Life sentences for drug kingpins and bringing back mandatory minimums for serious crimes. Those were the promises Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre made on Wednesday in Vancouver.
Poilievre stood with the Port of Vancouver as his backdrop as he denounced both the importation and exportation of fentanyl happening at Canada’s busiest port.
“Our ports are allowing 99% of shipping containers to enter our country with no inspection. And that’s where the drug ingredients, the guns, the stolen cars come into our country or leave,” Poilievre.
As part of his plan to deal with issues like drugs, guns and stolen goods at the border, he’s promising scanning technology. Poilievre said that if he were elected prime minister, he would approve “new high-tech scanners that can peer right through the metal walls of shipping containers to spot drugs, guns and stolen cars.”
While he spoke of cross-border crime in general, Poilievre’s main focus was on dealing with those trafficking in fentanyl.
“There will be life sentences for anyone caught trafficking, producing or exporting over 40 mg of fentanyl,” Poilievre said while pointing out that 40 mg is enough to kill 20 people.
“Anyone who is involved in trafficking that amount of fentanyl will get a life sentence. We will lock them up and we will throw away the key. And 15 years for traffickers caught with between 20 mg and 40 mg will be the new mandatory sentence.”
The Conservative leader also promised to repeal Bill C-5, brought in by the Trudeau Liberals in November 2021 after the last election. It did away with a number of mandatory minimum sentences for gun and drug crimes, claiming it was for social and racial justice while it really seems to be about the Liberal hug-a-thug ideology.
Dropping mandatory minimums for illegal gun possession and gun smuggling? Really?
You can speak to any police officer, captain or chief who has experience over the last decade and they will tell you the same thing. The rise in gun crime is directly tied to the rise in the fentanyl trade in Canada.
“Where they used to pull a knife, they now pull a gun,” one major city police chief told me years ago.
So many of our problems in this country, from the homeless encampments to the addiction crisis to the increase in gun crime we are experiencing, are due to fentanyl. This is something we should be trying to clean up to help ourselves, to improve our lives.
The fentanyl problem in Canada didn’t show up because Donald Trump was elected south of the border; it’s been here since before his first term. We just haven’t had politicians in positions of power willing to seriously deal with the problem.
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Now we have Trump telling Canadian leaders that there is a fentanyl problem in our country, it’s causing problems in his country and we should clean up our mess. Rather than acknowledging the issue, most of our elected leaders and the commentariat class are screaming back that there is no problem.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people have died over the last several years, as Poilievre pointed out Wednesday.
“Imagine if the (Manitoba) town of Brandon were to vanish, that its 50,000 people suddenly died. That is the size and scope of the fentanyl overdose crisis in the last nine years of the Carney-Trudeau Liberals,” he said.
The issue of fentanyl crossing the Canada-U.S. border is more significant than most Canadian politicians or media outlets will acknowledge. The bigger problem, though, is that the devastating impact of fentanyl in our communities is also bigger than they will acknowledge.
We are losing thousands of people a year to this deadly scourge and the only response by the Trudeau government has been to put more opioids into the system through so-called “safe supply,” which has only made the problem worse. Poilievre is looking at real solutions that will punish those trafficking in these deadly drugs and offering treatment for people who are addicted.
So far, the big response from the Trudeau Liberals has been to decriminalize fentanyl (a move they reversed) and to hand out opioid pills (a plan now under attack).
We need real leadership in Ottawa to deal with this mess and it won’t come from the Liberals.