- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Provencher
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $143,373.11
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, I have several petitions to present.
The first one is a petition of the House that comes from Canadians who are concerned about Bill C-21, a bill that targets law-abiding firearms owners. The petitioners say that hunting and firearms ownership play an important role in Canadian history and culture. The petitioners are concerned about the government's intent to ban several hunting rifles and shotguns, including bolt-action rifles.
The petitioners ask that the government leave their guns alone, that it votes against Bill C-21 and that it protects the property rights of Canadian hunters.
I support that wholeheartedly.
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Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to Bill C-33 this evening.
My folks always taught me that nothing good happens after midnight, and I want to remind the handful of my colleagues who are still with us and the fewer still who are awake that is it is only 11:50 p.m. and we will be wrapped up by midnight. What better way to spend the waning minutes of our evening together than with another speech on legislation that the Liberal government has brought forward?
This legislation was an opportunity. We have had two reviews: the Railway Safety Act review and the ports modernization review. We had a chance, and we still do, actually, to do something about the issues at our ports. We have critical issues with our supply chains and border security. However, with this legislation, as with many other bills, the Liberal government has missed the point. It does not matter what the problem is; the Liberal government only seems to ever have two solutions. It only has two clubs in its bag. One is to spend more money and the other is to add more government, or a combination of both, actually; there is probably a third option.
Rather than do what is best for Canadians and for businesses, the Liberal government always does what is best for itself. It seems that the best thing for the government is always more government, more power, more control. The bigger government gets, the more pervasive it gets and the hungrier it gets, until it desires to control every aspect of the economy, industry and people, and the very words we say and the very thoughts we think. It is this need to control that has led, at least in part, to the multiple crises we are facing today, including issues with our supply chains, railroads, ports and border security.
Let us go back a couple of years. Governments across the country, including the Liberal government, put in many restrictions during COVID that shut our economy down. They rigged their economies so that wealthy Liberal insiders and big businesses were able to get richer. The big box stores could stay open while mom-and-pop businesses and local businesses across Canada were forced to shut their doors. They borrowed and printed hundreds of billions of dollars and pumped this new money into the economy, creating unnecessary debt and fuelling inflation, which is now resulting in higher interest rates and an affordability crisis.
Through these policies, the government consolidated dependency on government and made government, rather than industry, the central driving force of our economy. Fast-forward to today, and the same disastrous economic policies, policies that the government continues to double down on, have led to crippling inflation, a cost of living crisis for Canadians and higher interest rates, and we are on the verge of a housing crisis.
These same COVID-era policies have crippled our government's ability to execute and provide the most basic functions of government, and the same disastrous policies have pretty much destroyed our supply chains. This is a Canadian problem now, and it is a problem the Liberal government has created through its policies. Government has caused it. It has been perpetuated on us, and it will continue to be that way.
As I said before, the government always seems to have two solutions, more money or more government, or a combination of the two. That brings us to Bill C-33. When I look at this legislation, a few words keep coming up in my mind. First is “government gatekeepers”, and the other words are “more red tape”. The legislation provides a lot of measures to make it easier for government to control things. What it does not do is make things work better, smoother, faster or more cost effectively, while still focusing on safety.
Let us start off by looking at our ports. The legislation adds new layers of red tape and reporting requirements that will make us less efficient and less competitive. There is no great shock here, but smaller ports will be hit harder than the big ones. Whether it is mom-and-pop businesses during COVID or our ports, with the Liberal government, the little guy always gets whacked and loses out. The Liberal government has stacked the deck against the common folk, because it thinks Ottawa politicians and bureaucrats know better than the people on the ground.
New regulations will add to the cost of doing business, which means businesses will have no choice but to pass on those costs to consumers who already cannot afford what they are paying now. Advisory committees and ministerial interference will mean that the ports have less of a say in their day-to-day operations and fewer opportunities to make operational changes that might actually make things more efficient.
The people who know best are usually the people on the front lines. These are the ones who are most impacted by day-to-day operations and often have the best perspective. However, in the minister's plan, those who are tenants of the ports do not even have a seat at the table and have no representation on the advisory committee.
In short, this bill fails to establish that decisions are made in the best interests of our economy and supply chains, choosing instead to keep our ports tangled up in red tape and confusion.
Again there was the potential here, an opportunity for parliamentarians and stakeholders to work together. As for border enforcement, we are all for that. If it is about streamlining, making things run more smoothly and more cost effectively, Conservatives are all over that. If it is about getting cheaper goods, particularly food, to Canadians faster, where is the “yes” button? Instead, we see the government adding more gatekeepers. In the case of our ports and borders, the Liberal government adds more gatekeepers.
The bill is a missed opportunity to provide for the certainty and clarity needed to modernize our ports and supply chains and, by extension, to ensure stability of prices and availability for Canadian consumers.
I would like to shift gears briefly and talk about another aspect of the bill, and that is the provisions for rail safety.
First of all, there is the hypocrisy of the government that went so far as to enact the Emergencies Act on a group of peaceful truckers who just wanted to be able to do their jobs. We can juxtapose that with 2020, when we had groups of individuals blockading our rail lines, setting them on fire and blocking ports, all in violation of a court order, and holding up a construction project that 20 elected first nation councils had approved, a project that should have brought 9,500 jobs, many of them to our indigenous people. Instead the protests cost Canadians 1,500 jobs and the government did nothing, absolutely nothing. The hypocrisy that it would now bring in a redundant new offence for tampering with rail lines is so disingenuous.
This is not an authority problem; it is an enforcement problem. We have measures in the Criminal Code that deal with this exact subject. The police already have authority to lay charges in the case of all these rail blockades. They just needed to be able to do their jobs, but instead their political masters hamstrung them with laws that go after the wrong people, like Bill C-21, for example. The Liberals do not go after the gangs that bring in illegal guns; no, they go after farmers and law-abiding firearms owners.
When it comes to taxes, Liberals do not go after the super-rich who are hiding their money in offshore tax havens; they go after the small business owners and then call them tax cheats. They are always going after the wrong people. Driven by their ideology, they go for what they think is the low-hanging fruit, the easy pickings, like law-abiding citizens, because public perception is more important to them than public safety. This is why any new enforcement measures included in this bill will ultimately fail: It will be because there is a lack of political will to enforce the existing laws.
Whether it is the economy, our ports, supply chains or law enforcement, we do not need to spend more money and we do not need more government; we need government to get out of the way.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader indicated in his speech that he did not believe this bill would negatively impact law-abiding gun owners. I would take a little exception to that. As a licence-holder for restricted firearms, I know this would very negatively affect law-abiding gun owners.
I am wondering why the member cannot see how the bill would do that and, at the same time, I am hoping that his position in his speech does not put him offside with his family members.
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Madam Speaker, I know it is at the discretion of the Chair, but it seems to me there are a lot of members who would like their opinions expressed here during this debate, and you keep deferring to the same member of the NDP. I think it is time to spread out the questions.
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Madam Speaker, I think I said something very similar to what the member quoted from Martin Luther King in my speech. I thank her for reiterating that laws cannot regulate the heart, but certainly the actions that proceed from what is in an individual's heart can be regulated.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member was doing so well with that question to start with, until she started criticizing and spouting off information about cuts to the CBSA. The public accounts show that this is actually not the case and that those cuts were not made.
I do share the member's concern with properly funding the CBSA. It does a tremendous job. We expect a lot from it and we want to make sure that it is properly funded and that there are adequate resources for it to do the job of stopping the illegal importation of guns and weapons into Canada from the United States.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member from the Bloc actually goes to the root of the whole issue here, which is what the Liberals and the NDP are failing to do. She is addressing the actual problem that is the heart of the issue.
Certainly, as I said in my speech, there need to be proper controls but reasonable controls, controls that will actually be effective and that will actually work—not controls that target law-abiding gun owners and farmers and hunters, but controls that go after gangs and seek to address the illegal importation of firearms into the country.
Those are the things that this legislation should address, and it does not address them.
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Madam Speaker, if the hon. member was listening carefully, she knows that I was actually trying to talk about Bill C-21. That is the gun control issue, the control that the government is seeking to have over law-abiding Canadians who enjoy the sport of sport shooting, who are hunters or farmers who need firearms to conduct their business.
This bill directly attacks individuals like that and makes their lives miserable. Why does the government do it? The government does it because they are easy targets. They are not really criminals.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Peace River—Westlock.
It is always a pleasure to rise in this House to speak to legislation, even bad legislation.
I will be frank. I think Bill C-21 has about as much chance of stopping gun violence as there is of me crossing the floor to join the Liberals. It is just not going to happen. The bill will not work because it is the wrong approach, and the sad thing is that the government knows it is the wrong approach. It knows it will not work, but it is doing it anyway.
I will talk about why it is doing that in just a minute, but let us be clear. Gun control is an important issue. Everyone in the House has agreed that we need sensible gun control, but in this legislation there is the same problem we have come up against every time with the government, and that is that, when it decides it wants to tackle gun crime, it completely ignores the problem. It goes after law-abiding citizens rather than doing the hard work of going after the bad guys. This is because it is easier to control the behaviour of those who already obey the law than it is to deal with those who do not.
Conservatives are eager to tackle this issue. We want to have common sense laws. There are even things in this bill we can get behind, but instead of a serious and honest conversation, we get virtue signalling. We get a Prime Minister who is so eager to import U.S. culture wars into Canada that he politicizes tragedy for his own political benefit rather than taking concrete steps to protect the lives of Canadians. Why is that?
I need to remind the Prime Minister that we do not live in the United States. He is the Prime Minister of Canada, not a pundit for MSNBC. I am not so naive as to think that what happens in the U.S. does not affect us, particularly with the saturation effect of U.S. media, but every time some controversial issue or potential wedge issue pops up south of the border, it would seem that the Prime Minister rubs his hands with glee and wonders how he can weaponize it and use it to divide and control Canadians, whether it is abortion, race, gender, immigration or, what we are talking about now, guns. He seeks to take U.S. issues, import them to Canada and weaponize them to stigmatize and divide Canadians. These are serious issues, and we need to address them, but we need to address them as Canada's Parliament. They are uniquely Canadian issues, but the Prime Minister does not want to do that because it is easier to control people through fear, anger and division than it is to convince Canadians based on the merits of a particular argument.
I spoke in the House last week on the subject of control and how the government wants to pick winners and losers. We see it in the economy. We see it in the media. We see it in society. One group gets federal funding because it agrees with the ideologically of the government and another group does not. One media outlet gets federal funding and the next one does not. Certain people can have their charter rights to travel because they have agreed with the ideology of getting the shot or the second, the third or the fourth. Those who question the government based largely on consistently inconsistent and conflicting information from government sources, not to mention the principle that personal medical choices are private, lost their jobs. They were stigmatized and demonized again and again, and it is still happening.
When certain folks had enough and drove to Ottawa to express their opposition to his overreach, the Prime Minister would not meet with them. He ran away and hid. He and his ministers spun a narrative about these individuals. They said things in the media that have been proven to be false again and again. Where is the accountability for that misinformation? He enacted the Emergencies Act, not, as we now know, on the advice of law enforcement, which is another untruth, but because he had to control. He crushed those people with the full weight of his powers. Why did he do that? It was not because of science or any credible threat, but because of control. He wants to control what we do, what we think, what we can see online.
It was the Prime Minister's father who stated that the government has no business in the bedrooms of Canadians. The government not only wants to be in the bedroom, but also in every other room. It wants to be on every device, and every speech and every thought, and I am not so sure if the government is doing this out of a sense of insecurity. A relationship where one side refuses to listen to the other and always needs to be in control is not a healthy relationship. A relationship where one side belittles and demeans the other is not a healthy relationship. A relationship where one side uses a power differential to force submission is not a healthy relationship. It is an abusive relationship, and right now the relationship between the government and Canadians is not a healthy relationship.
The government has abused power and continues to abuse power, aided and abetted by the New Democrats, who, for a lack of fortitude and courage, are willing to compromise their convictions and sell out to Canadians for just a whiff of power. This is not about public safety. It is about the government controlling the little people, the law-abiding people. Every time government adds to its power to exercise control, individual Canadians lose some of theirs. It only exacerbates and perpetuates the problem.
I look at this bill. I look at how the government went about that process and how it has conducted itself in the past two years, and all I see is another attempt to control law-abiding Canadians. Now, with my remaining minutes, I would like to shift gears a bit because I do want to talk about violence.
There is no greater evil than to perpetuate violence. It is why our criminal justice system reserves the most serious sentences for those who inflict harm on others. However, violence is not a political issue. It is not an issue of hate, but it is an issue of the heart. In my faith we call it sin, which is the corruption of the image of God in humanity. It is a moral defect, the natural expression of which is to inflict harm on ourselves and others. It is a condition and a state of being from which we must be healed if we are ever to find wholeness and peace.
It is a heart issue, and the interesting thing about a heart is issue is that we cannot legislate it. We cannot legislate against what is in a person's heart. We can try, and the government has and will continue to try, and fail, because laws do not fix hearts. Laws cannot eliminate the anger, loneliness or hopelessness that individuals who commit heinous crimes feel, but what laws can do is attempt to control the external factors that contribute to the anger, loneliness and hopelessness that lead to an individual committing such heinous acts. To that end, I would like to offer a few brief suggestions.
We are never going to be able to fully eradicate violent crime, but if we want to get serious about curtailing it, we need to start with our kids. As parents and grandparents, we need to know what they are watching in the media and on social media. We need to know what they are consuming in their minds, which eventually finds its way into their hearts, and the video games and entertainment many of our children and grandchildren are accessing.
We know kids are impressionable and that, even as young adults, people are still developing until their mid-twenties. We know what habitual consumption can do and about neural pathways that habits and patterns create in the brain.
“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks”, and we can naturally extrapolate that the body acts. To put it in simple terms, what we put in is likely what will come out. There is an expression that was quite familiar when computers first became very prevalent: “Garbage in; garbage out.” Studies have shown, consistently, the direct correlation between violent video games and being not only desensitized, but predisposed, to violence. As early as the year 2000, which was 22 years ago, a study by the American Psychological Association revealed “that even brief exposure to violent video games can temporarily increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants.”
We see similar patterns when it comes to sexual violence. There is no limit to the depths of depravity and dehumanizing behaviour individuals, including children, can view with just the click of a mouse. That is why in the House we have continually called on the government to take action against Quebec-based MindGeek, which owns Pornhub, one of the largest producers of pornography in the world, including illegal content that is racist, misogynistic and violent, as we have shown in the House in the past.
We recognize that pornography not only isolates individuals, but also creates unhealthy and unrealistic depictions and expectations of sexual behaviour, which leads to violence against women. We know this, but when a young person, or for that matter an older person, is routinely exposed to violence and pornography, they will develop radical and racist views, and that is what many people are consuming for hours a day, day in and day out. We should not be surprised when violence follows.
There is the story in the Bible of the very first murder. It is recorded in the Bible, and it is the story of Cain killing his brother Abel with a rock. The problem was not the rock. We do not read the story and say, “If only God had tougher rock control policies.” The rock was a tool. Jealousy, anger, feeling sorry for himself and feeling hard done by were what motivated the irrational rage that brought on the inability to get past himself and his own desires.
Cain lost control and acted out of his emotions. The problem was not the rock; the problem was the heart.
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