to touch the stove again. Through this feedback loop, the child will learn not to repeat the mistake. Human behaviour is like a river flowing down a mountain. We can either dig grooves to enhance the flow down one path, or we can build dams to block the flow down another. The Liberals have been allowing the river of crime to flow unimpeded. We Conservatives plan on setting up some more dams.
Having addressed the failure of Bill C-12 to secure our borders on the drug front, let me redirect attention to how Bill C-12 would fail to do so on the asylum front as well.
Canada's asylum system was set up to protect truly vulnerable people, like those from Hong Kong or Ukraine. We cannot resettle every economic migrant claiming asylum to get a free hotel stay. However, this is our current state of affairs. We have made the asylum route a lucrative one and have incentivized it. We give hotel rooms to people with bogus asylum claims, while hard-working Canadians struggle with housing, health care and jobs amidst a general cost of living crisis, and while legitimately vulnerable people from Hong Kong and Ukraine have been left in limbo on their path to permanent residence, despite already being in Canada.
All that Bill C-12 would accomplish is to shift the burden to the courts, which is another half measure among half measures, as the Liberals choose not to see the bad actors and choose not to hear the vulnerable.
Let me bring my Liberal colleagues the voices of the vulnerable. I was shocked to discover that on October 9, the estimated time for processing individuals under the Hong Kong pathways to permanent residence was revised to being upwards of 10 years. My constituency staff have seen the processing times for cases of applications that have been situated in the IRCC pipeline for years jump from 25 months to 48 months after the October 9 threshold. For those who submitted their application this summer, processing times went from 25 months at submission to 10 years after October 9 . In the best of cases, it is a doubling of processing, and in the worst of cases, it is a quintupling of processing. In all cases, there are lives ruined and families put in peril.
Hong Kongers are a case study of a people that has integrated into our society. They do not take handouts. They are taxpayers who contribute to the system instead of getting free hotel stays on the backs of hard-working Canadians.
The Liberals can secure our borders from their out-of-control asylum system by removing all the benefits. A single action like this would have sweeping effects, and yet the Liberals have chosen the path of half measures.
In conclusion, my message today about Bill C-12 can be expressed in two concepts: incentives and disincentives. All we have to do is to stop incentivizing behaviours we no longer wish to see and to start disincentivizing behaviours we want to end. We cannot secure our borders with half measures that dance around the core problem.
People are the actors; people do things, so to stop bad actors from doing bad things, we must build systems of incentives and disincentives around the bad actors themselves. This is only impossible to do when we actually love and esteem the bad actors above the hard-working, law-abiding and taxpaying Canadians. As it stands, structurally, Bill C-12 does not see the bad actors and does not hear the legitimately vulnerable. Bill C-12 is a bundle of half measures that would not secure our borders.