Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to be here speaking for Markham—Unionville.
The Liberals claim they want to “balance firmness with fairness” in Bill C-14 and that they want "a justice system that works for everyone." This is a false equivalence. There is no “everyone” when it comes to our justice system; there is a value hierarchy, and there is only one spot at the top. Whom do we choose to serve? Whom do we build our justice system around?
Day in and day out, the Liberals have shown us whom they truly value. They cater to the common criminals, with fairness for the thief, the murderer and the drug dealer, and firmness for the honest citizen and the compliant taxpayer. They do not value the everyday hard-working Canadian upon whose back this nation was built. We are treated like a tax farm to be extracted from and then fed to the bandits like in some sick joke. The world the Liberals have legislated into being through Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 is madness incarnate.
Human narratives are post hoc rationalizations. We commit to a position dictated by our incentive structures, and then we invent reasons why we took the given position. A metaphor I have encountered that captures this dynamic equates our gut instinct to an elephant, and our rational mind to an elephant rider: The elephant moves around any which way it wants, and the rider invents the reasons why the movement occurred. The Liberal elephant is committed to sitting with criminals, and the Liberal elephant rider creates narratives to justify soft-on-crime policies.
The principle of restraint is embedded in the very core of the Liberal doctrine on justice, so much so that even though the Liberals were forced to make numerous concessions to Conservative advocacy around the errors of Bill C-5 and Bill C-75, they have still left the principle unchanged in Bill C-14. Let me remind the House what Bill C-14 really is: a direct Liberal admission of failure regarding their soft-on crime policies, without altering the underlying pro-criminal commitments that undergird their doctrine of justice.
There is a good parallel to this in the world of science. Scientific paradigms are world views that are ways of looking at and interpreting bodies of facts. We can look at the facts of physics through the paradigm of Newton and the paradigm of Einstein, but we can never hold two competing paradigms at the same time, because each is a totalizing way of looking at the world.
In what we might call a justice paradigm, the Liberals are committed to catering to criminals. When they speak of restraint, they speak only of their favourite little lawbreakers. There is no room to look at the world from the world view of the everyday Canadian when the Liberals have chosen to take up a pro-criminal paradigm of justice.
This has been a prolonged build-up for what is a very simple solution. The Liberals must know in their heart of hearts that they need to go all the way and repeal Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 in full. They keep saying that they are a new Liberal government and are different from the old Liberal government. Well, I ask that my colleagues show us.
Bill C-14 succeeds, from a pro-order lens, where it would move in the direction of undoing the damages of C-5 and Bill C-75. The bill fails where it would retain the principle of restraint.
There can be no balance in our system of justice between competing world views. The Liberals need to take one path and go all the way. What Bill C-14 represents is a patchwork of compromises. The Liberals have found such a big tent that competing factions sit uncomfortably together under a single roof.
The ideological incoherence in Bill C-14 maps the incoherence of the Liberals' factional support structure and the basis of power. To use a metaphor from earlier, the Liberals have more than one elephant, but only a single elephant rider to rationalize policy commitments post hoc to the entire world. What a mess. The Liberals will be perpetually locked into half measures to keep a tenuous coalition together.
With my remaining time, I want to outline some potential positive directions for Bill C-14 if the Liberals accept my commentary on the justice paradigms. First of all, the Liberals need to put law-abiding Canadians first by choosing to commit to the maintainers of order. It is already impossible to hold the principle of restraint as a core value. When we put something together at the centre of our value hierarchy, we will necessarily build a new system around it.
Second, once the public safety of law-abiding Canadians is set as the true north of our justice paradigm, it becomes impossible to uphold the errors of Bill C-5 and Bill C-75. Restoring mandatory minimums, ending the catch-and-release system and removing the house arrest option for serious offenders are the logical consequences of accepting a new set of priorities.
Finally, Liberals will have to come to terms with their big tent and prune the factions that are clearly against the well-being of law-abiding Canadians and the productive society they enable. The principle of restraint for criminals is a principle of constraint on our productive economy.
In conclusion, I want to remind the Liberal colleagues that the situation with our justice system has deteriorated to such an extent this is no longer a question of partisan politics. If they continue with this patchwork of compromises, what will the spillover effects be? How many more Canadians need to be shot dead in their own homes by repeat offenders for this systemic madness to bleed into genuine societal chaos? We are not talking about riots in the streets, though that is always possible. We are talking about the everyday chaos of a low-trust society, a slow and steady descent into balkanization and tribalization when citizens see they cannot trust their justice system to serve their interests.
If the Liberals continue to wine and dine on the luxury belief of restraint for criminals, the least of their concerns will be the fractioning of their own coalition. They are to fear the fracturing of our society and of the tax base that funds their capacity to engage in those ludicrous luxury beliefs.