Mr. Speaker, it is great to be back. I want to welcome you and all our colleagues back for another session.

I am pleased to have spent the summer back home in my constituency, Miramichi—Grand Lake. I spent the past few months connecting with friends, neighbours and constituents and listening to their concerns. Just last week I attended a standing-room-only public meeting called by the downtown Newcastle Business District in response to a public safety crisis in the heart of our small town. The situation in downtown Newcastle is an emergency. Anyone who attended the meeting recognizes that. All one has to do is take a drive through our community to see it. However, the emergency in Newcastle is not one of a kind.

From speaking with and listening to my colleagues here in the House, I know nearly every community across this country faces the same serious challenges. There is a very real public safety crisis in our communities and across this nation: drug use and addiction, crime and vandalism, aggressive behaviour and harassment, and home invasions. A good many Canadians do not feel safe walking the streets, and they do not even feel safe at home with their doors locked.

I would hope that no member of this House thinks that this is a well-done job. I would hope that we can all agree that something needs to change. However, the Liberal government would like Canadians to rest easy. The government was re-elected on promises to axe the carbon tax and negotiate a trade deal with the Prime Minister's good friend Donald Trump, but it has done neither. From where I am standing, it does not look like the Liberals have a real plan to honour their promises to Canadians.

What is the Liberal Party's solution to the public safety crisis in this country? It wants to make it harder for people to get money from a bank machine and easier for the government to open people's mail.

Bill C-2 would do little to address the very real problems facing our nation, but it would get the government recognition with the World Economic Forum. Tone-deaf does not even begin to describe it. It is no wonder that the Liberal government has failed to get a trade deal with our largest and best trading partner, the United States. The Liberal government has not addressed the very legitimate concerns that the U.S. government has raised over crime in this country and its export across our border to the United States. It is in this bill, in black and white: The Liberal government's response to the flow of illegal drugs and weapons across our border is to make it easier, more streamlined, for asylum seekers to enter the United States and avoid the proper means of legitimate immigration. The bill would even provide asylum seekers with government support to navigate our system.

The bill would go on to allow government to keep a closer eye on our internet search history. For 10 years now, Conservatives have warned that Liberal soft-on-crime policies put Canadians in danger. We warned that fentanyl would rip through our towns; the Liberals did not listen. Now crime is up, drug deaths are up, and the Liberals are doubling down. This is one Canadian who is starting to think that when it comes to the complex challenges faced by our country, the Prime Minister does not even know whether to sit or wind his watch. I have to wonder whether the government does not know what it is doing or knows exactly what it is doing.

It is becoming more difficult to give the Liberals the benefit of the doubt. Are they making well-intentioned bad decisions? Could they make this many bad decisions in a row, or does the bill reveal the vile contempt that the urban elite have for hard-working rural Canadians? The same contempt, voiced by Ruth Marshall from the University of Toronto last week, blocked this House from observing a moment of silence for a young father murdered in Utah last week for believing in God and encouraging others to do the same.

In June, the Liberals rushed this bill into the House and dressed it up with a tough name, the “strong borders act”. The name is strong, but the bill is not. It is weak where it must be strong, and even worse, it is heavy-handed where it ought to respect the freedom of ordinary Canadians. Conservatives believe in real law and order, common-sense law and order, and that is why we oppose the bill. We will back any measure that truly stops drugs, guns and violence from infecting our communities, but I will not support legislation that would unnecessarily trample on the rights of law-abiding citizens.

Where is bail reform? The bill would do nothing to stop the catch and release of criminals in our communities. I can say what my constituents think. In Renous, Doaktown, Nauwigewauk, Chipman or Minto, if someone sells poison to our kids, they belong behind bars or in the ground. If the government does not quickly address the crisis situation, things will only get worse.

There are no mandatory jail terms for fentanyl traffickers in this bill, no new mandatory sentences for criminals who use guns. The bill does not demonstrate strength; it embraces weakness. While it would fail to get tough on real criminals, it would reach too far into the lives of ordinary people. It would let government agencies open our mail. It would force Internet companies to hand over our Google search engine results without a warrant. It would even take aim at the cash in our pockets.

Canadians need to know that Conservatives believe in the free market. Cash means choice, and choice means freedom. It is not for Ottawa to decide how a grandmother in Red Bank buys her groceries, but this is how the Liberal government works. It is why I was elected by my constituents, so that I would speak about it in the House. The Liberal government ignores a problem until it explodes; then, instead of a simple fix directed at the problem, it uses legislative tricks to further a globalist agenda at the expense of Canadians' freedoms.

To my mind, the bill is just more of the downtown Toronto crowd telling rural Canadians how to live, without the faintest idea of life where a handshake is still a deal and a man is measured by his word. I, for one, will not support the bill. I will fight for a Canada that is safe and free, and it does appear that I have a fight on my hands. I believe that criminals should face real consequences and that law-abiding people should keep the freedoms that our grandfathers fought and died for on beaches.

Mike Dawson

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