Mr. Speaker, at the beginning, I want to say that I will be sharing my time with the member for Edmonton Griesbach.
It is really important to make clear what is happening today for those who are watching. I do not normally get into all the procedural rigmarole. It is in-house fighting. However, the Conservatives had a day to bring forward any opposition motion to fight the government, which is one of the fundamental principles we have. They decided to upend their own opportunity to speak to something that they had previously committed to in order to use the House of Commons to amplify the distortions that are coming out of Mar-a-Lago from Donald Trump, primarily his falsehood that Canada is this fentanyl trafficking system causing deaths in the United States. What he has put on the table is the threat of a 25% tariff that would cause economic havoc for families, workers and businesses across Canada. There was a time when parliamentarians would have stood up for Canada and responded to these falsehoods, but that is not how Canada's Parliament operates under the member who lives in the 19-room mansion at Stornoway. It is to burn the House to the ground at all costs. That is a dangerous position for democracy to be in.
I would like to start just by talking about how we have the world's longest undefended border. Other than in 1812, when they attacked us and tried to take us over, we have maintained that border and we have maintained good-natured relations. However, we have not gone along with the Americans when they have tried to bully us. We have not embraced their wide open and dangerous death-cult gun culture, even though many Canadians are registered gun owners. We accept the principle of having responsible gun ownership as opposed to the reckless guns that are killing people across the United States. We have not supported their belief that health care should belong to those who have money. We took a different tack, even when we were being undermined as being communists and socialists at the time. When the United States insisted that young Canadian men go and die in the rice paddies of Vietnam, we said no, we would not send our young men to Vietnam. It was a wrong war. We opened our borders to many great young Americans who were not going to go die needlessly in Vietnam.
When the United States tried to pressure us to go into the false attack on Iraq, we said no; we were under enormous pressure then. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was launching horrific violence in Latin America, in El Salvador and Guatemala, and then the United States was deporting thousands of people who were trying to escape the genocide that was happening in the hills of Guatemala, they put enormous pressure on us to close our border. People who could not go back to the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala were trying to cross the border at Buffalo to get into Canada and be safe. At that time, Brian Mulroney said we had to have the same border principles as the United States, but Canadians stood up and said no, those were not our values. We pushed back because we could not send people back to the death squads.
Yes, the United States is our neighbour, but we have stood up to it. We are in a different situation with Donald Trump, a convicted predator who is seriously undermining the democratic process in the United States. He thinks he can just push us around. He insults us. The Conservatives seem to like it because he is insulting our Prime Minister, but he is not really insulting the Prime Minister. He is insulting Canadians, calling us the 51st state.
Once there was a Canada that had a flag that did not need to be waved, a flag that represented who we are. We did not boast about it. It was not until our flag was appropriated by conspiracy haters that it was stuck on pickup trucks, promoting all kinds of disinformation. Our flag was something that just said it was about values. It was something we all understood. We did not have to brag about that when we were a country of 11 million people and the Americans were saying they did not want to go to war. When Hitler invaded Poland, on the very first day, 11 million Canadians stood up and created the fourth-largest air force in the world, the fourth-largest navy in the world. We sent our young people all across the world to defend the notion of freedom and parliamentary democracy. We paid an enormous price. When we came back, we did not wave the flag; we just came back and did what we did because we were Canadians.
Now here we are with this falsehood being perpetrated by the member who lives in Stornoway, and whatever Donald Trump says, he will use it to burn the House down to get to the Prime Minister. He is using this falsehood on fentanyl, which is an absolute falsehood. I have the Drug Enforcement Administration's unclassified reports on fentanyl. It writes about China, India, Mexico, but there is just one very tiny thing about a small amount coming from Canada, so that is not the issue. Fentanyl is not the issue, but the Conservatives will use that falsehood, threatening a 25% tariff.
We can bet these dumbed-down speeches claiming Canada has a broken border and is a fentanyl-trafficking area are going to be used on every right-wing blogcast and on Fox News to further undermine our country. The Conservatives would do that. They would burn our House to the ground because they do not care about truth. They would would not know what truth was if Lady Truth came down naked, painted purple, and danced all over Stornoway for weeks. The member would not notice.
I say that jokingly, but it is not a joke, because what Trump is really after is our water. He has made it clear. He said there is a “giant faucet” in Canada and one can just turn it on. There was a time we would have defended those resources, but one can bet that if Donald Trump says, “I want Canada's water,” the Conservatives will use the House of Commons to promote his attack on our resources, to take what he can take, because the Americans do not take us seriously. They think they can push us around, but they can only push us around if we have fifth columnists, which is what they called Franco's people who undermined the defence of democracy in Spain, people who would undermine their own country to score a point. Another term is “quislings”.
We need to stand up to Donald Trump, and not to be boasting like he boasts, not to be threatening like he threatens, but to stand for Canadian values: that we will counter falsehood with truth, be a good neighbour, protect our border. We will not be pushed around. The member who lives in Stornoway will amplify falsehoods and misuse the House of Commons, knowing it is putting Canadian jobs and families directly at risk, because the Conservatives do not care. They do not care, because it is about burning the House to the ground to get to the Prime Minister.
I am not going to go down into the gutter with the Conservatives where they make these falsehoods about the Prime Minister, who I do not agree with on hardly anything, but that he somehow created the fentanyl crisis that caused thousands of deaths is an ugly falsehood. It is just a straight-up lie, but they use that all the time.
The Conservatives come into the House of Commons and talk about defending the border when, under Stephen Harper, they trashed border security. Members will remember when Tony Clement took $50 million out of border security and spent it on bogus projects in his riding, like the gazebos, the sunken boats and the fake lakes. They took money that would have protected our borders and used it so shamelessly. They cut 1,100 jobs from the Canada Border Services Agency, and they were told about the threats that would follow. They got rid of the dog sniffer teams. Maybe Stephen Harper did not know what a dog sniffer team is; a dog sniffer team is what we use to sniff out drugs, and it was the Harper government that got rid of that. They got rid of the intelligence agency at the border. They got rid of the teams who went undercover to take on the smuggling gangs. That is the record of Stephen Harper.
So, when Conservatives come in the House and pretend they stand for Canada, we know they do not stand for Canada. When they come in the House and say they will stand up on the world stage, we know they supported Putin in undermining the votes for Ukraine. When they say they will defend the border, they are only defending the interests of Donald Trump and they would sell us down the river, but not on my watch, not on our watch, not ever. We will stand up for Canada.
