Mr. Speaker, there is a silent killer, relentless and ruthless, marching through our streets. It is stealing breath, stopping hearts, breaking spirits and numbing pain only to multiply it. There is an invisible force, malicious and merciless, taking our loved ones one by one and turning vibrant lives into fading echoes. How do we fight this silent killer, when its poison lingers everywhere in the land? Now, 47,000 Canadians have died of fentanyl overdoses. This is more than died fighting for Canada in the Second World War.
Never before seen homeless camps and drug dens overtake once-beautiful communities, where contorted bodies lie half dead on filthy sidewalks in scenes resembling third world squalor. The government tranquilizes our people with an unsafe supply of tax-funded narcotics, from which those same troubled souls then graduate to even more dangerous drugs.
Such drugs as fentanyl, which is 100 times more potent than heroin, now abound in our streets. We have seen a 200% annual increase in overdose deaths in the last eight years, with the worst death counts massing in British Columbia, where the policies of soft sentences, non-enforcement and taxpayer-funded drug distribution have all been most enthusiastically embraced. We were told that these policies were based on science and data, yet all the science and data have proven these policies lethal and proven the counterfactual, which is to say that the places doing the opposite are far more secure and safe.
Not only is this killer ravaging our streets, but it is now spilling over our borders. In November, the RCMP busted Canada's largest-ever drug superlab, which had 54 kilograms of fentanyl. This is almost triple what the U.S. border patrol seized crossing the border this year. This lab contained enough fentanyl and precursor chemicals to produce more than 95.5 million potentially lethal doses of fentanyl. It also seized 89 firearms, including 45 handguns, 21 AR-style rifles and submachine guns, many of which were loaded and ready for use. All of these guns were easier for criminals and drug kingpins to get than ever before, not in spite of, but because of, the policies of the NDP-Liberal government. Small explosive devices, large amounts of ammunition, firearm silencers, high-capacity magazines, body armour and $500,000 in cold hard cash were all part of the drug bust.
The RCMP said that the lab was believed to be behind the “production, and the distribution of unprecedented quantities of fentanyl, and methamphetamine”. In October, the RCMP seized 33 tonnes, which is to say 66,138 pounds, of chemical precursors used to make the same deadly drugs. The RCMP says Canada is now a producer and exporter of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. In other words, despite our massive consumption of these deadly drugs, we actually produce even more than we consume, and we sell the surplus abroad.
CSIS has identified that more than 350 organized crime groups are actively involved in domestic illegal fentanyl marketing. CSIS says the precursor chemicals are largely sourced from China. Eighty per cent of chemicals used in fentanyl production are actually legal and unregulated in Canada. They can be procured here and imported from China, and even if they were not legal, the head of the border guards recently said that 99% of the incoming shipping containers go completely uninspected. Therefore, it would not even matter if they were banned, because the government would have no way of stopping them from coming in.
Eighty-four per cent of organized crime groups are involved in some aspect of the illicit drug trade, primarily in distribution. Street gangs are involved in the fentanyl trade, and street gang involvement in that trade has more than doubled in five years. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol seizures of fentanyl doses from Canada have gone from 239 kilograms to 839 kilograms. More than three times as much fentanyl was caught in 2023 than in 2024. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol seized 14 pounds of raw fentanyl in 2022; this has risen to 43 pounds. That, by the way, might not sound like a lot, but 43 pounds of fentanyl is enough to kill almost 10 million people. This illustrates the deadly nature of this poison.
What has the government done in this regard? First of all, it passed Bill C-5, reducing penalties for the murderers who produce and market these drugs. I call them murderers. Members might ask how I know that those producing these drugs have committed murder. The answer is that if we produce fentanyl on a large scale, we know with statistical certainty that we will kill people. There is no doubt that, on a statistical basis, if we are selling 2,000 or 3,000 hits of fentanyl, someone will die as a result of our actions, and we know it.
The government has allowed these murderers to get out of jail and go back to the streets, where they legally import the ingredients that go into this deadly poison. It can then be sold to people who are hopelessly addicted and have no way of getting off the drugs. Simultaneously, the government has found millions of dollars to subsidize the distribution of synthetic opioids that are supposedly used to “reduce harm”.
As my colleague from Kildonan—St. Paul will point out, as I split my time with her, there is no doubt that people are graduating from and using the proceeds of these tax-funded opioids to fund the fentanyl trade. While we have had wild inflation in almost every product that is on the market in Canada, one thing that has become vastly cheaper is synthetic opioids, such as the ones the government funds. They have gone down, not because they are cheaper, but because the greatest part of the price is paid through taxpayer-funded subsidies, supposedly to reduce the harm. We now know that this has done precisely the opposite. It not only murders our people but now threatens our livelihoods as our American friends demand swift action to secure the border, to protect their people against the recklessness of the government.
That is why common-sense Conservatives are making proposals to stop the drugs. We call for the repeal of Bill C-5, the law that allows these drug kingpins to go free. We must act to reinstate longer drug sentences for the kingpins, to ban the importation of fentanyl precursors, to buy high-powered scanners, to put more boots on the ground at our ports in order to stop fentanyl and to reinforce that we have a strong border, as we did nine years ago.
It should not have taken Donald Trump to make this point. Our government should have been thinking about our people. It is not because of another president that we should take these actions. It is because we believe that not one more mother should bury her face in her hands out of the heartbreak of losing a child. We must take the swift actions to secure our borders, to lock up the drug murderers, to clear our streets of these toxins and poisons, to invest in treatment and recovery, to bring our loved ones home drug-free and to heal our nation.
