Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the ability to speak today on Bill C-240. This touches my heart, because I would imagine that for all MPs sitting in this room, no matter where they are sitting today, their lives have changed and their communities have changed. I know all Canadian cities have changed, including all communities in the Similkameen—South Okanagan—West Kootenay riding.
I want to speak a bit about the city I live in. Penticton is a beautiful city. It is a place where people have always wanted to come to vacation, and possibly even retire, if they reach that point in their lives and have saved up enough money, because, of course, our housing is expensive, like it is in many communities.
Unfortunately, our city, like so many, is filled with chaos right now. I hope everyone here knows they can go and enjoy the city and enjoy the area, but there is chaos because crime rates are skyrocketing. In fact, it was announced last week by our first responders that overdose rates in Penticton increased by nearly 500% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the first quarter of 2025. This was reported by our fire department.
Imagine what being a first responder in Penticton is like right now, when all they are doing is constantly going out to calls and trying to bring people back to life. Imagine how difficult it would be for them psychologically to not fight fires, like they were trained to. We do not have a lot of fires anymore, except for quite a few that are caused by people who are homeless and on the streets. Instead, our first responders are constantly going out and injecting people with some type of drug to try to bring them back to life. Sometimes they are successful and sometimes they are not.
It has ruined our community and our most vulnerable people, who are those are on drugs and living on our streets. It has also ruined our community for many vulnerable people, as we have a very large senior community.
Going back to Bill C-240, the bill aims to amend the Criminal Code to empower judges to prescribe structured rehabilitation programs for individuals whose offences stem from circumstances that can be addressed through skills development, education and recovery as part of a holistic healing process.
It is important to know that in Similkameen—South Okanagan—West Kootenay, which is a very big riding in the B.C. interior, there is not one detox bed available. In fact, as a city councillor, a couple of years ago, I was given a presentation by leaders in the community who were addressing this issue. I asked them a question. If someone were to come into our city council meeting right then and say, “I am a drug addict. I want help. I want to go back to my family”, how long would it take for that person to get into a detox bed or a rehab bed? By the way, this was in public. Members can look this up from the City of Penticton's council meeting two years ago. They told the city council that it would take two years for that person to be given any type of detox bed or any type of rehabilitation. They also said it would not be in our huge riding. They would have to leave the community in two years and go to another community to get help.
We all know what would happen in those two years. I am sure I will get letters saying, “No, it's not two years.” Maybe it has gotten better, and hopefully it has, but it would still be at least half that time.
We need to give people the ability to go back to their families, and we also need to keep people behind bars who are not safe for our communities. Some of the residents I represent are afraid of even going to the grocery store anymore to shop because there are erratic people walking down the aisles. There has been a huge issue, obviously, since the pilot project to decriminalize drugs in B.C. That was a great experiment put together by the Liberal government and the NDP provincial government. I would like to ask everyone in this great room today, would they like to try that decriminalization project? Let us just see what might happen.
British Columbia has the most deaths from fentanyl in the world now. The genie is out of the bottle now. Sure, the decriminalization project has been declared over, but we have not found out the complete chaos that was caused by it; the numbers are not out yet. That will happen, and we will bring them, hopefully, before the Standing Committee on Health, which I sit on, and get the complete numbers, but do we really need them? We all know that thousands and thousands of people have died in British Columbia from that project. I do not see anyone representing any other province wanting to come forward and try it for their communities.
I want to thank MP DeRidder, who—