Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to rise on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South.
My colleague from Barrie South—Innisfil did a tremendous job explaining the breadth of Liberal obstruction right now. There is a logical inconsistency here that I do not believe should be all that surprising coming from the Liberal Party, but they are obstructing their own agenda. The Liberals are obstructing their own legislation.
I can speak specifically to what has been happening on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, a committee I was honoured to be named to shortly after I was sworn in as a member of Parliament, and a committee that is very relevant to the people in my riding, for whom crime has been a top issue. I sent out a household mailer to the people in my riding a couple of months back, and it was about crime, justice and the revolving-door bail crisis. The police chiefs in St. Thomas, Aylmer and London, and officers with the Ontario Provincial Police, have all said the same thing, which is that they are tired of arresting people in the morning only to find them on the streets again, sometimes that afternoon.
We demanded action. Canadians demanded action on bail. We were told that the Liberal government would make bail a top priority. On the justice committee, we were expecting to be able to do incredibly important, timely work on this. We actually initiated a study on bail, and extended invitations, as part of that study, to the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Public Safety. Shockingly, months later, neither has appeared on this.
Now, it is possible that the Minister of Public Safety is still hard at work getting his RPAL, and that is why he has not had time to come before the committee. The Minister of Justice said he would only come before committee to talk about Bill C-9, the Liberal government's anti-hate bill. The very first justice bill that the Liberal government put forward was not on revolving-door bail and it was not on mandatory minimums for child predators; it was on cracking down on freedom of expression, cracking down on what people post online. That was the very first priority of the Minister of Justice. I will get to how that is going for the Liberal government in a moment.
It was interesting that the Minister of Justice did not want to speak about bail. He did not want to come to committee, and has not yet responded to our invitation for him to speak to his mandate and priorities. We are seeing now that the Minister of Justice is providing the same level of excellence he delivered as the Minister of Housing and Minister of Immigration. He is bringing that to the justice file, and Canadians are suffering.
Let us talk about what has been happening in the last few weeks alone. There was a meeting at the end of November that the Liberals simply did not call. There was another meeting that the Liberals did not call, and another meeting that the Liberals cancelled. As of today, we do not know if the justice committee will be meeting tomorrow at a regularly scheduled time. No notice of meeting has been issued. The notice of meeting for our Tuesday meetings almost always comes on the Friday before, so I suspect we are not going to be meeting tomorrow, although I would love to be proven wrong.
It was interesting, just a couple of hours ago in question period, that the Minister of Justice stood up, facing questions from our colleagues in the Bloc Québécois about the government's bungling of Bill C-9. He would not give a clear answer as to what the Liberal government's view is of the amendment that we understand is forthcoming from the Bloc to remove long-standing religious free speech protections from criminal law. What the Minister of Justice said was, “Whoa, the committee will decide this.” How is the committee going to decide anything when the Liberals are either not calling meetings or are cancelling meetings on their bill?
Now, what we learned in the last couple of days is rather interesting. In fact, just this morning, there was an article in which we learned that the Minister of Justice initiated a secret deal with the Bloc Québécois, where the Bloc would support Bill C-9 in exchange for the Liberals supporting the Bloc amendment removing religious freedom protections, making it so that someone could be criminally prosecuted for expressing good faith religious beliefs or even quoting scripture.
This is the government that promoted the previous chair of the justice committee to the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture after he said that prosecutors should be able to, “press charges” for people who quote verses of scripture that he deems to be hateful. It is good to know that falling upwards, the long-standing Liberal pastime and career trajectory, is still available.
This is so interesting because the Liberals, when they are faced with questions about where they stand on this, hide behind the committee process, yet members of the committee are saying, “Let us do our jobs.” Conservatives have stood ready at the last two meetings of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to work until midnight, and resources have been available. On this issue that the government says is such a priority, to get through clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-9, we have stood ready to do that even though, as I said at the justice committee and as I said in the House of Commons, we do not believe that Bill C-9 should have been prioritized above bail reform.
However, when the Liberals obstruct Bill C-9, which they are doing right now, when they obstruct their own bill, they are also obstructing every other justice priority they said they have. They have obstructed the committee's work on Bill C-14, a bail bill, which is very welcome in that it acknowledges how bad the bail system has gotten. Although, I believe there are a number of amendments that need to be put forward on Bill C-14 so that it does what we need it to do to fix Liberal bail in this country, we cannot do any of that, because the Liberals cannot figure out where they stand on Bill C-9.
When I mentioned the Minister of Justice's secret deal with the Bloc Québécois, the interesting tidbit that came out in the media today is that he forgot to tell the Prime Minister that he was making that deal. Now, the Liberals are in turmoil while they figure out where they stand on their own legislation and amendments to it, and Canadians expecting the justice committee to work on fixing the criminal justice system have to wait while the Liberals get their act together.
Similarly, earlier this fall, we passed a very critical report before the justice committee calling on the government to send a strong message that it will not tolerate judicial leniency for people convicted of peddling in and viewing child sexual exploitation and abuse material. What should have been a very quick, unanimous decision by the committee after the Supreme Court made an absolutely egregious ruling that a one-year sentence for those offences was “cruel and unusual punishment”, instead took two meetings. The Liberals filibustered this, preventing us from working on anything. We finally adopted that motion, and it came before the House. I am grateful for it, but we lost critical time to do everything else, again, because of Liberal obstruction and Liberal filibustering.
The Liberals do not know how to govern in a minority Parliament, evidently. They do not know that they have to work with other parties. I guess the Minister of Justice tried to do this, although his way of working with other parties was to launch a full-out assault on religious freedom. That is not what bipartisanship is supposed to look like.
We are still ready and eager to do the work. The reason I put forward a motion at the justice committee a couple of weeks ago to reset the committee's priorities was that it was clear that we were headed towards exactly the situation we find ourselves in: a bill where, in the words of the chair of the justice committee before this very House the other day, there is no path forward right now.
We still believe we should prioritize bail, and I would welcome the justice committee to actually call a meeting. We have two designated spots before the House rises for the winter break. I would certainly hope that Liberal members of Parliament do not want to face their constituents and say that they did not deliver on any of their justice priorities, because that is what is going to be happening now.
All the Canadians who are concerned about revolving-door bail and all of the frontline police officers, police chiefs and first responders who have been crying out for years for action have gotten nothing from the Liberal government. They have gotten a commitment from the public safety minister that they are going to go full steam ahead on the gun confiscation scheme, but nothing to put repeat offenders behind bars where they belong. Legislation, we understand, is forthcoming from the government to perhaps deal with the issue of mandatory minimum sentences for child sexual predators. However, again, no action is possible on that, because of Liberal obstruction on committee.
I am a new member of Parliament. I came here with a mandate, and I came here to get to work. The Liberal government, if it does not want to co-operate, needs to get out of the way. Right now, the Liberals are getting in their own way and the way of Canadians, and we will not stand for it.