Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong.
I want to start my speech by taking a moment to address the horrific events that took place in Toronto and in Thornhill last weekend. The doors of houses of worship were pierced by a gunman's bullets in the middle of the night. There is nothing more cowardly, more shameful and more un-Canadian than targeting a sacred place under the cover of darkness. It is meant to strike fear in the hearts of those who use that place, in this case the Jewish community in their central place of worship, and intimidate an entire community on the Sabbath, the most sacred day of the week. The Prime Minister and his ministers are quick to run to the podium after events like this to offer things like thoughts, prayers and condemnation, but it always stops after those kind words and it never gets to decisive action.
The government will claim that this is not who we are, but it is exactly who we have become in this country. It is terrorism meant to terrorize a community. With two synagogues being shot on Saturday, one being shot last Monday and businesses being vandalized every week, we see there is a tide of anti-Semitism and hatred that the Liberals have allowed to crest over the last two and a half years. We have to admit that this is very much who we are now. This has become a fact of everyday life in Canada. We are number one in the world when it comes to violence against Jewish institutions.
The Liberal government, unfortunately, wants Canadians to believe that this bill before us, Bill C-9, is the silver bullet that will fix all of this. It is not. It is a cynical sales pitch in the face of what is a crisis in this country. Nothing in this bill would have prevented these shootings or the violence that we have watched unfold in our streets for the better part of the last two and a half years.
Do not be fooled by the legislative theatre or the answers to the questions that we hear in this place. First and foremost, nothing, absolutely nothing has changed a week after those shootings. There has not been a single dollar of more security funding and not one more deportation of the terrorists that we have in our country. Nothing has changed. More importantly, the solution that they have peddled shamelessly is one that will, no doubt, be weaponized against the very community that it purports to protect. It also would not have prevented the burning of churches, the targeting of temples, the desecration of mosques or any of the atrocities that we have seen under the watch of the Liberal government and through the callousness of its divisive politics over the last number of years.
Shooting a bullet into a synagogue is already illegal. Spray-painting a swastika onto a school is already illegal. Covering one's face and chanting genocidal slogans in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood is already illegal. What is missing is the enforcement of those laws. Our government, our leaders and many of the institutions are frankly missing in action. We do not need more nice-sounding laws with snappy names that will not be enforced to go collect dust on a shelf somewhere. We do not need another news release, another press conference or more platitudes from a government that certainly stopped caring about this long ago.
What we do need is our leaders to grow a spine and stand up to the communities that they swore an oath to protect. They need to actually do their jobs and stop the madness that is unfolding. They can start by coordinating the activities of our law enforcement agencies to prevent attacks, disrupt threats and prosecute offenders. They can make sure that the funding that they promise to these institutions actually flows without the red tape, and they can double that funding today. They can establish the foreign influence registry that they promised years ago. They can round up the terrorists that we know are living on our streets and send them home, such as the 700 identified IRGC terrorists, who dine in posh steakhouses and intimidate our communities. They can hunt down the people who commit these heinous crimes and put them in jail. They have the power to do all of those things right now, but they choose not to. Instead, they pretend the solution is a bill that nobody has asked for, and nearly every faith community agrees is harmful and counterproductive to its goals.
We cannot legislate ourselves out of a crisis. I am going to say on the floor what we, oftentimes, do not say enough: We do not need new laws. We need the enforcement of existing laws. We need action from politicians and we need a recognition in this country that this is actually a crisis.
We do not go out of our way to censor opponents by limiting the free speech of those we might disagree with. That is not how we fix things in this country. In fact, the Liberal government is censoring this very debate in Parliament on whether to enact a new censorship law. It would go after free expression instead of going after people who shoot up synagogues and Jewish schools, who burn down churches or who vandalize mosques, gurdwaras or temples. It would prosecute faith leaders from all stripes instead of prosecuting the very people perpetuating terrorism in our streets. It would chill the religious discourse instead of chilling the activities of the terrorists and foreign agents roaming free in this country with complete impunity.
Let me be very clear. It is already illegal to spew hate speech and foment violence against groups. That is not what Bill C-9 is about. Instead, it is about a government that chooses overreach every time it could choose leadership or action. It chooses ambiguity and infringement to hide from the very real consequences that its lack of action has brought on Canadians in their own cities. The Liberals will tell us that the Jewish community supports this. I will state clearly for everyone that this is one of the most divisive issues in that community, and worse, the Liberals did not even bother to ask clergy.
The rabbinical council of Toronto, the very people who represent the synagogues that were shot at this week, said that the contemplated changes to Bill C-9 threaten and would irreversibly erode the charter-protected rights of Canadians to worship freely and transmit the sacred teachings and principles that have guided and uplifted faith communities for thousands of years. These are the words of the senior rabbis in our own community, the ones who the Minister of Public Safety and other ministers stood at a podium with this weekend after their temples were shot at. They understand what is at stake and that the government left them on their own a long time ago. The government stood alongside them, could not be bothered to ask them what they thought about Bill C-9 and, instead, spewed into a microphone the bill as a way to stop events like what happened this weekend in Toronto.
The Liberals do not have the support of pastors, priests, imams, teachers or Canadians from faith backgrounds. They could have very well split the bill, and they chose not to. They chose to ram it through with something that was not introduced in the original version of the bill, and that is why we have a problem with it.
We are all on the same page with faith communities, and the only people who are not are those in the Liberal government who have succumbed to a demand from the Bloc on this issue to ram through debate on a bill that we all know is fundamentally flawed. We could have very well taken this out of the bill, had the debate on this specific issue and passed the protections for the communities, but the Liberals chose not to. At every turn, they choose not to act.
I will wrap up by saying that the day we dispose with sideshows like Bill C-9 is the day that we can finally get down to business and actually protect our communities. There are those who think they can control what happens on the other side of the world, which they cannot, but we absolutely have control of what we can do on our own soil. We can get the authorities working together. We can enforce the law in this country. We can throw the terrorists out. We can introduce a foreign agent registry. We can do all of those things today instead of doing nothing.
I hope, for our community, that happens sooner rather than later, because I think the exhaustion is there. The days of watching ministers and the Prime Minister give condolences and thoughts and prayers over and over again are over, and there are better days ahead for a resilient community that I know deserves a whole lot better than the government they got.