Bill C-49 (Historical)

Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act

An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act

This enactment amends the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to, among other things,
(a) authorize the Minister, in certain circumstances, to designate as an irregular arrival the arrival in Canada of a group of persons, the result of which is that some of the foreign nationals in the group become designated foreign nationals;
(b) authorize an officer or the Minister, as the case may be, to refuse to consider an application for permanent residence if the applicant has failed to comply with a condition of release or other requirement imposed on them;
(c) provide that a person may not become a permanent resident as long as an application by the Minister for cessation of that person’s refugee protection is pending;
(d) add, as grounds for the detention of a permanent resident or foreign national, the existence of reasonable grounds to suspect that the person concerned is inadmissible on grounds of serious criminality, criminality or organized criminality;
(e) provide that the Immigration Division must impose any prescribed conditions on the release of certain designated foreign nationals;
(f) provide for detention rules and a review procedure that are specific to the detention of certain designated foreign nationals;
(g) clarify the authority of the Governor in Council to make regulations in respect of conditions of release from detention;
(h) provide that certain designated foreign nationals may not apply to become permanent residents until the expiry of a certain period and that the processing of any pending applications for permanent residence is suspended for a certain period;
(i) require certain designated foreign nationals on whom refugee protection has been conferred to report to an officer;
(j) authorize the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting the reporting requirements imposed on certain designated foreign nationals;
(k) provide that the offence of human smuggling is committed when a person organizes the coming into Canada of another person and knows, or is reckless as to whether, the entry into Canada is or would be in contravention of the Act;
(l) provide for minimum punishments for the offence of human smuggling in certain circumstances;
(m) in respect of the determination of the penalty to be imposed for certain offences, add as an aggravating factor the endangerment of the life or safety of any person as a result of the commission of the offence;
(n) change the definition of “criminal organization” in Part 3 to give it the same meaning as in subsection 467.1(1) of the Criminal Code; and
(o) extend the time for instituting proceedings by way of summary conviction from six months to five years.
The enactment also amends the Balanced Refugee Reform Act to provide that a refugee protection claimant whose claim is rejected is not prevented from applying for protection earlier than 12 months after the day on which the claim is rejected, if it is rejected as a result of a vacation of the initial decision to allow the claim.
The enactment also amends the Marine Transportation Security Act to increase the penalties for persons who fail to provide information required to be reported before a vessel enters Canadian waters or to comply with ministerial directions and for persons who provide false or misleading information. It creates a new offence for vessels that fail to comply with ministerial directions. It also amends the Act to authorize regulations respecting the disclosure of certain information for the purpose of protecting the safety or security of Canada or Canadians.

Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

moved that Bill C-49, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Madam Speaker, I am proud to open the debate on Bill C-49, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, whose purpose is to combat the serious crime of human smuggling.

I am pleased to introduce this bill. Canada is very proud of its long tradition of being a place of migration for people from around the world. We receive more newcomers than any other country in the developed world, 0.8% of our population, every year as new permanent residents.

We are also proud of our long humanitarian tradition of being a place of protection and refuge for victims of persecution and violence, those who need our protection. This goes back long into our history, in fact to the days of the arrival of the United Empire Loyalists, the Black Loyalists, the Underground Railroad, the eastern European refugees before the war, the refugees from Hungary and Soviet and Communist oppression after the war, and, most famously, the over 60,000 Indo Chinese who were welcomed by Canadians in 1979 and 1980. This underscores our long and deep humanitarian tradition as a place of protection.

Canada receives more resettled refugees than any other developed country in the world. This is so important to Canadians that our government announced earlier this year an increase of 20% in the number of resettled refugees who we will receive. That means that, beginning next year, we will welcome some 14,000 refugees in need of our protection each and every year, which is in addition to those who come to Canada making asylum claims that are assessed by our Immigration and Refugee Board and through various appeals and administrative appeals in our legal system.

One of the problems this Parliament recognized was the abuse of that asylum system, which is why Bill C-11, Balanced Refugee Reform Act, was adopted unanimously by this Parliament following all party co-operation in the spring in order to significantly speed up the process of refugee determination, providing protection to bona fide refugees and the removal of those who seek to abuse Canada's generosity.

However, Canadians are deeply concerned with a particularly pernicious crime, a crime that exploits vulnerable people in their dream to come to Canada, the dangerous crime of human smuggling.

In the past year, it is well known that Canada has received two large vessels on our west coast, together carrying nearly 600 illegal migrants to our shores, people who, based on our intelligence, had paid criminal smuggling syndicates some $50,000 each in order to come to Canada in the most dangerous and exploitative way possible.

The remarkable openness of Canada to immigration in general and refugee protection in particular, which makes possible our very generous approach to immigration, is dependent on public confidence in the system. I submit that Canadians demand an immigration system that is characterized by a sense of fair play and a rule of law. What disturbs them deeply about these mass illegal smuggling operations is precisely that they undermine those principles of fundamental fairness and the rule of law.

The position of Canadians and the position of this government is and ought to be that we will be a country of openness, we will be a country that provides protection to those who are in need of it and we will lead the world in the moral obligation of refugee protection, but we will not be treated like a doormat by criminal networks that seek to profit from, frankly, encouraging people to come to this country illegally in a fashion that puts them and others in moral danger. We know that every year hundreds and potentially thousands of people around the world fall victim to the dangerous ruse of smuggling syndicates.

Let me be very specific about the problem we face and then allow me to identify the strong but fair remedies that we propose in Bill C-49 and in certain associative operational actions that are taken by this government and its agencies.

First, I came back last month from a visit to Asia, including to Southeast Asia, where I met with counterparts in various foreign governments. I met with our own Canadian intelligence police, border security and Immigration officials and learned a great deal about the vile trade of human smuggling in that region.

What I learned was the following. There are approximately three or four criminal syndicates operating in that region that have a long history of being involved in the arms smuggling trade. Because there has been an end to hostilities in the Sri Lankan civil war, those syndicates have now decided to smuggle and to traffic a different commodity, which is human beings. They have refocused their logistical ability to selling people the opportunity to be smuggled illegally to Canada.

I have been told by our partners in the region that they believe these syndicates have the capacity to deliver several large steel hulled vessels with the ability to bring in each hundreds of illegal smuggled migrants to Canada each year. Prospectively thousands of people are being smuggled to our country in this dangerous fashion.

This government, any government and any minister of immigration, as my friend from Toronto knows well, has a profound responsibility to maintain public confidence in the immigration system. What we have seen since the arrival of the last smuggling vessel is a fundamental and very disturbing decline in public support for immigration in general and refugee protection in particular.

According to the most recent polling that I have seen, over 60% of Canadians say that our response to this threat to our sovereignty, our laws and the fairness of our immigration system should be to prohibit these vessels from entering Canadian territorial waters. Fifty-five per cent of Canadians have said that even if these vessels land and some of their passengers subsequently attain refugee protection under our laws, that those people should be returned to their country of origin, notwithstanding a positive legal determination on their asylum claim.

That is the public opinion environment. Imagine how much more vigorous Canadians would feel about this, if we actually had several vessels arriving, which I am informed is within the logistical capability of the criminal organizations involved.

We cannot allow that to happen. The easier path is to do nothing. The easier path is to mouth platitudes. The easier path is to take no difficult decisions. However, the necessary and responsible path is to take firm and meaningful action that does everything we reasonably and legally can to deter and disrupt the smuggling networks, to reduce both the pull and the push factors in this illegal migration so that it stops. To do otherwise is to put at risk the broad public consensus, which has historically existed in Canada in favour of immigration and refugee protection, and I will not allow that to happen on my watch as minister of Immigration.

Some would have us believe that we can successfully deter the smuggling operations simply by focusing on the smugglers. How I wish that were true. How I wish it were true that we did not have to, at the same time, address the demand side of the equation in the smuggling enterprise. However, to pretend that is the case, to pretend that we can avoid disincentivizing the customers of the syndicates from paying $50,000 to come to Canada is naive in the extreme.

Therefore, let me present the general approach of the government and then the legislation in particular.

First, it is evident there are legitimate refugees in need of protection in Southeast Asia. It is also true, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, that it is always preferable to find a local or regional protection solution for those who are bona fide refugees and to do everything possible to prevent them from being exploited by trafficking syndicates. That is why we have begun preliminary discussions with our international partners, including Australia, which obviously has a great stake in this issue, and with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to pursue the possibility of some form of regional protection framework in the Southeast Asian region.

In part that would entail encouraging the countries now being used as transit points for smuggling and trafficking to offer at least temporary protection to those deemed by the UN in need of protection and then for countries such as Canada to provide, to some extent, reasonable resettlement opportunities for those deemed to be bona fide refugees, which is something we are pursuing.

However, to be honest, that is a mid to long-term solution. Working on that with the UN and our international partners will not stop the fact that criminal networks in Southeast Asian countries are planning to smuggle their customers to Canada. They are in the process right now. People have already paid their upfront fee and are sitting in waiting positions in parts of Southeast Asia. Vessels have been acquired. Officials have been, shall we say, induced to co-operate with these networks. The operations are not abstract. This is not a possibility. This is not a theory. This is a real and present reality and we must react with real, present and current action to disincentivize the smuggling networks.

It is also true, insofar as we are talking about a flow of illegally smuggled migrants of Tamil origin, that we acknowledge Canadians have a stake in seeing a just and durable peace in Sri Lanka. We acknowledge that the Tamil people have legitimate aspirations and that they deserve to be protected from violence and persecution. That is why, through the Department of Foreign Affairs, our High Commission in Colombo and through multilateral institutions, we continue to strongly encourage the government of Sri Lanka to make every effort to find a just resolution to the legitimate aspirations of its Tamil minority. That is one important issue. A regional protection framework is another important issue.

Perhaps the most important element in combatting the smuggling is to stop the boats from leaving the transit countries in the first place. That is why our government has directed relevant security and intelligence agencies to increase their presence and capability in the transit countries, partly to assist the transit countries in improving their capacity to detect fraudulent documents and smuggling networks and to gather better and actionable intelligence to prevent people from being loaded on to the vessels in the first place.

In this respect, I would note that two weeks ago the Royal Thai Police detained some 150 individuals who were in the country illegally, without status. Apparently they were planning to board vessels to be smuggled possibly to Canada. Therefore, that work is being done as well. There is increased and improved police and intelligence co-operation in the region among ourselves, the Australians and the transit countries.

However, should a vessel successfully leave a transit country, and we are talking about these leaky, decommissioned cargo vessels that people are loaded onto like cattle to take the dangerous voyage across the Pacific, and arrive in our territorial waters, Canada, after the adoption of Bill C-49, will continue to fully honour our humanitarian, domestic and international legal obligations to provide refugee protection.

We will not endanger the lives of people, as some would have us do, to prevent them from entering Canadian waters. Nor will we violate our international obligations under the convention for refugees and torture or our domestic obligations under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to provide protection to those who are deemed by our legal system to be in need of it, to have a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin. This is to say that we will not, in the technical term refoulement, send back to the country of origin someone who has arrived even through this dangerous, illegal and irregular form of marine migration.

We do need to send a strong message to the smugglers, which is why Bill C-49 proposes strong mandatory minimum prison sentences for those involved in smuggling operations. Those who are involved in smuggling under 50 people would face a mandatory minimum prison sentence of at least 3 years. If there are one of two aggravating factors involved, they would face a mandatory minimum of five years. If the group is over 50 individuals, they could face a mandatory minimum of 5 years unless there was an aggravating factor, such as having put the life or safety of their customers in danger, in which case a 10 year mandatory minimum. We believe this will help to cause the smugglers and the crews that work for them to think twice before targeting Canada for their sordid trade.

We also propose massive new penalties for the shipowners, those who are at the back end of this business enterprise, this terrible criminal profit-making venture. They ought to know that they stand to lose millions of dollars if they acquire a ship to be used for this illicit purpose.

Also, we have broadened the ability to make it easier to obtain successful prosecutions against people smugglers through amendments to the relevant law. We take other measures targeting the smugglers very clearly.

However, when we are talking about an illicit market, one thing history, common experience and economics all tell us is that as long as there is a sufficient demand and a sufficient price, there will always be someone willing to provide a service or a good. Therefore, we cannot be naive about the imperative of diminishing the demand side of the equation in the smuggling enterprise.

We must ask ourselves this. Why are people coming from third world countries paying $50,000 to come to Canada in this dangerous way?

Some of the people we are talking about are actually coming from democracies like India. Recently CBC News did a report on individuals in Tamil Nadu in Chennai in the great Indian democracy who had paid smugglers to come to Canada. One of them wanted to come to Canada because he or she had heard this country provided free monthly salaries. In part, there is an economic pull factor to Canada.

It is clear to us that the capacity of someone who lands in Canada, for example, a positive refugee protection decision, to immediately then sponsor family members, means that the $50,000 price point used by the syndicates is not just an investment on the principal applicant getting into the country, but on those family members who will then follow. Therefore, $50,000 makes sense on the smuggling market because the price point actually will eventually allow several family members to come to Canada in reasonably short order.

That is one of the reasons why it is important to change the business model of these smuggling syndicates by disincentivizing. This is why we propose that those who have been designated to have arrived in a smuggling event and who get a positive protection decision would have temporary residency in Canada for a period of five years. I would be happy to develop that further on questions.

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the minister for his overview of this legislation.

As a preamble, I would like to remind Canadians, and I think the minister and the House would agree, that our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is applied differently from any other charter in the world, as far as I am aware, offers some protection even to non-citizens within Canadian waters.

Therefore, we need not defend the compassion and empathy that Canadians, in keeping with our legislation, have demonstrated over many decades.

My question, though, is more related to what could be classified as a second or third option. The minister said that Canadian protections and the full extent of natural justice will apply to those who have landed. However, he may not have fully explored an option being pursued in southeast Asia. It has to do with neutral points of entry. Under this option, the same kind of examination would be pursued to determine who ought to be admitted to the country. It is interesting to consider how far we have gone in arriving at a United Nations or universal approach to this problem, which many countries, including Canada, will be experiencing in the next few years.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Madam Speaker, we have had preliminary discussions with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, our friends in Australia, and with other countries on the concept of a framework in southeast Asia that would allow for the kind of regional protection opportunities to which the member refers.

We are not terribly advanced in these discussions, I have to admit. This is the problem We are talking about a lot of legal, diplomatic, logistical work that would have to be done with a number of countries. But we are committed to pursuing it.

I think one analogy for this would be the way that Indo-Chinese boat people were dealt with in 1979 and 1980, when large numbers of them were fleeing communist oppression. The United Nations established regional processing centres where they could go to have their claims assessed, after which they might be considered eligible for resettlement if they were found to be in need of protection. Canada received some 60,000 people.

Having said that, I can tell you that this is not an easy solution. If one were to create regional protection centres, one would have to avoid allowing a small flow of asylum seekers to become millions of people. There are tens of millions of people around the world who would like to resettle in a developed country, and who feel, for one reason or another, that they are victims of persecution.

Many of these people are economic migrants; there are mixed motives here. This is a difficult question, and the complexity of it tells me that this is not a viable solution to the short-term pressure we are facing from the syndicates today, which why other action needs to be taken, like the action contemplated in the bill.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Madam Speaker, the bill before us has more to do with political marketing than any true desire to change policy for the better. This bill was announced in Vancouver. It is easy to understand the political aspect because that is where the boat arrived. We also see that the minister made his announcement in English only, even though he speaks excellent French. He really is speaking to Canada.

More to the point, this bill is a clear repudiation by the government of the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. It was the Minister of Public Safety who introduced this bill today. In fact, he was in the House to monitor the speech by his colleague from Immigration.

Last spring, the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism introduced, debated and defended in the House a fair and balanced—in his own words—reform with regard to refugees. He received the unanimous consent of the House. He negotiated with the other parties and four months later, he is being repudiated by his own government. By tabling this bill, the Minister of Public Safety is sending him a message that the reform he considered to be balanced is not and that other measures need to be presented to the House.

How does the minister feel about being repudiated by his colleague from Public Safety?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Madam Speaker, there seem to be all manner of political conspiracy theories in that question and those comments. It is obvious that the intent of this bill is serious, and that it is also reasonable and fair. Let us recall that, according to surveys conducted after the arrival of the latest boatloads of illegal immigrants, the vast majority of Quebeckers indicated that they wanted to send the illegal immigrants, who were brought here by a human smuggling ring, back to their country of origin. In terms of public opinion, Quebec is the most outspoken.

Some members of the Bloc Québécois are more concerned about the values of the elite than those of ordinary people. But we must maintain the confidence of Quebeckers and Canadians in the Canadian immigration and refugee protection system.

That is why we need real measures and not rhetoric to fight the trend towards illegal immigration facilitated by these smuggling rings.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Madam Speaker, I have a few questions.

How would refugees from Sri Lanka, let us say Tamils, come to Canada? What queue would they be lining up in? Would they be lining up in Sri Lanka? No. Thailand? What is the proper way for Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka to come to Canada?

The minister said that there are criminals there, that they have already pocketed money, and that people are ready to go on the ships. If he has all this information, and he said that he was working with the police in different parts of southeast Asia, why are the RCMP and CSIS not working to have these smugglers arrested overseas?

I have seen reports stating that nine out of ten of these refugees are in desperate shape when they leave. They have no idea of the refugee policy in the country they are going to.

Whatever policy we establish, it will not make a lot of difference. If refugees are desperate, they are going to try to get out somehow.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Madam Speaker, first of all, there is an assumption in the member's first question about how Sri Lankan refugees would come to Canada that I do not necessarily accept. Under this assumption, everyone coming to Canada in this fashion is in need of our protection. They are all coming here seeking protection, as opposed to family reunification, economic opportunities, or a mix of motives.

Since the end of hostilities in Sri Lanka last year, some 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees who are resident in Tamil Nadu under the protection of the Indian government have returned voluntarily to Sri Lanka. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has facilitated the return to Sri Lanka of many Tamils who were living temporarily in Southeast Asia. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has declared that Tamils can no longer be presumed to be bona fide asylum claimants. According to a survey done by the Canada Border Services Agency, the majority of successful Tamil asylum claimants in Canada have since returned, at least for visits, to the country from which they fled, after claiming that they could not be there for reasons of persecution.

I would remind the member of the recent CBC report that interviewed people who had paid these networks. Many are living not in Sri Lanka but in India. If they would like to come to Canada, they are free to fill out an application to come here as an immigrant. If they are in need of protection, they are free to enrol with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

They should not come in the worst and most dangerous way possible, which is through a smuggling syndicate.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise to speak to this bill.

I am deeply concerned that any time the Conservatives are faced with a choice of considering policy, sitting down and having a rational discussion, or playing politics, they choose to play politics. There does not seem to be a headline the Conservatives are not willing to exploit.

I can remember the pardon issue, four or five years ago, when the then public safety minister said, after a sensational case, that they had fixed the pardon problem. He said they did not involve the rest of Parliament, because it was something they were able to do on their own. They refused to have any hearings. On the back of a napkin, they whipped something up and called it fixed.

And then we had Graham James. All of sudden, they feigned indignation and said they had to do something fast, forgetting that they themselves claimed to have fixed the problem some four years before.

However, this did not stop them from trying to play games with the problem again. They ratchet up the rhetoric and, on the back of a napkin, whip up a policy, instead of sitting down with Parliament and having a mature debate.

When the Sun Sea and the Ocean Lady arrived on Canadian shores, the Minister of Public Safety was eager to say this was a boatload of terrorists. He talked about intercepting boats in international waters, even though this would violate international conventions. Anywhere else this has been tried, it has been a disaster, raising fears that people would be thrown overboard to hide the evidence, that human beings would be tossed like luggage off the side of the ship to hide the fact that they were being smuggled.

So, for roughly 2% of the claimants Canada would get in a year, the Conservative government went nuclear, not because it wanted to fix something, but because it wanted to play politics and saw a great opportunity to drive a wedge.

The people the Conservatives called terrorists turned out to be mostly women and children. But that is an aside. Apparently, it did not matter much to them.

So after much floundering, including talk about going out into international waters, after throwing around a lot of rhetoric, we get this bill.

I have a lot of problems with the bill. Let me start with the fact that it is tough in all the wrong ways. It is extremely tough on claimants. It is easy on the scum that preys upon the weak and smuggles others into this country. Because of this misplaced focus, I have serious doubts about how it could be effective.

In addition, we have to realize that the government is masking the fact that the real solution rests in engaging international partners. If there is one thing the government has not been able to do, it is work with other countries.

If we want to go after the people who prey on the weak, on those who are vulnerable, then we have to work with foreign jurisdictions and ensure that we go after this scum where they are operating. Instead of being hard on the women and children who are trying to escape war-torn regions, we have to go after the people who are preying on them, trying to suck money out of them, taking advantage of their unfortunate situation, sticking them on dangerous ships and sending them across oceans to Canada. We have to stop the problem long before they walk onto that boat and begin their journey across the seas.

In this regard, and in many others, this is a placebo policy. And I wish it was only that. However, the government also plays on the public's misunderstanding of the distinction between the words “refugee”, “immigrant”, and “claimant”, trying to mix them all up together, trying to confuse people, trying to make them think that there is some queue and that these claimants are jumping ahead of other people. The government knows this is false. That is what makes the assertions absolutely irresponsible and reprehensible.

The government's job is to inform public debate, to inform it with facts. The government is supposed to encourage honest discussion about the differences between political parties. Instead, the government capitalizes on misunderstandings, plays tricks with, let us be straight here, fake emails that go around with misinformation, and generally tries to engage in grand political games. I think this is shameful.

It is not just me who is saying these things or having problems with these bills. I will read a couple of things that some experts in these areas have been saying. Their words are worth hearing because they make the case so clearly.

There is a piece written for the Globe and Mail by Lorne Waldman and Audrey Macklin entitled, “Why we can’t turn away the Tamil ships”, and I will quote several excerpts from it:

Asylum seekers on boats is not a new phenomenon. In 1939, the St. Louis, filled with hundreds of refugees fleeing the Nazis, was turned away from Canada. At the time, the government tried to discredit the passengers as frauds and economic opportunists, and warned that, if the St. Louis were permitted to dock, more Jews in Europe might follow. The “line must be drawn somewhere,” and it was drawn at zero. Many of the people on board subsequently perished in the death camps.

In 1969, Canada signed the Refugee Convention and undertook not to return refugees if they had a valid fear of persecution. This obligation is part of our law. Once asylum seekers reach our territorial waters and are in Canada, they cannot be sent back to another country unless their claims for protection have been denied.

From the St. Louis onward, every new boat is accompanied by denunciation of the passengers as frauds and dire warnings of future “waves.” Yet, two boats – one filled with Tamils and the other with Sikhs – arrived in the 1980s followed by four boats with Chinese in the 1990s, and the sky did not fall in. All were given due process without creating havoc. Some were found to be refugees, some not. Other countries, including Australia and the United States, receive far more sea-borne migrants than Canada, and far more irregular migrants in general.

It goes on to talk about the bill:

Moreover, such a regime would run afoul of our Charter. Our Supreme Court has held that Canada cannot be directly or indirectly complicit in torture or other human-rights violations. By turning away boats without fairly determining whether those on board would be at risk, we would be violating refugees’ right to life and security of the person.

The article concludes by saying:

Canada receives about 30,000 claimants each year. Five hundred Tamils represent only 2 per cent of the annual intake. The rest arrive by plane or overland, so don’t elicit the same moral panic as people on boats. Although the system has experienced delays in recent times, it has managed to provide a reasonably fair determination. Failed claimants are being deported each year in record numbers. All this to say, that with a just and efficient determination system, we will be able to deal with asylum seekers arriving by boat or otherwise. And the best way – indeed, the only way – to stop any future boats from Sri Lanka is by solving the problems in Sri Lanka.

Amnesty International is also speaking with deep concern about this bill saying that the proposal violates three treaties: the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Amnesty says that the bill shows no respect for the equality provisions in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Gloria Nafziger of Amnesty International said:

It’s just a flagrant violation of so many rights, it just goes beyond the pale. Those treaties are the international treaties we signed on to and we have obligations to uphold and respect [them].

The Canadian Council for Refugees is saying that despite the government's claim that it is targeting smugglers, the people who will suffer in this bill are the people fleeing persecution, including women and children. It asserts that measures keeping some refugees longer in detention, denying them family reunification, and restricting their freedom of movement, are likely in violation of our charter.

Professor Peter Showler, the former head of the IRB and a refugee expert, noted that there are two different targets under this bill: the human smugglers and the refugee claimants themselves. Even if a person is accepted as a refugee, which means the person fears persecution for five years, the person cannot bring his or her family members. This is not just any family member, we are talking about husbands, wives, and children who are trapped in conflict zones. Mr. Showler has characterized many of the provisions in the bill as outrageous.

What I would like to do is talk about some of the specific provisions that the bill does undertake. One of the much heralded things the bill does is it creates mandatory minimums. It defines aggravating factors where those mandatory minimums would be triggered. There are two aggravating factors. Factor one is where somebody is engaged in the activity for profit, whether or not the person is with a criminal organization. Factor two is whether or not it endangers the life of a person who is being smuggled. It gets into a formula where if there are less than 50 people and there is one aggravating factor, it is a three year mandatory minimum. If there are both aggravating factors and it is under 50 people, it is a five year mandatory minimum. If it is more than 50 people, it is a mandatory minimum of five years if it is one aggravating factor. It is 10 years if it is two aggravating factors and more than 50 people.

Here is the problem. The current penalty can be up to life imprisonment and a $1 million fine for anybody smuggling more than 10 people. The government already has at its disposal extremely serious measures that are on the books to go after the smugglers.

These mandatory minimums are a placebo. They are held in the window to feign action, to pretend they are being tough, as the Conservatives like to say, when in reality they are little more than window dressing. In fact, the actual tools they need to go after the smugglers are already in place. The problem is they are not going after them where they need to, overseas in other countries, working with other jurisdictions.

There are some provisions in the bill that I think we could support. Looking at increasing penalties under the Marine Transportation Security Act for someone who is providing misleading information, or a failure to comply with a ministerial order and therefore be refused entry.

One of the things that is very concerning because its wording is so ambiguous first was introduced by the minister when he talked of a “human smuggling event” and all of a sudden this human smuggling event would trigger all sorts of extraordinary powers. We are not given any details of what those powers would be or how they would be exercised, but eagerly, obviously, we looked at the bill and tried to determine what those powers were.

Gone was the term “human smuggling event” and now came the term “irregular arrival”. Irregular arrival has no real specificity and could just be two people, not a large group or a throng of people or hordes of people coming into Canada, but just two people. If the minister, for whatever arbitrary reason he or she decides, invokes this provision, there are suddenly two classes of refugees, those that are subject to one set of rules and those that are subject to another. It could be for no other reason than the minister does not happen to like those particular refugees, or happens to think one particular group coming from one particular region is more disliked by the public and therefore maybe the government should play games with them and play it for wedge politics.

The problem is that for that separate class, some very different rules are invoked. One of them is to invoke mandatory detention so that when someone was defined in this class he or she would be detained for a minimum of one year. This mandatory detention would not be reviewed again for another six months. Imagine women or children being in a detention centre where they are only given the opportunity once every six months after the first year to appeal that detention. While they are detained, it stops their ability to appeal to the Refugee Appeal Division. It stops their ability from making any claim on humanitarian or compassionate grounds for their situation for five years.

One of the things worth pointing out is the impact of detentions on mental health for a woman or a child who is in a mandatory detention centre because the minister arbitrarily decided to put the woman or child in that class. We can refer here to a multidisciplinary team of university researchers. The team members included: Dr. Rousseau of the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University; Professor François Crépeau, Hans and Tamar Oppenheimer Professor, Public International Law at McGill University; and the list goes on and on.

They concluded a three-year study, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research on the impact of detention in Canada on adult asylum seekers. Based on their expertise in this area, they predict that the mandatory long-term detention as proposed in the bill will have a severe negative impact on refugee claimants' mental health, especially on the most vulnerable: children, pregnant women, and survivors of rape and torture.

Their preliminary results based on a sample of 54 refugee claimants detained in the Laval and Toronto immigration holding centres showed that even a short period of detention is associated with high levels of anxiety and depression. After only 16 days of detention, 30% of refugee claimants met the criteria for depression, 22% for anxiety. Studies have consistently shown that detainees' mental health problems tend to worsen over time and they are more likely to persist, even after release, when detention is prolonged.

I hear some members heckling on the other side about that. I am talking about people who might have been raped or tortured, pregnant women, children. Let us remember who we are talking about. Let us remember the people who could potentially be impacted by this detention.

Another thing we need to look at in the bill is the fact that it imposes a duty of inquiry on people who provide assistance. That may seem relatively innocuous at first, but if a church group makes a determination that it wants to help a claimant because the group thinks the situation the claimant is coming out of is desperate and dangerous, no longer will the burden be on the state to prove that there was not a violation of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, but rather that burden of proof would literally fall upon the church or independent organization that sought to assist that refugee, placing all that burden of proof on that individual instead of placing it on the state.

The bill would also seek, and this is quite remarkable and something we need to debate as we move forward, that even if a person is successful in claiming refugee status, even if the person finds a way to convince the government that being sent back would mean the person's certain death, torture or some other horrible outcome, the government reserves the right after five years, after the person has spent five years in Canada and has naturalized here and has established roots, to say it has changed its mind and the person is out of here. The person can spend five years here as a legitimate refugee and then after those five years, the government says, “See you later”, and the person is back out. For those five years the person obviously will be living under a constant threat of being tossed out. How will the person be able to establish himself or herself? How will he or she be able to make a meaningful contribution to Canadian society?

During that five year ban, and again we are talking about legitimate refugees, the person is also barred from applying for permanent residence. He or she is barred from travelling outside the country for five years. He or she cannot sponsor family members. Let us remember who these family members are. They are the wife or the husband, or the person's children.

We need to proceed very carefully, because when we change legislation, it has profound implications. There is no question we need to get tough with those who would smuggle the most desperate and the most weak out there, but the bill, full of its flaws, appears to me to be infinitely more about playing politics than it is about finding solutions.

People who hoped as they read headlines that the bill would be the thing that would save us from future situations such as we saw, will be sorely disappointed when they look beneath the veneer, because like so much of what the Conservative Party puts forward, it is about the talking points and it is not about the substance.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-49, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Minister of Citizenship]

Madam Speaker, that intervention was certainly living up to the standard that we all expect of the member. In part, of course, he very casually casts the most disgusting aspersions on his adversaries. Rather than simply disagreeing on substance, he made all sorts of allegations of bad faith, which is what he does best. I commend him for that.

For example, he implied that this government somehow politicizes against the tradition of refugee protection. Let me be very clear. This government has increased the resettlement of refugees to Canada to the highest level ever, higher than any ever under the Liberal government. We will be bringing in 14,500 resettled refugees next year. After the government to which he belonged froze the numbers for refugee resettlement, we are increasing the refugee assistance program by 20%. What kind of government that tries to politicize against refugees actually brings more of them and gives them more support?

I have a question for him. Why did his government not do the same thing if it was really in favour of refugee protection? Why did it freeze the refugee assistance program for 13 years? Why did it freeze the number of resettled refugees? I am not going to allege that there was a bad motive in that, because I think that would be unreasonable and unfair. I am sure it had sound reasons, but then to turn around and cast aspersions on the motives of a government that is doing more to help refugees than any in recent Canadian history is very pathetic.

However, I just want to ask him this. If he says this is not tough enough on the smugglers, I have a very simple question. What is his alternative? What would the Liberal Party do to stop the smuggling operations? We have the police and our intelligence agencies working in the transit countries. There have been detentions there. What would he do? If not mandatory minimum sentences, what is his solution?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, let me first state, while I am not going to get into a debate on history, that I am deeply proud of the Liberal record when it comes to immigration and refugees. It is a record that speaks for itself and we have long been a party that understands that this is a nation of immigrants, based upon policies that are sound, reasonable and well considered.

Let me suggest to the minister how he might have proceeded instead of trying to whip up this bill in a mad frenzy to create talking points that he could use. Instead of proceeding in that way, what he should have done was sit down with the experts, sit down with this House, dare I say in a minority government, sit down with the immigration and citizenship committee, sit down with the public safety and national security committee, allow us the opportunity to hear from experts and witnesses, and in a careful, considered way, using facts and real information, take the opportunity to craft a bill that really creates solutions.

But that is not what we got. To be fair, what we got was a political reaction, and my frustration when I speak in this place, the reason I speak so passionately in opposition to what the government does, is because I have seen, time and time again, the government decide to put talking points in the window first, and beneath a very thin veneer is a complete absence of real policy.

Worse than that, the actions that will be taken are detrimental, and I hope that in my speech, over a period of 20 minutes, I outlined all the concerns I had. I would hope that instead of torquing up the debate, instead of ramping it up, the minister would take an opportunity to have a mature conversation with us on this, allow that debate to occur and not ramp up the rhetoric.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Madam Speaker, I listened to my colleague's speech and I share a number of his concerns. The Bloc's position on this bill is very clear, as I will have a chance to explain in a few minutes.

But, aside from fundamental principles, it cannot be said that the Liberal position is just as clear. Even after my colleague's speech, we still do not know what the Liberals will do when it comes time to vote on this discriminatory bill in a few days.

This is nothing new; it is always the same thing with the Liberal Party. There are always some intellectual gymnastics and some fancy dancing. It tries to please everyone and make people believe that it is tough on crime and open at the same time.

The member has looked at the bill long enough to make a 20-minute speech. Can he simply tell us whether he will vote for or against it at second reading?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the Bloc Québécois member for his question.

The Liberal Party's position is very clear. We see many issues with this bill and it brings up many questions. We will take the time to speak with experts and our caucus. The government only introduced the bill three or four days ago. We need to speak with our caucus and experts to see if there is a way to save this bill.

In a few days, once we have found the answers to our questions, the member will understand the Liberal Party's actions and see how it will vote.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Madam Speaker, one of the first things the new coalition government in England did was to say that putting refugees who are children or migrant children in detention causes a lot of hardship and that it is a practice it wants to refrain from because it leaves psychological scars on these youngsters. They are not really criminals, and often they are in detention because of the vicarious immigration status of their parents. It is working towards eliminating the detention of all children based on immigration reasons, whether they are the children of refugees, of migrants or of temporary workers.

I heard the member speak about the kind of suffering the children have, and not just children, that within a few days they get into a depressive state. Does the member have more information concerning the kind of long-term impact that a prolonged detention has on children, especially if it is over a year and perhaps several years.

Under the bill, the review would not occur until after one year and then six months later. So that child could be in detention for several years.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for a very good question.

I would refer the member, in my speech, to the multi-disciplinary team of university researchers who have actually done a lot of study on this very impact. I think it is something that the House should be seized with as it considers the bill and should look at further.

I think the member makes a point that is worth repeating and worth remembering. The government more often than not, as it confuses what is a claimant with what is a refugee, also likes to characterize all refugees or all claimants as somehow these big, bad terrorists, these bad people. More often than not, the people we are dealing with are children. They are women. Many times they can be people who are coming out of war-torn, terrible situations, people who might have been dealing with rape, people who might have been dealing with torture.

Can we imagine what it would be like for somebody who is coming out of that kind of horror and what psychological impacts additionally it would have to then be shoved into detention for a year and not given any opportunity during that one-year period to say, “This is wrong for me”? That child does not belong there or that woman does not belong in the situation, after all they have gone through, that after a year, if they do not make that review, they would have to wait another six months.

I think the psychological impact, particularly on these people who could potentially be very vulnerable and coming out of desperate situations, is something we need to bear in mind.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Madam Speaker, last spring Parliament reached unanimous agreement on refugee reform. We showed that we can agree on things, when there is the will to do so. I fear we will have a hard time reaching an agreement in this case and there are probably few things we will agree on in the future.

Perhaps I will do the same as the minister today, that is, I will give my speech in only one language, except in my case, it will be in French instead of English.

I think this must have been extremely difficult for the Minister of Immigration , even though he is willing to step up to the plate to defend the bill introduced by his colleague from Public Safety. To me this feels like a serious repudiation of all the work he did, which we, as parliamentarians had recognized. We voted unanimously in favour of the refugee reform, which should have, as he said himself, lasted for decades, or for at least one generation. It was a fundamental change in how refugees would be treated.

Now just four months later, this reform, which he described as balanced and with which we agreed—we voted in favour of the reform—is being questioned by his colleague from Public Safety. We will not make a fuss, because even though the minister is here in the House today to defend the bill introduced by his colleague from Public Safety, this bill is clearly being imposed on him by his government. One of two things is true: either the balanced reform the minister defended at the time was not balanced and he knew it—he sold us on something that he knew was not balanced—or the reform was indeed balanced, but someone in his government repudiated his work because he or she did not agree with the minister's conclusion.

This is rather disturbing. At the same time, it also seriously undermines the minister's position since, at the end of the day, considering this repudiation by his colleagues, who would want to negotiate and discuss anything with him in the future, if any of his colleagues can go back on the deals he makes and propose a new bill like the one before us today?

It is even more disturbing, since this bill was only passed four months ago, it has not yet been implemented, we have not seen what kind of impact it may have, and so we cannot assume that it is already broken. It was passed four months ago. This seems to be all about political marketing. That is what we are seeing today in the House, because I do not detect any sincerity in the minister's comments. Let me be clear. I do not doubt his sincerity as an individual, but I doubt that he is convinced that the bill introduced by his colleague is the right thing to do. I say that because this is not the same man we saw last spring. When the minister introduced his balanced reform, he met with parliamentarians from the different parties to explain the reform. His officials offered us a number of technical briefings in advance to explains all the ins and outs of the bill. In a way, he was preparing us mentally. We knew what direction he was taking, but today, there is none of that.

The minister must have wanted to be sure that his bill would be defeated in the House; otherwise, he would have acted differently.

It is very clear that this bill simply appeals to some kind of unhealthy populism, that it goes after all refugees by putting them all in the same boat—no pun intended—and that it suggests simplistic solutions. I do not think that even the minister believes in these solutions.

The Conservatives always take the same approach. First, they introduce a bill with a bogus name, something they could put a trademark notice on, something that sells the bill, a crude advertisement. This time, we have the Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act. This lengthy bill has only a few measures that address smugglers; the rest have to do with the refugees themselves. The government is going after people in extremely difficult situations, instead of helping people who are in need.

It always uses the same technique to end any debate: it just says that they are terrorists. That is what it said when the boat arrived in Vancouver. It said that there were members of the Tamil Eelam, a terrorist group, among the Tamils. So the government says that anyone who is against this bill is pro-terrorist. And that is it, there is nothing more to add and no further discussion is needed. That is the Conservatives' argument.

It is even more grotesque given that 80% of the Tamil refugee claimants are considered to be genuine claimants under the Geneva convention. A few months earlier, the minister took aim at Mexican refugee claimants, saying that since only 10% of them were accepted, it was suspect. In this case, 80% are being accepted and it is still suspect. There is a problem here. You can worry about acceptance rates that are too low or too high, but not both.

Seriously, I have a very hard time believing that the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism and the people in his department thought about this and had an overall vision when they drafted this bill, especially since these same people did all this work last spring, a mere four months ago, and came up with completely different conclusions. Obviously, this bill was prepared quickly, in a purely partisan fashion, as a sort of collection of unrelated measures. They have no vision. They are not taking aim at the problem, but at refugees, which will create much bigger problems that I will come back to.

I would like to put things into context so that the people of Canada who are watching this understand that just because the government says that this bill and its 50-odd clauses crack down on smugglers, that does not mean that it actually does. Human smugglers are not watching CPAC and are not reading the bill. This bill will have no impact on them. The government chose the title of the bill. It can give the bill any title it wants, even if it has nothing to do with the bill's content.

Now let us talk about the substance of the bill. This is a very strong reaction to what we all agree is a real problem, but the government exaggerated the problem. It is trying to kill a fly with a bazooka. Not only is it futile to use a bazooka to kill a fly, but one also risks missing the target because it is such a precise operation. In this bill, the government focuses on the means of transportation by which the person arrives.

That has nothing to do with anything. The government also focuses on the fact that people arrive in groups of two, three, four or 100. That has nothing to do with anything either. There is no reason to believe that the people who want to cheat the system—for some people do—are more likely to come by boat than by plane or by land. Recent history suggests quite the opposite. More of the Tamils who arrived by boat were accepted than claimants who arrive by plane or by land. What is more, the refugees on board that boat were detained just long enough to verify their identity and threat level, and they have all been released since. Clearly, there is no reason to believe that people arriving by boat are less likely to be legitimate refugees than those who arrive by other means.

Nevertheless, I have to say that arriving by boat makes more of a splash. It is a bit like when a plane crashes. It makes the news because of the tragedy of hundreds of people dying at the same time. But is a plane more dangerous than a car? Any transportation specialist will say it is not. One is more likely to die while travelling in a car than while travelling in a plane.

This is when cheap political marketing and cheap rhetoric are used in an attempt to make us believe that the government is dealing with a problem. Only 2% of refugees arrive in large groups by boat. The government is grandstanding across Canada, putting on a show and telling us that it is tackling the problem of refugee fraud. Why does the government's bill target the 2% of refugee claimants who have one of the highest acceptance rates?

Suppose 98% of the claimants had been dealt with. Then we could look at the remaining 2%. Why target people who arrive by boat? There is no other justification than the fact that it is a hot issue and that when a boat arrives, the Conservatives can tell the media that they are going to deal with the situation.

It is rather crass and I am convinced that no one will be fooled. The minister likes to quote poll results to Quebeckers, but they are not happy when they realize that the government has tried to put one over on them by telling them that the refugees are all terrorists, that they have to be kicked out, and that they will take care of it. Quebeckers realize that it is not true.

Let us examine some of the measures in the bill's whimsical assortment of provisions. First, the bill will create a category of refugees: those who arrive by boat in groups of 2, 50, 100 or more. If more than one arrives by boat, it seems that they are more dangerous than other refugees. This category will be established and these people will be dealt with in a completely arbitrary and discriminatory manner. For example, the government will be able to hold them for 12 months without even determining whether they should be released. For purposes of comparison, the current timeframe is two days.

At the beginning of my presentation, I said that if the government had wanted to make improvements, it would have come to see us. Had the government told us that two days was not enough and that seven were required, we would have listened to what it had to say. Had it said that 14 days were needed, we would have studied the matter. Had it said that 30 days were needed, we would have started wondering, but we would have considered it nonetheless. Now, the minister is telling us that people who are not being accused of anything yet must be kept in prison for 365 days, before the government even determines whether there is cause to do so.

It is shameful. The founding principles of our modern, democratic societies are being attacked. Habeas corpus does not grab the attention of the media. What does that suggest?

At the end of the middle ages, people had had enough of arbitrary justice and tyranny and they decided to develop a concept whereby people could not be imprisoned without cause for an indeterminate or abusive period without having the chance to explain themselves. I am not talking about democracy writ large or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I am talking about a rather basic concept. It is the foundation of our societies governed by the rule of law. We do not detain people indefinitely or abusively without telling them what they are being charged with or without charging them. That is what sets us apart from tyrannies and the middle ages. The bill attacks that foundation. The government is saying, “These people arrive by boat, for some unknown reason, but we are going to keep them in prison for a year before we do anything. Then, every six months we will see whether we can release them.” That is not a very good start.

There is another troubling series of elements in this bill with regard to the same people. They will have to wait five years to apply for permanent residence, and they can only do so if they have been recognized as true refugees. Why? The government wants to crack down on dishonest people who test the system and who are not real refugees. It wants to be tough on them for abusing the system. We will see whether the government is going to make any proposals to that effect. However, what happens to people who are true refugees, who have fled persecution? Why should they be penalized? There is no explaining it. Once they are recognized as refugees, the government could even continue to harass them by verifying whether they still are refugees, which is completely at odds with the very concept of what a refugee is. This concept implies that once a person is recognized as a refugee, they can rebuild their life and not spend it wondering whether they will be sent back to their country of origin.

These people would no longer be able to travel outside Canada. The fact that it would be impossible to obtain permanent residence for five years and therefore impossible to bring one's children to Canada could even have the opposite effect. How does the minister—who is so concerned about the message we are sending to smugglers and people who abuse the system—think these people will react? Does he think people are going to cross the ocean alone even though it is going to take seven years to bring their children to Canada?

In addition to risking his own life, someone who wants to flee persecution will also have to risk the lives of his wife and children. That is what the minister is proposing with this bill. It is completely inappropriate and in the end, we could be faced with bigger boats with more women and children on board, because those who flee persecution will have no other way to keep their families together. Do people see where such an extreme measure will take us?

Lastly, to add insult to injury, the minister is denying these people access to the refugee appeal division, even though he knows that this Parliament deemed that to be a very important aspect of the reform and it was something for which I personally fought long and hard. The fact that his colleague has introduced a bill in this House that attacks the universal nature of the refugee appeal division clearly demonstrates bad faith, especially given that the refugee appeal division—by standardizing decisions and eliminating arbitrary rulings—is just as beneficial for refugees, who can avoid bad, arbitrary decisions, as it is for society. It also allows the minister to appeal bad decisions. Furthermore, it makes it possible to build a body of precedents for refugee claims and ensures a certain predictability that discourages people from testing the system, because they know the outcome is predictable.

[Devinder Shory, Conservative, Calgary Northeast, AB]

Madam Speaker, being an immigrant to this country, I have a lot of interest in this legislation and I listened to the member opposite very carefully.

I understand that quite a few immigrant community organizations have endorsed Bill C-49. I will try to read the names of a few: the Tamil Community Centre; Toronto Community & Culture Centre; the United Macedonian Diaspora (Canada); Taiwanese Canadian Association of Toronto; Victoria Immigrant and Refugee Centre Society; l'Association du Canada; Islamic Lebanese centre; World Lebanese Cultural Union; B'nai Brith Canada; Canadian Friends of Ukraine; Young Polish Canadian Professionals Association; Chinese Cultural Association of Greater Toronto; Canadian Confederation of Fujian Associations; Canada First Community Organization; Armenian National Committee of Toronto; Multicultural Helping House Society; Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations; Armenian National Committee of Canada - Western Region; Vancouver Multicultural Society; to name a few.

What does the hon. member e attribute all those immigrant communities lining up in support of this bill?

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would say that the organizations that represent certain immigrants and support this bill are doing that much as certain non-immigrants would. The Bloc Québécois does not treat immigrants any differently than anyone else. When people come to Quebec and join Quebec society, they are part of the Quebec nation, and they are entitled to their own opinions, like anyone else. Like anyone else, they can be fooled by the government. The government can tell them that there are terrorists, Tamil Eelam members, on the boat. It can say that they must be terrorists. Anyone can be fooled and lied to by the government. Whether we are immigrants or not does not matter. Whether we are immigrants or not, we are against terrorists. I do not know why immigrants would be any less against terrorists than the rest of the population.

The problem is that we have no reason to believe that people who arrive by boat are more likely to be terrorists than those who arrive by air. The problem is that false information is being given to the public, which includes immigrants, who are members of the public like anyone else. The problem is that the government has introduced a bill called the Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act. The government is asking people whether they agree with stopping human trafficking. It is asking people whether they are in favour of human trafficking. Immigrants would say the same thing as anyone else; they would say “no”. The problem is that this bill does not tackle human trafficking.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Madam Speaker, this bill would allow for the decimation of the regular arrival of two or more people, it could five hundred or two, but it could also impact on, not just refugees but on visitors, on immigrants who are arriving, on students or on business people who are coming in as entrepreneurs. It would have an impact on all foreigners arriving in Canada, whether by boat, by car or by air.

Is that the interpretation that the member has and, if so, does he not think it would have a very negative impact on the reputation of the Canadian immigration system?

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Madam Speaker, before answering my NDP colleague's question, I would like to say a couple of things.

First, I just realized that I told my Liberal colleague I was going to express the Bloc Québécois' intention with respect to this bill. I do not think I said we would vote against it. Just to be clear, we will vote against it.

Second, I am a little disappointed because, unlike my Liberal colleague, I did not even get an attempt at a question from the minister. I do not know if I should be flattered or annoyed. We will probably have an opportunity to talk about this again.

As written, the bill has a very broad scope. It is not limited to those submitting genuine applications for refugee status. Does this suggest that the government was in such a hurry to draft the bill that it forgot a few things? Did it do this deliberately to make the bill so unacceptable that the opposition would vote against it? Is this a trap? I do not know.

We have before us a bill that does not deserve our support as parliamentarians. It does not tackle the human trafficking problem. It is easy to give a bill a title saying that it will tackle human trafficking, but if the 36 clauses in the bill have nothing to do with the title, it will not work. Moreover, if most of the clauses do nothing more than suspend individual freedoms and discriminate against certain individuals, the title should actually be “bill to discriminate against refugee claimants arriving by boat”, “bill to suspend certain individual freedoms for certain applicants”, or “bill to circumvent international laws and conventions”.

I would like to read a clause from the bill:

Refugee Travel Document—For the purposes of Article 28 of the Refugee Convention, a designated foreign national [the person discriminated against] whose claim for refugee protection or application for protection is accepted [a refugee under the Geneva convention] is lawfully staying in Canada only if they become a permanent resident [which means waiting five years]...

In other words, instead of dumping clause 28, this bill claims to respect it but then pretends that these people are not residents of Canada. That makes no sense.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Minister of Citizenship]

Madam Speaker, there are far too many errors in the member's speech. And while I have a lot of respect for him, I will not be able to answer in just a couple of minutes. However, I will clarify certain points.

What he refers to as a prison is actually a detention centre for immigrants, and anyone can leave in order to exit the country. It is not a prison. Children and people who need to be released can be, by ministerial order. All detentions can be reviewed by Canadian courts.

I would like to remind the member that many liberal democracies, such as Australia, the United States, Great Britain and France, send refugee claimants to detention centres until their applications are reviewed. It is not really a question of a one-year period. A person would generally be held for a year before the IRB reviews their file. However, if the refugee claimant's application is approved before a year is up, they would be released. Based on the new refugee system that we recently passed, this decision would be made within two or three months.

The member exaggerated a lot in his speech. I would like to ask him this question: what policy would he propose to keep these criminal networks from undermining the public's confidence in our immigration system? What is his solution?

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Madam Speaker, the solution is quite simple, which should please the minister. It is simply Bill C-11, which he introduced in the House last spring, regarding the balanced refugee reform that was passed unanimously with a few amendments that everyone agreed on. It was indeed a balanced reform that gave the minister all the tools needed for action.

If he truly believes that the bill introduced by the Minister of Public Safety is the solution for dealing with illegitimate claimants, why does it only deal with those who arrive by boat? Why does it target only 2% of all refugee claimants, and moreover, those who arrive from countries that have some of the highest acceptance rates in the world? The minister says he needs legislation, but he needs it for the 2% of claimants for whom it is least needed. What is the point?

If the minister truly believed this, he would have introduced something that would target the other 98%, not just the 2% that have the highest acceptance rates.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this bill. The bill should be called “attack the refugees” and not preventing human smugglers from abusing Canada's immigration system act. If it was about human smugglers, then there would not be amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to deal with the refugees and immigration portion. There are only a few pages in the act that deals with human smugglers. We prefer to attack the criminals, the traffickers and smugglers and not the victim.

The bill concentrates absolute power in the hands of the minister to decide which refugees will be subjected to draconian measures. With no clear definition on irregular arrivals, it can apply to any group of refugees, immigrants, or visitors.

The bill would also hurt legitimate refugees and those who help them. It would prevent refugees from bringing their spouses and children to Canada for at least 10 years. It would detain women and children that the minister deemed arrived in Canada irregularly for at least a year. It would repeat a shameful chapter of Canadian history by punishing and interning refugees and their children.

I will speak about the impact of detaining children, children who have not committed any crime.

A study was done recently by the United Kingdom. Over 15 months, the U.K. detained 1,300 children. On average that is 1,000 per year. There were 889 children detained for more than 28 days.

The report by the Royal College of Paediatrics and the Royal College of Psychiatrists found many elements. It found that detaining children was harmful to their mental health and that they were filled with terror. It found that children who saw their parents cry and in stress led to eating, sleeping, and learning problems. Of the children studied, 73% of those who were detained had emotional and behavioural problems. They were disoriented, depressed, anxious, confused and frightened. They had nightmares and some refused to feed themselves. A few of the children lost 10% of their body weight and one-quarter of them began bed-wetting. There was a regression of language. One child out of twenty-five became selectively mute. Many of the children had somatic symptoms like headaches and stomach pains.

This kind of treatment, putting children in jail and in detention, is callous and cruel. The U.K. did a review and the new Conservative coalition government said that it was a moral outrage that children were detained.

Canada detains six to seven children per night. If this bill passes, there would be a dramatic increase because any number of these children and their parents, whether women or men, will be part of the people designated as arriving to Canada in an irregular manner, whatever that means.

Every four weeks a judge in the U.K. has to sign a new authorization to continue to detain a child. This bill says that a child arriving on the shores of Canada, irregularly, will be detained for at least a year and then there will be a hearing every six months. A child could be detained for at least 12 months if not more.

Seeking a release after a year would have no appeal process, which would bring it to the courts. The government would not be bound by the court. I always thought Canada had a rule of law and that we should not do things in an arbitrary manner. The bill would do that.

Canada has some dark history. I previously talked about the boat, the S.S. St. Louis, that came to Canada in the late 1930s after going to the U.S. The boat arrived at Halifax harbour carrying 900 Jewish refugees who were seeking sanctuary. Tragically, because of racism, xenophobia, hatred and anti-Semitism, these refugees were sent away. Two hundred and fifty of them were murdered in the Holocaust after returning to Europe. The refugee law at that time was unjust, cruel and mean-spirited and it led to death. We have always said that never again would we practice the policy of none is too many. We have always said that we will not repeat history.

The bill would allow a boat such as the S.S. St. Louis to dock in Canada. However, those people, whether they are men, women or children, would be detained for at least a year. We may tell some of them that they are genuine refugees and they will be allowed to stay, but they will not be allowed to apply for permanent residence and therefore will not be able to sponsor their children or spouses to come to Canada for at least five years.

What would happen if the people on the S.S. St. Louis were accepted after a few years? They would have to wait for five years and then apply for permanent residence and bring their children over. However, because of the huge backlog, they will have to wait three to four years to bring their children over, no matter whether their children are coming from a refugee camp or another country and facing persecution. A person deemed to be a genuine refugee would have to wait at least nine years to bring a son, daughter, spouse to Canada. How many people would survive in a refugee camp, especially a child, for nine years?

Therefore, we are talking about punishing and attacking refugees, and not just those who arrive on Canada's shores. We are also talking about their relatives who are stuck back home. We are telling them that they either do not come to Canada, or if they do, they have to kiss goodbye their kids or their spouse for at least nine or ten years. They might never see them again.

What kind of law is this? It is not about dealing with smugglers. It is about attacking the refugee claimants. What is happening with these refugees. They will be victimized three times: first, by the persecutors, whoever is hunting them down; second, by the smugglers; and finally, by Canada. It also will incur huge costs. It costs at least $80,000 to $90,000 per person we detain or jail in Canada. We should think of the cost that it will incur to Canadian taxpayers.

Many of them could easily work and being paying taxes. Why will we not allow them to do that, while we process their claims and process them quickly? However, that is not what we are doing. We will just detain them.

Very few refugees know about the kind of laws of the countries to which they go. They do not search them out. In fact, studies show nine out of ten of these people do not know the laws of these countries. We know that Australia, for example, has a very punitive law, but it has not stopped the boats from arriving on its shores or deterred people from arriving there.

For months we debated the issue that all refugees coming to the shores of Canada must be treated equally under one set of rules, one law. We dealt with that in Bill C-11. We said that every person must be treated equally under the law. That is our charter. However, this bill would set up two classes of refugees. One would be the designated kind and they would be treated much worse than others who somehow have arrived in Canada.

The detention, as I said earlier, is arbitrary. The minister may on discretionary grounds based on “exceptional circumstances” be able to release a few people, but we know we should not leave things in an arbitrary manner. It should be set in law so it is clear who will be jailed and who will not be.

The law basically says that all who come here in an irregular fashion will be detained for over a year. It also says that they will not have an opportunity to have an independent tribunal to review their case because if the minister decides their identity has not been established, then there would not be any independent tribunal to review their case, which again, in some ways, contrary to the charter and international law.

Why am I talking so much about detention? A few weeks ago, Toronto held a event called Nuit Blanche, which is an art extravaganza. There were a lot of art shows in different parts of town. I went into a gallery that had a big photo exhibit. The photo exhibit also had tapes and recordings of people in detention in the U.K. I have never heard these kinds of stories first hand from the people who have been detained, but the stories are phenomenal, especially from the children and young people, about the kind of suffering. On average in the U.K it is only for a few weeks, yet the kind of trauma they experience is unbelievable. These are the ones who are awaiting deportation. They have already had their cases judged against them.

In the case we are dealing with, we have not even judged against them yet. Many of them could be genuine refugees and yet we are still jailing them, including their kids. Therefore, it is not possible for us to support a bill of this kind.

Another thing about the bill is that if people's refugee claim gets rejected they would not be able to go to the Refugee Appeal Division. We debated the Refugee Appeal Division for about 10 years and we said that all refugees must have the right to be heard in front of an independent tribunal, which we were about to set up, called the Refugee Appeal Division. By eliminating the opportunity to correct errors at the first level, the bill again puts Canada at risk of violating its most fundamental obligation toward refugees, which is not to send them back to their death.

The bill has other elements that are difficult. It would prevent refugees from going outside Canada. For example, if refugees wanted to go to a United Nations war crime convention or testify to a panel dealing with war crimes, they would not be able to do so. I can understand why the minister said that it was important to ensure they do not go back to the place where they claim they are being persecuted. However, this law actually says that they would not be able to leave Canada at all because they would not be able to get a travel document. Again, that is a problem. By detaining refugees for so long, it makes it harder for refugees to integrate into Canadian society and eventually apply for citizenship. We have seen real problems with this. This was tried with the Somali refugees in the 1990s when thousands were denied permanent residence for years.

Let us look at Australia, which is where I know the minister has been. In the last three years, Australia has moved away from a policy of detention and temporary status for refugees. I do not know why we are repeating what it has moved away from.

What is really in front of us are two options. One is to see refugees, newcomers as a burden. Refugee claimants can be seen as burdens or we could care for them. We did that. We saw the St. Louis refugee claimants as burdens. We made a mistake. We sent people to their death. We cared for the Vietnamese boat people, welcomed them and allowed them to stay and they are doing extremely well in Canada. What is it that we plan to do? Do we see refugees as burdens or do we see them as worthy of our care?

I would support the elements in this bill that punish smugglers in a serious manner. Those are elements that we could definitely support because we do not want to be soft on crime, especially for people who are committing crimes against immigrants or refugees, and we need to punish them harshly. However, what we should not do is attack the refugees. We should not attack the victims because this will not assist Canada's reputation or we will just end up repeating a very sad, tragic chapters of Canadian history where we interned people and where we sent people to their death.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Minister of Citizenship]

Madam Speaker, there are too many misconceptions in that speech for me to respond to at this point but I do have two points to make.

First, the member is factually mistaken when she says that the government of Australia has changed its policy with respect to detention of asylum seekers. In fact, the Australian detention policy, under the Labor government, is far more robust than that which we propose in Bill C-49. In fact, it detains all asylum seekers, regardless of whether they were smuggled to Australia or not, or the means through which they arrived, until their claims are processed. We propose to do no such thing. The Australian practice in that regard, frankly, reflects the standard practice in most other democracies that are signatories to the United Nations convention on refugees.

Having said that, what I found most disturbing and, frankly, demagogic in her speech was to draw a completely specious parallel with the tragic and unjust experience of the rejection of the St. Louis and other second world war Jewish refugees. In that case, Canada had a deliberate policy of none is too many, where we deliberately excluded Jewish immigrants as refugees. We had no refugee resettlement program and no asylum system per se.

Under the regime we propose in Bill C-49, people arriving in those circumstances would be able to enter our waters, disembark and have an asylum claim. Under the new system that we adopted this spring, they would almost certainly have a positive protection decision and be out of detention within a matter of a couple of months. To suggest that we would return people to their deaths is irresponsible and demagogic. Canada--

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

I regret to interrupt the hon. member but there are two minutes left. I would like to give the hon. member for Trinity--Spadina equal chance to respond.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Madam Speaker, I never actually said that we would turn the boats away. What I said was that if the boats do arrive on our shore, we would detain them for over a year and we would prevent them from sponsoring their kids into Canada. They will stay in Europe and it will be at least eight years before they can get into Canada. God knows what will happen to them by that time.

The Australian Human Rights Commission, an organization created by Parliament, conducted a national inquiry into children in immigration detention and found that the children in Australian immigration detention centres had suffered numerous and repeated breaches of their human rights.

Far from deterring people, depriving refugees of their right to family reunification appears to have caused some people to arrive by boat, as later boats brought their wives and children of refugees in Australia into Australia because they were not able to bring in their families through legal channels. We in fact had more boats showing up in Australia because of those kinds of wrong policies, and certainly we--

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

I would just like to advise the hon. member that when this debate resumes, she will have seven minutes left in questions and comments.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-49, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Peter Milliken]

The hon. member for Papineau had the floor before question period, and he has about seven minutes left for questions and comments.

Since there are no questions, we will resume debate. The hon. member for Abbotsford.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is great to get back to matters of substance.

It is an honour to have the opportunity to rise today in support of Bill C-49, an act to prevent human smugglers from abusing Canada's immigration system.

Canada has a history and a tradition of welcoming immigrants who wish to start a new life here. On a per capita basis, we now welcome more newcomers than any other country, nearly a quarter of a million last year alone.

Through the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, introduced by our Conservative government, we have committed to resettle 2,500 more refugees living in refugee camps and urban slums. This is a source of pride for our country and a reflection of the generosity of our nation. It is part of our national character.

Unfortunately, Canada's immigration system and our generosity have become a target for human smuggling operations. The arrival of the MV Sun Sea and the Ocean Lady in a period of less than 12 months clearly demonstrated that human smuggling networks are extending their reach to our borders. Our intelligence indicates that these voyages, organized by criminal syndicates, will continue.

This form of illegal commercial migration is dangerous and exploitive by nature. The journey of these migrants is treacherous, and every year people around the world die in human smuggling operations.

The ringleaders of these smuggling operations are ruthless profiteers. They are vile, despicable criminals who consider their passengers to be little more than cargo. Those profiteers cause misery and suffering, and risk the lives of those they purport to be helping. Human smugglers and those on board their vessels also provide financial support to dangerous international criminal networks.

Many who use these types of smuggling networks are economic migrants. When they use this unlawful behaviour to arrive on our shores and then claim to be asylum seekers, they abuse our country's generosity.

These operations are unfair to those seeking to come to Canada by legal means. Millions of people around the world aspire to come to our great country, and it is gross unfairness to allow others to jump the queue through illegal means and co-opt those who use legal means to come to Canada.

Those who use illegal means take up space and resources in our immigration system, which should be focused on those who have applied to immigrate legally. They deprive true refugees of the opportunity to be granted protection in this great country of ours. When genuine refugees use these illicit networks to get to Canada, they put themselves and their families at risk.

If we do not take strong action now, more vessels will arrive in Canada and more lives will be put at risk. We cannot just stand by and allow these exploitive operations to continue. We must act now.

We must act to avoid a two-tiered immigration system: one tier for legal immigrants who wait patiently in the queue for the privilege of coming to Canada; and a second tier for illegal migrants and queue-jumpers who pay human smugglers to get them to the front of the line.

Canadians have reacted strongly to these unwelcome arrivals. More than 50% of Canadians polled agreed that this type of migration is unacceptable. These events have put at risk public support for immigration in general and refugees in particular.

We are a generous country. We welcome immigrants and refugees from around the world. I would hate to see our national support for that program decline because illegal migrants and smugglers are abusing the system.

We need to maintain public confidence in our immigration and refugee system, since immigration will soon become the source of all our labour-force growth and a critical part of our economic growth.

The legislation before us will help prevent abuse of Canada's immigration system and goodwill. It will help us prevent human smuggling operations. It will provide disincentives to would-be migrants, so that they do not place themselves at the mercy of human smugglers on these treacherous ocean journeys.

I would like to outline how this legislation will do just that. First, the law before us proposes to introduce mandatory detention for up to one year. This will allow for determination of identity, admissibility, and illegal activity. As I am sure most members of this House are aware, people who arrive on these vessels often do not have proper documentation, whether by design or not.

We do not know who they are or whether they might have been involved in criminal or terrorist activities. We as a government need to have time to confirm their identities. This becomes particularly difficult in the case of mass arrivals, as we have recently experienced, when hundreds of people arrive at the same time without the proper paperwork.

As we are now learning, some of the migrants onboard the Sun Sea have already claimed refugee status in other countries such as the United Kingdom, and have already been found not to be in need of protection.

Detention will allow us to verify and confirm the identities of these individuals. This way we can determine whether they are admissible to Canada, or whether they are, or have ever been, involved in illegal activity.

That is fair and reasonable, and Canadians agree with us. Our main priority is to protect the safety and security of Canadians. We need to know who these people are before they are released into our Canadian communities. This is the least that Canadians can expect of their government, and we are delivering on that expectation.

Second, this legislation aims to introduce several disincentives to stop those who are tempted to use this perilous form of migration. A key disincentive is that those who arrive as a result of a designated smuggling event will not be able to apply for permanent residency for a period of at least five years. This applies whether they are found to be in need of protection or not.

During that five-year period, persons found to be in need of protection would be restricted from travelling outside Canada and would be unable to apply for permanent residence to Canada through other means. As a result, they would not be eligible to sponsor family members into Canada or to become Canadian citizens during that time.

For those who received protected-person status, reporting requirements would be put in place. This will allow our government to be able to initiate proceedings before the Immigration and Refugee Board to remove their protected-person status if there is evidence that the individual no longer needs protection. This would apply, for example, if the individual returns to his country of origin or if conditions in that country change.

If someone is able to return safely from a holiday to his country of origin, the country that he claims to be fleeing, then he is clearly not in genuine need of Canada's protection. In such cases, the existing legislation would allow the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism to make an application to the Refugee Protection Division for a cessation of the individual's protected-person status.

These legislative amendments would ensure that while an individual is subject to a cessation application, his application for permanent residence would be suspended and would not be processed until a decision is made on the minister's application. If the Refugee Protection Division upholds the minister's decision and the application for cessation, the individual would be removed from Canada.

An individual would be allowed to apply for permanent residence only after five years, if he is determined to be in further need of protection. This means that people in this category could apply for permanent residence only if no cessation proceedings had been initiated as a result of changed country conditions, or if they had not returned to their country of origin, or if the minister's application for cessation was not positively decided by the IRB.

If there is evidence that the protected-person status was obtained fraudulently, if, for example, an individual has directly or indirectly misrepresented or withheld material facts relevant to his situation, then the Minister of Public Safety would be able to apply to the Refugee Protection Division of the IRB to revoke the individual's refugee protection status. If the original decision is cancelled and no other grounds for protection remain, the individual would be removed from Canada.

Once in force, the bill would also eliminate access to the Refugee Appeal Division for people who want to review a negative decision on their claim. While they would still be able to ask the Federal Court to review a decision, they would not benefit from an automatic stay of removal from Canada while their application was being considered.

These measures that our government has proposed are firm but reasonable. They are exactly what Canadians have been calling for. They would maintain our Conservative government's goal of faster protection for those who truly need it and faster removal of those who do not. This will be achieved through the balanced refugee reform act, the bill before us today.

To further discourage individuals from coming to Canada as part of a smuggling operation, we are also taking measures to ensure that these individuals have access to fewer Canadian benefits. Canadians enjoy health services that are among the best and most generous in the world.

Currently, asylum seekers, resettled refugees, failed asylum seekers awaiting removal, detained individuals, and victims of trafficking are all provided with temporary health care coverage through the interim federal health program.

Under the changes we are proposing, the scope of services provided under the IFH program would be reduced for those who arrive in Canada illegally by way of human smuggling. They would receive only basic coverage, including medically necessary care and the immigration medical exams that refugee claimants must take upon their arrival in order to ensure that they do not pose a risk to public health or safety.

We need to ensure that illegal migrants are not receiving health coverage that is more generous than that offered to hard-working Canadians.

Canada is a fair, generous and welcoming country for those who want to work for a better life, but our generosity should not make us a target for criminal activities such as smuggling operations. In order to avoid becoming a target, we must remove the incentives for people seeking to come here by way of human smuggling.

These measures before us today are right. They are fair. And they are necessary. We know that Canadians agree with us. Poll after poll shows that Canadians want firm action taken on human smuggling, on cheating the system.

Cultural groups across the country have endorsed our measures. The Peel Tamil Community Centre stated that it was “pleased to see the government taking action to deter human smugglers who charge victims enormous sums of money”. The Taiwanese Canadian Association of Toronto said, “We need to know the identities of these individuals before they are released into Canadian society. That's why we also support the mandatory detention of illegal migrants who use human smugglers”.

Our government is committed to protecting the integrity of our immigration and refugee system. We are committed to upholding our laws. We are committed to protecting the safety and security of Canadians.

Taken together, the changes we have proposed will help safeguard our fair and generous immigration system. Moreover, they will help ensure that Canada is not an easy target for criminal organizations involved in human smuggling.

As I mentioned before, this legislation has won the support of virtually all key stakeholders. The legislation has resonated with Canadians at large. In fact, recent polls show that 60% of Canadians want to send ships back without allowing them to land on our shores. Yet we know that as a compassionate country we have to leave room for legitimate refugees. It is the abuse of the system that we object to.

Canada is a compassionate country, but because we are compassionate and generous, there are people around the world who will abuse that generosity, and Canadians do not tolerate abuse. In fact, I am shocked to hear the opposition parties in this House actually criticizing and opposing this bill. It is very clear that they are still not listening to Canadians.

We have consulted broadly with Canadians on this bill and we know that Canadians support it. My invitation to the opposition parties is to join us in doing the right thing for Canada.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member knows that I come from a riding that is one of the most ethnically diverse ridings in all of Canada.

One of the things I heard loud and clear this past summer was that people wanted us to stand up for Canada once and for all. People wanted to ensure that our immigration system and our refugee protection system put Canadian interests first. They wanted to ensure that the people who needed help were getting help but they did not want us to see our system and our generosity abused.

I wonder if the hon. member received the same type of reaction in his riding that I received in my riding, not just from Canadians who have been in this country for many years, but also from new Canadians who came to me and said that we needed to do something about this, that we needed to ensure that people are not abused and people are not taken advantage of by human smugglers.

I wonder what reaction the people in his riding had over the summer. I wonder if he could, in some way, explain to me and to this House how any of the members of the opposition could possibly, at this point in time, be contemplating going against what I think are the wishes of most Canadians, certainly the wishes of the people in my riding, to finally, once and for all, put Canada first when we are talking about immigration and refugee protection.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I, like my colleague, come from a riding that is very diverse. In fact, I believe the city of Abbotsford is the fifth most diverse community in Canada on a per capita basis.

Do members know where the support for this legislation is the strongest? It is in the immigrant communities. They understand because got to Canada by following the law. They are law-abiding citizens. They do it right.

What they object to are the human smugglers around the world who see Canada as a soft touch and then have people pay them, in some cases, $50,000 per person to smuggle them into the country and essentially, by extension, jump the queue that many other immigrants are prepared to legally immigrate to Canada through.

It is disgraceful that we would have opposition parties in this House actually opposing these kinds of reforms. It is so puzzling to me that the opposition parties, the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc, still are not listening to what Canadians are saying.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague.

It confuses me when I hear certain things from the opposition on occasion. This bill deals with both sides of the equation: the smugglers and those who are taking advantage of the situation. I relate it to those who are thieves. A thief will steal something and sell it to somebody else. Those persons who have those stolen goods are still breaking the law by having stolen goods.

Why is it important that this bill deals with both the smugglers and those who are being smuggled? If he could possibly answer that question, I would really appreciate it.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my Conservative colleague from Burlington is a great MP who gets the issue, unlike members of the opposition parties who continue to whine, criticize and oppose what Canadians are demanding we do.

He is right. It is a matter of balance. First, we are going after the smugglers themselves because they are part of international criminal organizations. They earn millions upon millions of dollars every year on the backs of the human suffering of others. We are targeting them and imposing much tougher penalties on them if they do arrive in Canada. We are also working with international authorities to interdict them before they ever leave their countries of origin. We are working very hard with our domestic and international authorities to ensure we go after human smugglers before they ever get here.

Second, we are also going after the customers because many of the customers are actually illegal migrants. They are coming to Canada for purposes other than true refugee reasons. They are coming here because they may be economic migrants or they may be escaping criminal or terrorist activity elsewhere.

This is a balanced bill because it goes after the human smugglers and their customers.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, given my colleague's experience in law, his extensive international experience and the different cultures that he interacts with on a regular basis, would having a law that appears to clamp down on human smuggling enforced increase or decrease the interest of qualified people who would like to immigrate to our great country?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague has touched on the key element of this bill, and that has to do with the integrity and credibility of our refugee system in Canada.

If legitimate immigrants and refugees from around the world think that if they use legal means to get to Canada to make a new life here that they will be in a long lineup and others will be jumping the queue by cheating, then they will be discouraged. Those very people who are prepared to be law-abiding will not come to Canada and we will be stuck with those who abuse the system.

In Canada we want immigrants and refugees who are in need of genuine protection. We want them to be here in Canada, build new lives for themselves and become law-abiding citizens. This bill would ensure that the credibility and integrity of our refugee system is maintained.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Lévis—Bellechasse, QC]

Mr. Speaker, unlike my colleagues from Oak Ridges—Markham and Abbotsford, the riding I represent is not known for the number of immigrants it welcomes, or for being ethnically diverse. On the contrary, Lévis—Bellechasse is a typical region in Quebec. The people are proud and happy to welcome immigrants, but they are against organized crime groups that smuggle migrants in ahead of everyone else and, even worse, exploit them.

I have a quote from Antoine Malek, the president of the Association of the Coptic Orthodox Community:

It is time for Canada to send a clear signal to the world to discourage and fight human smuggling. That is why the Coptic community supports new federal legislation to protect human life, Canada's security and the integrity of Canada's immigration policy as a whole.

My question for the member is clear: will this bill allow us to preserve the integrity of our immigration system by preventing the entry of illegal immigrants, and by ensuring that organized crime groups do not bring people to Canada illegally?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am actually the son of an immigrant. My mother came to Canada through legal means after the second world war and, boy, was she grateful for the opportunity to come to this country. My mother and father are law-abiding citizens who worked hard to build a life for themselves and to provide us children with an education knowing that Canada was a country that gave their children so much opportunity.

However, that opportunity is dependent upon the rule of law and the assumption that every Canadian citizen and permanent resident will follow the law and be a law-abiding citizen.

This legislation is absolutely critical to ensuring that tradition carries on in Canada, that the refugee system has credibility and integrity.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my question is much simpler than the tough questions put to him by his own caucus colleagues.

Could the hon. member tell me how many refugee claimants he has met with, how long has he talked to them, how many sponsored refugees has he called as friends and how well does he know them?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it would take me hours to regale the Liberal member with all the individuals I have met with over the years who have been refugees and who have been immigrants There are some 30,000 immigrants in my riding alone.

What we need to focus in on is collaborating within the House.

I have a question for that member. Why will he not support this legislation that is demanded by Canadians? Polls show that over 60% of Canadians want our government to get tough on human smuggling. We are doing that. Why is that member not on side?

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to Bill C-49 today.

During question period today, the member for Winnipeg South Centre asked a question about the nominee program in Manitoba. This has been a very successful program, developed under the auspices of the NDP under former premier Gary Doer's leadership in 1999. In fact, the program became so successful that the province of Nova Scotia approached Manitoba to study how to replicate it. I hope and believe Nova Scotia has a similarly successful program at this time.

In answering the question, the minister made the point that Manitoba's population represented 10% of the population of Canada and that Manitoba received 30% of the nominees under the program. He pointed out that while the Liberals were in power, Manitoba only received 2,000 nominees per year. Under the Conservatives, it gets 10,000 per year. We like to think that the 10,000 we get in Manitoba each year is a result of the initiatives of the Gary Doer NDP government, which proved to be so successful.

I also want to point out that the Minister of Immigration has provided some of the only true leadership we have seen from his government in the last five years. In June he brought all parties in Parliament onside with an agreement on Bill C-11 to take care of the mess in the immigration system, which had developed over the years.

The argument rages still in the House as to whether the mess was in fact left by the Liberals or created by the Conservatives. The NDP has stayed out of that fight. They can continue to fight it out as to who is ultimately responsible, but the fact is it is a mess. As I said, the minister was able to get all party agreement in June to make big improvements to the immigration system.

What the minister did is something the government should replicate. There is a schizophrenia in the government. It seems to be incapable of going back to the last long period of minority government, the Lester B. Pearson years in the sixties, when we got a new flag, we amalgamated the armed forces, we brought in medicare and a lot of other things. The Conservatives have literally wasted five full years trying to fight its way through Parliament with no real effect.

However, there is one good example with the minister getting all parties together and getting a new immigration act in place. The government should be doing more of that. Instead, what has it done? The Conservatives have done some polling, and we are very clear about that. They keep mentioning the 65% public support for Bill C-49.

The bill is not being promoted by the Minister of Immigration. It is being promoted by the Minister of Public Safety. Once again, the Minister of Public Safety trumps the Minister of Immigration and the polling of the Conservative Party. The appeal to public sentiment is the overriding concern behind this bill.

We feel we should give some time for Bill C-11 to be implemented in the country. It was only passed in June. It has not had time to do what it has been designed to do. Now the government is trying to amend the bill before it even has its current legislation in place.

It is interesting to note that Bill C-49 has 12 clauses that deal with refugees. Only five clauses actually deal with smugglers. I think all parties in the House agree that human smuggling is a very bad thing and that it is a criminal enterprise. In fact, the government points out that it is a criminal enterprise that spans the globe, that human smugglers facilitate for a profit individuals entering Canada illegally. The figure of $50,000 is being mentioned.

Our party is totally opposed to this. We think the government should take measures to root out these smugglers. We know the smugglers are not here. The smugglers are in foreign jurisdictions. Therefore, the government has to bring in legislation to deal directly with an effort to get at these people in other countries. It has indicated it is dealing with that issue through diplomatic means and policing means. It is going to have to deal with the police in Thailand, in Southeast Asia and other countries around the world.

It has also been pointed out that there already is a life sentence under the immigration laws of the country for smugglers. Therefore, what is this all about? Why is the government bringing in a new bill with a graduated penalty system and minimum sentences when we already have a life sentence for people involved in this kind of activity, if they are caught.

By charging large sums of money for transportation, human smugglers have been making a lucrative business out of facilitating illegal migration around the world, often counselling smuggled persons to claim asylum in the country in which they are smuggled. Human smuggling can take place in many forms, including by boat.

Once again, as has been pointed out by many members, the government is making a separation as to how people arrive in Canada. It will deal with people who arrive by boat differently than people who arrive by airplane.

In terms of human smuggling undermining Canada's security, large scale arrivals make it difficult to properly investigate whether those who arrive, including the smugglers themselves, could pose a risk to Canada on the basis of either criminality or national security. The public security minister made pronouncements about criminals and terrorists, speaking about the recent arrival of the boat, stirring up public sentiment against them. The people who are brought in will be investigated. That is the whole idea behind what we are doing right now.

In addition, the government wants to give the Minister of Public Safety more powers. I do not know if that is such a good idea. In the short term perhaps with the current situation it might seem like the popular thing to do, because 65% of the people are against acceptance of the people on these boats. However, if we were to take it two or three years down the line and a boat load of people from another country showed up, perhaps the polling then would show that 65% were in favour of the people staying. What is the minister going to do? What is the point of having an immigration department in the first place if the minister is going to be overriding it and making decisions along the way? That measure may be wise in the short run, but may not be wise in the long run.

The government also wants to make it easier to prosecute human smugglers, but it has to catch them in the first place and they have to be caught overseas. Foreign governments have to be involved in the process as well.

I believe the government already knows who these smugglers are. The minister has indicated there are three or four groups at least in Sri Lanka that were previously involved in other criminal activities. These groups have now transferred their activities over to human smuggling. Half the battle is knowing who the enemy is.

The bottom line is we should be enforcing our existing laws as opposed to dreaming up new laws to become more popular with the public.

The government also wants to introduce mandatory minimum prison sentences on convicted smugglers. It wants to hold the owners and operators of the ships to account for the use of their ships in human smuggling operations.

The government is ensuring the safety and security of our streets and communities by establishing, and this is a good one, the mandatory detention of participants for up to a year or until a positive decision by the Immigration and Refugee Board, whichever comes sooner, in order to allow for the determination of the identity, admissibility and illegal activity of a participant.

We have some experience with Australia. My colleague from B.C. indicated earlier that he thought there were probably 20,000 refugees in the Australian system. I recognize it is a little warmer in Australia than here, but where will Australia put these people?

The government has announced that it will spend $9 billion on new prisons in the country. Will the government use these prisons as detention centres? Is it the government's intention to put people into detention centres? That is one of the initiatives in the bill.

The government hopes to reduce the attraction of coming to Canada by way of illegal human smuggling by doing several other things. It is going to prevent those who come to Canada from applying for permanent resident status for a period of five years.

I may be running out of time quicker than I anticipated so I do not know if I will have time to get to all the studies that have been done.

Studies done in England show that most immigrants do not have a clue of the rules of the country to which they go. They go to that country regardless of the rules. Are we expecting smugglers to start reading the new rules? What is the government going to do? Is it going to send the smugglers a list of the new rules and all the regulations that are promulgated through the bill?

The government is going to hold a refugee back from permanent resident status for a period of five years should that individual successfully obtain refugee status. The individual will be prevented from sponsoring family members for five years. I will have a lot to say about that at a later point.

The government is trying to reduce the attraction of coming to Canada by way of illegal human smuggling operations by ensuring the health benefits participants receive are not more generous than those received by the Canadian public.

The government is enhancing the ability to terminate the protected person status of those who return to their country of origin for a vacation or demonstrate in other ways that they are not in legitimate need of Canadian protection.

Another point raised by other speakers was whether the bill would survive a charter challenge.

The government is planning to detect and deter human smuggling overseas through the appointment of a special adviser on human smuggling and illegal migration. That may be a good idea. I do not know who that will be and what he or she might do, but hopefully there will be a way of monitoring or getting some sort of report from this individual as to progress being made. We would not want to add onto a bureaucracy that produces very little results.

In terms of increasing the presence overseas through operational activities, diplomatic outreach, partnership with other affected nations and engagement with multilateral bodies, anything that can track down the smugglers and put them in jail is probably a good idea. I indicated that we already have life sentences for smugglers. If we apply life sentences and put them in jail, the House will have our full agreement on that, but the preponderance of the bill actually deals with the migrants themselves and that is what the government is looking at.

Bill C-49 is called the “preventing human smugglers from abusing Canada's immigration system act”, but it is really basically an act to attack and punish refugees. As I indicated before, we would rather attack the criminals, the traffickers, the smugglers, and not the victims. The bill will concentrate absolute power in the hands of the minister to decide which refugees will be subject to these measures, with no clear definition of irregular arrival. It can apply to any group of refugees, immigrants or visitors.

Also, as I have indicated, Parliament already approved a strong and balanced refugee law a few months ago. The Conservatives should basically concentrate on enforcing Bill C-11, the law we have right now, and allow genuine refugees to stay and deport the bogus ones as quickly as possible. We are fully in agreement with that. Once again, we were part of the development group behind Bill C-11 in the first place.

We have also long called for the refugee determination process to be sped up, because it has taken too long in the past, and increased RCMP resources and secure immigration status of trafficked and smuggled victims so that they can testify against the real criminals. That was a concern that was indicated as well, that even if we do catch the smugglers, what are the realistic chances that witnesses would be willing to testify against them? We need to make sure that we have RCMP resources and proper safeguards to make sure that when we do catch these people, the witnesses are able to testify against them to put them away for those long sentences.

Our members have indicated that the bill will hurt legitimate refugees and those people who help them. It will prevent refugees from bringing their spouses and children to Canada for at least seven years, and women and children will be detained for at least one year, repeating the previous sad history of punishing and interning refugees and their children.

Bill C-49 is basically very deeply unfair to refugees because it fails to honour obligations under Canadian and international law, and other speakers have mentioned that. It deprives individual cases from the independent review that justice requires. It will involve huge costs and unnecessary detention. We talked about the $9 billion in prisons that the government will have sprouting up across the country over the next little while. It will do nothing to prevent human smuggling. More laws will not catch the smugglers who are overseas. Mandatory minimum sentences will not deter them.

Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, smuggling is already punishable by life imprisonment and mandatory minimums have been shown not to work as deterrents. If we already have the possibility of life imprisonment, then how much further do we want to go in this area?

I recognize that my time is up and I would be willing to answer questions from members.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the hon. member from the NDP's speech, but it is completely naive to think that smugglers would not read the new rules. Does he think that smugglers and thieves, criminals, do not understand why they come to Canada, that they just pick Canada because it is on the map? They know what our present rules and regulations are regarding refugee status and how they can get away with smuggling human beings here. They know what the rules are. They know what is available to them.

It is important for us to send the message through this bill, to make changes that would make the mass immigration of refugees much more difficult so that we are not a solution for the customers they are smuggling here.

The member is upset about the potential one-year detention when they arrive here. We deport 14,000 people a year. We have about another 10,000 or 15,000 people who we do not even know where they are. They were refused refugee status and they are out on the lam. Why would we allow people coming to Canada in boatloads to be on the lam for a year until they get approval? We need to stop this now.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that the member is very excited about his bill. The fact of the matter is that we are certainly determined to track down the smugglers. That is the real problem here. However, we do not believe that we should be punishing the migrants in the process. Let us put whatever efforts we can into tracking down these smugglers.

I already indicated several times that we have the availability of life sentences under the current legislation. Let us put some effort into finding the smugglers.

I have given the government credit. It has made some initiatives to deal with foreign governments and it has appointed a special adviser on human smuggling and illegal migration. Let us give this system some time. The problem did not just develop yesterday.

Australia has been dealing with this problem for several years. It has had detention systems and they do not work. The migrants keep coming.

The government, once again, wants to do something that does not work.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, somewhat in response to the last question and answer, I wonder if the hon. member knows whether these smugglers actually ever come on these boats. Do they come and have a sign on them that says, “I'm the smuggler”? Or is it more likely that they are actually somewhere in a third country, operating an odious business that takes advantage of vulnerable people?

I am questioning whether this act could actually help track down those smugglers or do anything with them, really.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I invite the member to read the minister's speech on this subject. I thought I heard him say that they knew where the smugglers were or who the smugglers were, that there were three or four organized criminal gangs from Sri Lanka that had been involved in the drug trade and in arms deals and whatnot in the past, and now that the war has more or less come to and end they have decided to embark on human smuggling. So if they know who the people are, it should be a simple matter of having our police forces, and so on, talk to the foreign governments and try to do something about it from that end.

Clearly, the problem is over there. That is where the boats are being bought. That is where the boats are. They are recruiting the people over there. The money is being flushed through bank accounts in these foreign countries. So it is incumbent upon these countries to help us catch these smugglers. The government itself has indicated that it is going to appoint a special adviser on human smuggling and it is going to increase the presence overseas through operational activities, diplomatic outreach, partnership with other affected nations, and all those other great things that would catch these smugglers. So I invite them to get out there and catch them.

In the meantime, we have Bill C-11, which we put together through a co-operation of all of the parties in this House. Let us get it implemented and let us deal with the backlog in the immigration system.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Elmwood—Transcona touched on a point that I would like him to address.

In the recent Auditor General's report, the Department of Immigration came under serious criticism from her. A couple of points she specifically raised was that in many cases the department itself had no standards for service delivery, it had no comprehensive way to monitor performance, and out of 35 different service areas, only four had service targets. In addition, they provided no consistent way to communicate with clients who were waiting.

On the one hand, we have this bill that is before the House, but on the other hand we know that there are serious problems within the department itself. Again, this is not about the employees in that department. I would argue that they do not have the tools and resources they need to adequately do the job.

I wonder if the member could comment specifically on the problems within the department itself in terms of quality and service standards.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, clearly the Auditor General has a unique way of investigating and determining what is or is not going on in government departments. None of those observations would surprise me in the least.

We had a system that was broken under the Liberals and was not appreciably improved under the Conservatives until the last little while when the current minister was able to get all the parties in this Parliament together and come up with a big success. Trying to get four parties in this House to agree on anything is almost impossible, but he did the impossible. He got everybody together. Everybody here was reasonably happy.

I listened to all the self-congratulatory messages here in June and I was really impressed. I thought it was too bad that we could not do this again. This is what we did collectively in this House through the auspices of Bill C-11.

I do not know why we do not just leave it there and work on this smuggling issue separately through law enforcement and the procedures currently in place. Again, we have life sentences for smugglers.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, my question for the member is, why do they not listen to Canadians? Why are they blindly going ahead and not listening to Canadians?

Canadians do want to have this problem solved. It was one of the major things I heard this summer. Canadians were not happy.

Canadians also said to the NDP, Bloc, and Liberal coalition, “no” to a carbon tax. Now they are trying to sneak through the carbon tax, through a litigation bill also known as Bill C-469, a Trojan Horse that wants to bring a carbon tax on every Canadian. It is a job-killing tax.

I would like to know from the member why they do not listen to Canadians. Why do they try to do things sneakingly? The message from Canadians is clear. Why are they not listening to Canadians?

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, we are listening to Canadians.

Canadians told us they wanted to make this minority government work. The minority government surely is not listening to what Canadians want.

We have agreed with all the parties in this House to pass Bill C-11, which cleans up the problems in the immigration system right now. We have already indicated that we want to do something about smugglers, and there are already life sentences under current laws for smugglers.

Let us get the government out there and catch the smugglers first and give them their life sentences. We are right behind any initiative to do that.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Lévis—Bellechasse, QC]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to say a few words today about this bill, which is important to the people of Lévis, Bellechasse and Les Etchemins.

As we all know, the Prime Minister recently attended a citizenship ceremony to welcome new Canadian citizens. Every year, Canada welcomes thousands of immigrants and refugees who benefit from one of the fairest and most generous refugee protection systems in the world. The government and all Canadians are proud of this system, which demonstrates our country's generosity.

Nevertheless, we are currently facing a very serious problem that threatens the safety and security of our communities and the integrity of our generous immigration system. In August, the MV Sun Sea arrived in Canada illegally less than a year after another vessel, the Ocean Lady also arrived illegally. The fact that two ships reached Canada's shores within 12 months of each other clearly shows that human smuggling rings are getting more interested in Canada because they think they can exploit our immigration system and make money from it.

Canada willingly welcomes people who patiently wait their turn to come live here in our country and benefit from the many advantages of Canadian citizenship. They want to contribute to Canadian society and they want their descendants to do so as well. For hundreds of years, strong, brave people from around the world have contributed to our great country's prosperity and culture and continue to do so. In my case, it all began five generations ago when people from Ireland arrived. Quebeckers welcomed them. They became a part of the society and made their contribution to it.

However, the government has made it clear that it will not tolerate any exploitation of the Canadian immigration system, whether by human smugglers or outlaws trying to make money. That is why our minister recently introduced the preventing human smugglers from abusing Canada's immigration system bill.

The government has three objectives with this legislation. The first is to make it easier to prosecute human smugglers. Second, it imposes a mandatory minimum sentence on convicted human smugglers. Third, it holds ship owners and operators accountable for the use of their ships in human smuggling operations. This bill gets to the root of the problem of smugglers and illegal immigrants. It also sends a clear message to these organized crime gangs that Canada's border is not a sieve and that illegal immigrants are not welcome here.

The government is also taking measures to ensure the safety and security of our neighbourhoods and communities. Anyone involved in human smuggling operations will be held for up to one year to allow for the determination of identity, admissibility and the illegal nature of the activity, if applicable.

The government is using this law to make it less attractive to come to Canada through illegal human smuggling operations. We have rights and responsibilities.

Under this legislation, anyone involved in a human smuggling operation will not be able to apply for permanent resident status for five years, if they succeed in obtaining refugee status. They will not receive health benefits that are more generous than those received by the Canadian public. It will also be easier to revoke someone's refugee status if they return to their country of origin for a vacation or if they demonstrate in other ways that they are not legitimately in need of Canada's protection.

Individuals who arrive in Canada as a result of human smuggling will not be allowed to sponsor family members for a period of five years.

The government is also appointing a special advisor on human smuggling and illegal immigration who will coordinate a whole-government response to human smuggling.

Are these measures tough? Yes, absolutely. They have to be tough in order to make human smugglers and fraudsters think twice before they try to commit these crimes against Canadians.

However, these measures are also fair, fair to those who legitimately and legally wait or plan to wait in line for a better life in Canada. They are also fair for all Canadians and Canadian taxpayers who rightfully expect that our borders and shores are protected and secure and our generous systems, including immigration, are protected from abuse.

These measures will enhance our ability to crack down on those who engage in human smuggling and try to exploit Canada's immigration system. They will strengthen our ability to protect Canadians from criminal or terrorist threats and they will respect our international obligations to provide assistance to those legitimate refugees who need our protection and help to start a new and better life, while tackling international crime and human smugglers.

The people of my riding and all Canadians want tough but fair measures to stop those who would abuse our generosity from illegally becoming part of Canadian society. We know that threats exist and that we must remain vigilant. That is why the government is taking concrete action today to ensure the safety of Canadians.

Benjamin Perrin, an expert on human trafficking, gave a talk here in Ottawa yesterday. He explained how the migrants who come here are exploited by human smugglers and by members of organized crime right here in Canada. This is one way to tackle the crimes being committed.

This measure is supported not only by the people of Lévis—Bellechasse and Les Etchemins, but also by several ethnic communities.

“Canada is a generous country with an immigration system that treats both immigrants and refugees very well. However there are those who are not willing to wait their turns in line and criminals who would profit from this. Instead they want to jump the immigration queue and make their way to Canada through any means available to them, often bypassing several hospitable countries and travelling halfway around the world to land on our shores.

“These individuals pay criminals to be smuggled to Canada where they can claim refugee status, in effect putting themselves at the front of the line illegally. We believe that the criminal activities of the smugglers should be prosecuted to the full extent of Canadian and international law. As a result of this human smuggling, honest and legal would-be immigrants who are waiting patiently and anxiously in the queue are penalized, while the smuggled refugees' claims are processed.

“The criminal enterprise that is human smuggling is an abuse of both Canada's generosity and the honesty of all the other immigration applicants. We are pleased that the government has sent a clear message that it will not be tolerated and we welcome the introduction of legislation preventing human smugglers from in effect creating an unfair, two-tier immigration system, one for the impatient rich and the other for the honest applicant”.

This long quote is from Michael Deakin-Macey. He is a past president of the board of directors of the Victoria Immigrant and Refugee Centre Society. It summarizes very well the spirit of this committee, and I am appalled today to see that members of the opposition are not willing to move this bill forward to second reading, to send it to committee, because this is a bill that Canada needs to be protected against the illegal smuggling that goes on around the world.

I would be more than happy to answer questions. I hope that we will get some support from the opposition because Canadians are calling for this bill.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Trinity—Spadina, Citizenship and Immigration; the hon. member for St. John's South—Mount Pearl, G8 and G20 Summits.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it was truly a pleasure listening to the speech of the hon. member who seems to have a true passion for real refugee claimants, a true passion to fight those who would seek to take advantage of the people who really need our help in society and to crack down on human smugglers. I know that his constituents are very lucky to have him fighting on their behalf each and every day in the House.

What is really troubling me through this whole debate is hearing the members of the opposition. The NDP member consistently talks about the 25-year penalty that is in place, but we all know on this side of the House what a 25-year penalty for the NDP and the Liberals is. Twenty-five years is a 15-year faint hope clause. It is time served, which brings it down even further. There is good behaviour. So by the time it is all done, we would actually owe the criminals some time. We also know that last week, when we were debating another issue, they told us we should treat criminals like kids because the poor criminals have had so much trouble in their lives.

How can members opposite not support a bill that would crack down on human smugglers?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Lévis—Bellechasse, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Oak Ridges—Markham for his question and for the work he has done for immigration in this country. I want him to know I am proud that he is part of our government, which wants to pass a bill to put an end to illegal immigration and to attack the root of the child trafficking problem.

Unfortunately, it is a problem that we have already dealt with here in the House. It is not surprising to see that the Bloc is opposing human smuggling today, because they voted against Bill C-268, to impose minimum sentences for criminals found guilty of human trafficking. We get the picture. I think it is deplorable that the Quebec MPs are opposing measures that Quebeckers want. These measures are wanted because we have one of the most generous immigration systems in the world. They are currently in the process of creating a two-tier system: one system for illegal immigrants and another system for people who wait their turn. Our message is that there is only one way to enter the country and that is through an honest and transparent process. That is what this bill aims to achieve.

[Devinder Shory, Conservative, Calgary Northeast, AB]

Mr. Speaker, being an immigrant I am very much interested in immigration and this legislation, Bill C-49. I think the government is taking the absolute right step by bringing this kind of legislation, which would not only deter smugglers but would also give a strong message to potential refugee claimants that they will be dealt with by tougher action. At the same time, it would also give the government some encouragement to decide and determine those cases of potential refugee claimants within that one-year period when those claimants will be kept in custody.

Would my colleague agree that this will give an urgent message to those potential refugee claimants that it will not be as easy as it was to go through the smuggling process and jump the queue?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Lévis—Bellechasse, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to acknowledge and thank my colleague from Calgary Northeast for his excellent question. I would first like to tell him that not only do the people of Lévis—Bellechasse give their full support to this bill, but so do the ethnic communities.

For the reason given by my colleague, it is important to avoid a two-tiered immigration system where illegal immigrants and organized crime jump the queue and move ahead of honest applicants. That is at the heart of this bill and it is the reason why we would like the opposition to adopt the same position as the people of Lévis—Bellechasse, the people of Calgary and the people of ethnic communities. I have a quote I would like to read.

Human smugglers make our immigration system less fair for legal immigrants. We believe that the government should have the tools it needs to ensure that our immigration system is fair.

Who said that? Nader Abou Chacra, president of the Canadian Druze Society.

It is evident that ethnic communities are asking us to strengthen our immigration system so that these communities can integrate and welcome immigrants who arrive legally, and not by the illegal means that we want to eliminate with the bill before us.

[Luc Desnoyers, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, is the member aware that the bill violates various treaties and also the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the 1951 refugee convention, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child?

How can he say that this bill, which violates three conventions and treaties, will become a law that Canada can enforce internationally when we do not enforce the other laws?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Lévis—Bellechasse, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague opposite for his question. Fundamental human rights are being violated with illegal immigration. We have seen women and children come here as slaves, which is the worst violation of human rights. These people lose all of their rights. They come to our country without ID, they live illegally, they are at the mercy of organized crime groups, and they are exploited here.

The member has a chance to support a bill that will make a difference and put an end to this violation of the fundamental rights of people who come to our country and to the scourge that threatens to destroy our immigration system.

I urge the member opposite to follow the lead of the Lebanese Islamic Centre, which said:

We have noticed that smugglers are targeting Canada. That is why we support these amendments. We must make it easier to press charges against these criminals who profit from vulnerable individuals, and we must deter anyone who would consider committing this crime by imposing mandatory jail time and minimum prison sentences on smugglers.

We are moving forward.

[Tim Uppal, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to hear the hon. member speak to the bill and I fully agree with him that we need to stop this human smuggling. It is a loophole for illegal immigrants to come and, frankly, to jump the queue. This is something that always upsets new Canadians who have immigrated to Canada through the proper channels in order to experience everything that is Canada. When my parents came over to Canada, they went through a process and were very pleased to go through that process in a legal way.

Why does the member think the previous government did not address this issue? This is not a new issue. This is not something that just happened because of the previous ship that landed on our shores. This issue has been around in Canada for a long time. It is something that needed to be addressed and I am pleased that this government is addressing it.

Why does the member feel that the previous government ignored this?

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

The hon. member for Lévis—Bellechasse for a brief answer.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Lévis—Bellechasse, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his excellent question.

I am pleased to be part of a government that gets the job done. In this specific case, that is precisely what we are doing with a critical issue. Not only are we acting on this human smuggling matter, but we are also acting on the entire immigration issue. We see our minister accomplishing long-awaited and necessary tasks.

I have here a quote, again from a representative of an ethnic community. This time, it is the Arab and Syrian community of Montreal, which says:

Human smuggling is a lucrative enterprise that generates huge profits for the merciless criminals who organize these trips. The very nature of illegal migration means that anyone could be tempted to come to Canada. It also means that we run the risk that terrorists may be on board these ships bound for Canada.

It is not surprising that the previous government did nothing at the time, because today it has the chance to take action and it is opposing this bill.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to speak today to this bill at second reading.

The concerns of Canadians have been well expressed by members of the Conservative government. They have echoed the concerns that I have heard from many people in my riding and across the country as people have raised concerns about people arriving on Canada's shores in very vulnerable conditions.

Obviously the arrival this summer of the Sun Sea, carrying almost 500 Tamil refugee claimants from Sri Lanka, raised concerns. It raised concerns across the political spectrum. Those on the more left side of spectrum felt that someone was taking advantage of refugee claimants by charging exorbitant amounts of money and placing their very lives in danger for a second or third time as they were placed on vessels that were not seaworthy. They were designed to actually travel between Sri Lanka and India but made an across-the-ocean voyage to Canada.

There was also a concern that this was the second ship. The previous ship, the Ocean Lady, also came to the shores of Canada with refugee claimants on it. That began to raise concerns in Canada that something was going wrong, that something was out of control.

I congratulate the government for resisting some of the urges that some Canadians had to actually stop the ships mid-course in the ocean. The government made a wise decision, actually followed the law on this and exercised great concern for the administration of justice and for the law.

However, that began a discussion around the sort of law that Canadians wanted. Canadians were expressing concern, even outrage and, at times, misunderstanding about what was going on. There was a misunderstanding about immigration versus refugee law. I know that all hon. members in this chamber know that there is a difference between immigrants and refugees and that there is a further difference between refugee claimants and refugees themselves, or convention refugees as declared. That discussion has been sort of muddied by government ministers who have taken the opportunities, perhaps unwittingly, to muddy the waters for Canadians. I wanted to spend a few minutes clarifying what we are talking about here.

First, we are talking about people who are not immigrants, who have not stood in queues up to six or seven years, as people who have come to Canada often have, and who are not coming for economic reasons or as part of family sponsorship or family reunification programs. These are also not convention refugees who have been sponsored by the government, by the church or by other groups into Canada. We know that.

These are vulnerable individuals whose lives may have been at risk and who are seeking asylum in a country that has honoured asylum seekers with fair and just processes for decades. That is who these people are.

We all know that Sri Lanka has come through over two decades of civil war that has had atrocities on all sides. After every war, there are people whose lives continue to be at risk and some of them take desperate measures. That is what has happened with the two most recent vessels. They have been loaded with people who have claimed that their lives are in danger and they are seeking asylum in Canada.

Canada has a long history of having signed onto international conventions and treaties that dictate how we will deal with those asylum seekers. They are given fair and transparent judicial processes. They are allowed to be heard on a case-by-case refugee determination process.

As the hon. member from the New Democrat caucus said earlier, we have a process whereby the refugee determination has been too slow in the past but we were able to reach an accord in this House called Bill C-11 which changes some of those refugee determination processes and are meant to speed them up.

My fear is that we already have the Minister of Public Safety expressing a lack of confidence in the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism and his fine work on Bill C-11. We on this side of the House were kind of confused when we listened to the discussions on what sort of a law would deal with this problem of smugglers.

Let there be no doubt that no one on this side of the House, nor, I believe, on the other side of the House, condones human smuggling. I will give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I do not believe anyone wants to put a vulnerable person at a greater vulnerable level. We do not want people making money off this exercise. We do not want to risk lives a second or third time. We want to ensure a fair and just immigration system, including a refugee determination system, that works. Everyone in the House agrees on that.

However, the Minister of Public Safety, who presented this legislation that does not seem to honour those things which we as Canadians have stood up for decades for, has started to shift the language on this. We hear members, although I think they are making an honest mistake, talking about queue-jumping. There are no quotas and no queues when it comes to refugee determination. We have no standards that we follow.

As a western country and as a democracy, we believe in the rule of law. Every person who comes to this country, whether by car, by foot, by canoe, by sea vessel, by airplane, by helicopter, no matter how they arrive or in what numbers they arrive, one, two or three people, whether they are children, youth, adults or seniors, every person is allowed a fair refugee determination process.

Is that system working? Obviously it is not. We introduced Bill C-11 because there were problems and it was taking too long. However, I believe some of those problems came from the fact that the government strangled the system by starving it of resources. The previous Liberal government left 15,000 people in that system and that number has now gone up to 60,000 people. This is a problem. We are hoping that Bill C-11 and the attendant resources that are required will streamline the process to ensure fairness and transparency and ensure those who are not bona fide refugees are sent home in a timely manner. We agree with that.

On this side of the House, we do not believe there are two kinds of Canadians: new Canadians and old Canadians. We are not surprised, as I keep hearing from my hon. colleagues across the aisle, that new Canadians have this concern too. We are all Canadians, whether we have been here one generation, two generations or three generations. We want to ensure that the system of justice, the system of refugee determination and the immigration system are fair, transparent and just, and we will work for that.

This particular legislation does raise some concerns for me in very specific ways. We absolutely want to tackle the problem of human smuggling. Would this bill actually do that or are there already, as previous members have said, pieces of legislation in place with life sentences if someone is actually caught doing this? Is there anything new in this legislation that would actually ensure that those who are committing the heinous act of smuggling human beings for profit into this country will be caught and punished? It is simply not in this legislation. There are too many problems.

Bill C-49 is not an effective piece of legislation nor is it a good piece of legislation. The government will need to find ways to improve this legislation to ensure that it actually addresses the real problem of human smuggling.

This bill would actually punish refugee claimants even after they have gone through a process of determination. It would create two kinds of refugees by splitting them into two classes, which is simply not right. We do not do that in Canada.

The government thinks that by somehow deterring refugees from seeking a safe way out of their country, they will not try to do this. Every piece of research has said that the laws of the land that people are going to do not determine whether or not they will try to get there. They are simply trying to get away from the threat against their life. That is the problem with this legislation. It is as though the government thinks, for example, that the Tamils living in Sri Lanka will look at this and decide not to get on the ship because of the things that could possibly happen to them.

Whatever can happen in Canada will never be as bad as what goes on for them in camps, in bushes, on beaches and in places where they try to eke out their very survival. Nothing that we can do will stop them from trying to get to safety. That is the human instinct. That is what is in the core of our bodies, our spirits. It is in our DNA. We want to survive.

That means for this to be effective, we have to do two or three different things. We have to look at truly effective ways to stop the smugglers. Yes, we want strong deterrents against the smugglers. Yes, we want to be assured that smugglers will face at least mandatory minimum sentences, with which I do not normally agree. However, this is such a horrible crime that we should look at that. Let us open our door to dealing with smugglers that way.

However, we have to go to the source of the problem. Once we have dealt with that, we have to look at human beings as human beings. The reality is these vulnerable human beings are vulnerable because of the failures of a particular national government or because of the international community's misunderstanding or failure to act to protect them.

The war has ended in Sri Lanka, but the violence and danger continues. The lives of people continue to be at risk. Canada is failing, the government is failing to ensure that we are in Sri Lanka, offering a democratic, institutional way of responding to how to live with a linguistic and religious minority in their midst and how to build civil society to protect minorities. Canada has not done that. We have abdicated our responsibility internationally.

We have also failed to work with the United Nations and other countries in refugee determination in Sri Lanka, in Thailand and in places where Tamils have sought refuge. We have to ensure that the United Nations has the resources, the staff, the personnel and the ability to get into a country and ensure that refugees are determined there.

Therefore, we have to stop the problem at the source. We have to stop it by building international human rights, by working co-operatively with other countries, by engaging internationally, by restoring our reputation, which has been so greatly damaged in the last four years by the government. We have to find a way to involve ourselves in these countries in real and meaningful ways and stop our tokenism.

The second thing we have to do is beef up the United Nations to ensure that we work in a partnership to do refugee determination there.

There are 43 million forcibly displaced persons in the world, and it is a horrible life. People seeking asylum are potential victims. They are not worthy of being further victimized in any way, as I believe the legislation may be doing. We have to find a way to fix this. We have to take out some of the basic problems in the legislation.

The question I continue to have is on these so-called irregular events. On some kind of an irregular immigration of inter-migration event, the minister seems to have too much power to designate. It seems to be far too open and far too flexible. This is one of the things at which the House has to look. We have to understand where we are then from that point on discriminating and causing two classes of refugee claimants and then, further, once determined, two classes of refugees. This law cannot discriminate against people because of where they have come from or how they have come to Canada. We have to absolutely take a step back and take a second look at the legislation.

Arbitrary detention, as the hon. member had said earlier, has not worked in Australia. Not only has civil society risen up against it, but every group that looks at this problem says that it is not working. It is not a deterrent. It is simply an infringement upon human rights.

Bill C-49 makes no exceptions for women who may be pregnant or children who arrive on the shores of our land. We have to look at this as a protection for the most vulnerable, including women and children.

The Supreme Court of Canada said that we would have to review lengthy periods of detention under the charter. Bill C-49 has to deal exactly with that. Arbitrary detention is already prohibited under international law, notably by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Bill C-49 is dangerously close to denying any right of equal access to justice. It is blocking a sense of integration as well. That is where I really want to go in these last few minutes.

Once refugees have been determined to be refugees, they then become part of Canadian society. They are landed here and they begin to integrate into our society. They begin to learn the language and seek employment. They build families, they are part of neighbourhoods and they are part of communities. They are our friends. They are part of the structure and the very fabric of Canada.

Bill C-49 breaks that down. It blocks family reunification. It denies the right to travel. It does not look at the fact that the world changes. Someone may be determined a refugee, but that country's regime may change drastically and the conditions in that country may change.The legislation does not give the required flexibility to ensure that the people who integrate into our society are part of who we are, part of where we need to go, part of what we need to do.

The mere suspicion that something is wrong is not good enough for a minister to deny human rights. A fair and just country is what we are building. It is what we continue to work on and all legislation needs to be examined from that vantage point. Who is being hurt? Who is being helped? How is our country being built?

This legislation seems shy on actually dealing with the problem of human smuggling and heavy-handed when it comes to the victims of those smugglers. This is no time for Canada to re-victimize vulnerable people. This is no time for Canada to create two classes of refugees. This is no time for Canada to break Canada apart into different kinds of people. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. A refugee is a refugee is a refugee. A claimant is a claimant is a claimant. Canada is built on that. It is built on the rule of law that ensures that justice and transparency are built into the fabric of every piece of law that we pass in the House.

Canada has made mistakes when boats have landed on our shores before. I hope I do not need to remind a single person in the House of 1939 when the Government of Canada made a mistake. We turned back the S.S. St. Louis and we let hundreds of people go back to a country where their lives were very much at risk and their safety was at stake. This was not the first time it had happened.

In 1939 the S.S. St. Louis, filled with hundreds of refugees fleeing from the Nazis, sought asylum in Canada. At that time, the government sought to discredit them as well and warned that if the S.S. St. Louis were permitted to dock, more Jews in Europe might follow. Would that they had. Would that we had opened up our eyes, our minds and our hearts because we could have saved more lives.

We had not learned the lesson in 1914 from the Komagata Maru. We did not learn it in 1939. We are learning slowly. This legislation dangerously turns back the clock on these issues.

Canada needs to remember that we are a place of justice and fairness. We will punish the smugglers strongly. We will learn to accept the refugee claimants and give them justice.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Madam Speaker, it has been difficult listening to the opposition today. The Liberal members in particular have been flip-flopping so badly on this. The reason they are flip-flopping back and forth is because they know their position does not mesh with the position of Canadians. It does not mesh with the position of immigrants. It does not mesh with the position of refugee claimants.

In their own little way they are trying to convince millions of Canadians, who expressed their opinions over the summer, that they are wrong. They have tied themselves into this pretzel, flip-flopping back and forth, which is something we see constantly from the Liberals. They have no idea what position they need to take on a certain day. They always believe their position is better than the position of Canadians, that Canadians do not know what they are talking about.

The reality in this situation is that Canadians and immigrants to our country have spoken. They have said that this is unacceptable, that for once and for all Canada needs to stand up to these human smugglers, jail them, seize their ships and ensure that we put all of our resources into ensuring the people who need our help get our help. The bill does that. We do not need to do what the Liberals and their coalition partners are suggesting, and that is looking at these human smugglers, treating them with kid gloves and trying to figure out what in their childhood went wrong that turned them into human smugglers.

I just wish for once the opposition coalition, which is fronted by the Leader of the Opposition but led by two failed—

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

Order, please. The hon. member for Don Valley West.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member may want to check the blues after this. At the beginning, he talked about Canadians and immigrants. In my Canada immigrants who are citizens are Canadians. We are one.

Canadians have spoken on this and we have heard them. Canadians want tough and effective laws that will actually work against smuggling. Canadians are not anti-newcomers.

The Canadians I know, and I have talked to them from coast to coast, are not anti-newcomers. They want to be ensured that the government will effectively deal with those who are smuggling humans.

Canadians did make a mistake in 1914. I hope the hon. member knows that. Canadians did make a mistake in 1939. I do not know whether the Conservatives know that. I cannot tell today.

No one is flip-flopping on this side of the House. That side of the House is not aware that we made mistakes. We turned away people and they died. We will not do that from this side of the House.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Madam Speaker, I liked the way the member laid this out in terms of a humanitarian challenge, confronting not only us but the whole world, as we try to bring peace and stability. Lack of peace and stability anywhere is a threat to everyone else. What we do here, we have to be very thoughtful about. We have to think it through. We have to be deep and reflective in our response.

What I have seen in this place over the last six to 12 months is an attempt to deal with some very real challenges in the world in a very sort of knee-jerk reaction, throw a big net out, capture everyone and then we will sort it out later somehow, perhaps.

There are ways to deal with some of the real challenges that are inherent in the smuggling of refugees. As the member for Toronto Centre said today, a lot of the issues we are wanting to deal with we can actually deal with if we were willing to go and work with the people and the government of Sri Lanka because that is really where the problem is. Apparently there are three or four gangs that developed after the war. They are organizing this money-making scheme to smuggle refugees into other countries.

Perhaps the member would like to respond to that for me.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Sault Ste. Marie because I can tell he understands that Canadians are smart. Canadians are compassionate. Canadians understand these situations and need to be led not by fear, not by slogans, not by misunderstanding—

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

Order. Order, please. I regret to interrupt the hon. member. I believe this is a debate and differences of opinion, but I do not think it merits laughing at comments made that are not intended in that way. I would ask for some respect for the hon. member who is speaking.

The hon. member for Don Valley West.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I repeat, we know that Canadians are smart. We know that they are compassionate. We know that they want to understand these issues and they want to be led with a sense of hopefulness and a sense that we will effectively deal with the problems in the world and compassionately deal with those who are the victims. That is what Canadians are about. They are not led by slogans. They are not led by easy answers. They are not led by someone who promises them something and delivers nothing.

We have problems in our refugee system, in our immigration system. Read the Auditor General's report. There are problems in the immigration system that is being led by the government. We were trying to fix the refugee determination system with Bill C-11, an honest attempt from all sides of the House to fix that. We are attempting to do that. We also are calling upon the government to look at our international relationships, to actually build them and build the kind of world where we stop the need for a refugee determination system here.

[Luc Desnoyers, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Madam Speaker, I have a question for my colleague, who said that this bill will hurt immigration rather than help it. I was also surprised when I saw Bill C-49. I thought that on the other side of the House it would be called the “Tamil bill”. Their bills always address specific events.

I would like the member to talk a bit more about the punitive aspects of this bill.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Madam Speaker, I, too, am surprised that the Conservatives have not come up with a smarter, snappier little title that actually tries to further confuse the issue, because let us be real; this is about Tamils. This bill is about keeping out a certain group of people. The Conservatives were very clear; before the boat even landed they were already decrying that these were probably terrorists, that these people were going to come into our country to cause trouble.

The Tamil people who live in my riding are Canadians who are building this country with me and they are concerned about sisters and brothers in that country where they are a minority that is persecuted. I think the hon. member is absolutely correct by saying that we have to look at this problem with a broader lens and a lens that punishes the people who are meant to be punished and actually cares for the people who need to be cared for. Punish the smugglers. Care for the vulnerable.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Madam Speaker, I would first like to thank the Liberal opposition members for leaving the new Conservative government a 750,000-file backlog because of their ineptitude in running the immigration system.

I have to make this comment. The member for Don Valley West is trying to draw a comparison between this latest ship that came over, run by human smugglers, and the 1939 St. Louis and the Komagata Maru. For him to do that is very deceiving. It is misrepresenting the facts between the ships we are talking about now and the two incidents, one in 1939 and one in 1914. He should be ashamed of himself for trying to draw that conclusion.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

Order. I must give the hon. member for Don Valley West equal time to respond.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Madam Speaker, I find that outrageous for two reasons. Once again the government side is confusing immigrants with refugees. They do not understand that the 750,000 are immigrants. Immigrants begins with an “i”; refugees begins with an “r”. These are two different bills, two different ways of looking at the world, two different systems. One is about conventional refugees and claimants and the other is about an immigration system that the Conservative government does not know how to fix.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

Order, order. The time has run out for this member's speech and period of questions and comments.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Oak Ridges—Markham.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Madam Speaker, I can assure the hon. member that this is a government that truly understands how the immigration system should work. It truly understands what Canadians look for in an immigration system.

When we took over, we saw a waiting list of one million people. If that is what the Liberals are claiming was a successful immigration system under their watch, I can certainly assure the member that people to whom I am talking in Canada's most diverse riding certainly do not agree with that assessment. What they are saying to me is that the system under the previous administration was a catastrophe and they are certainly happy that this government, this Minister of Immigration and the Prime Minister, stepped in to fix the mess that was left behind by the Liberal government after 13 years of terrible rule.

Let me say this. We do not need any lessons from the Liberal Party or any of the members opposite on how to deal fairly with refugees and with immigration matters.

However, getting back to this bill specifically, I welcome the opportunity to rise in support of Bill C-49, the preventing human smugglers from abusing Canada's immigration system act. I am sure hon. members will agree that human smuggling is among the most loathsome of criminal endeavours, and judging from the comments on news websites, the letters on the pages of newspapers, and the calls to talk radio shows, Canadians definitely feel the same way. Some have suggested that Canadians' reaction to the recent arrivals of the smuggling ships was somehow improper, ungenerous, inhuman or worse. I do not believe anything could be further from the truth.

Canada's international reputation for generosity, as a place of refuge and welcome to newcomers, is definitely a source of pride for all Canadians, but no one wants our generosity to be abused, and most certainly, Canadians do not want unscrupulous operators to line their pockets from the desperation of the downtrodden and the generosity of the Canadian immigration system. That is why Canadians are angry and that is why our government has acted.

As an editorial in the Calgary Herald put it a few days after the Sun Sea docked in Esquimalt:

[I]t's not that Canada has lost its tolerance for refugees. What we've lost is our tolerance for refugee smugglers.

The bill makes it clear that Canada and Canadians do not and will not tolerate human smuggling. In fact, this bill makes it even more clear. Canada has always been a strong and visible supporter of international efforts to fight human smuggling. Our signature on the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air demonstrates our commitment to be part of the solution. Bill C-49 reinforces that commitment. It would allow law enforcement officials additional tools to investigate and to prosecute individuals who organize, engage in and profit from human smuggling.

As hon. members are aware, existing laws are very narrow in terms of the activities that can be prosecuted in this regard. The Crown must prove that the accused knew that the people being smuggled did not have the documents needed to enter Canada. This bill would change that. The amendments our government is proposing would broaden the application of the law so that it will be easier to prosecute human smugglers.

That sends a message to would-be smugglers. Bill C-49 underscores that message with mandatory minimum penalties for anyone convicted of human smuggling. Depending on the circumstances of the offence, these mandatory sentences would range up to a minimum of 10 years for the most grievous offences, such as those involving organized crime and endangering the lives of smuggled persons.

Similarly, this bill will increase the penalties for violations of the Marine Transportation Security Act, such as refusing to comply with a ministerial directive to leave Canadian waters or providing false or misleading information to officials. Individuals, for example, would be liable to fines of as much as $200,000 on indictment, up from the current $10,000. Individuals convicted on indictment for failure to file a pre-arrival information report would be liable to a maximum penalty of one year of imprisonment or a $75,000 fine, or both.

These changes would deliver a strong, clear message. It is a message that must be delivered before the next MV Sun Sea sails for our shores, and that risk is very real.

The bill would deter human smugglers from mounting such ventures. Indeed, we must do more than simply express our distaste for human smugglers as the opposition have been wanting to do today.

There is also the simple, yet profound, matter of exercising our right as a sovereign nation to protect our borders.

Canada has the right to decide who enters this country, and there is no question that Canada is very generous in that regard. At the same time, we have an obligation and we are committed to protecting the safety and security of Canadians. We have to be certain that the individuals claiming refugee status in Canada are not war criminals or a danger to Canadians.

The existing rules allow a foreign national or permanent resident entering Canada to be detained if an immigration officer considers their detention necessary in order to carry out a proper examination, to make sure that the person is who they say they are and that there is nothing in their background that would make them inadmissible to Canada.

Detentions of this kind must be reviewed by the Immigration and Refugee Board within 48 hours, again within seven days, and if necessary, within every 30 days after that. This system works well most of the time; however, it is not designed to deal with hundreds of people arriving en masse at one location, as was the case with the Sun Sea.

Instead of concentrating on the investigations that are so vital to public safety, border officers find themselves devoting hour after precious hour to preparing for these numerous detention reviews. That is why Bill C-49 would give the Minister of Public Safety the authority to designate anyone who arrives at our border in circumstances such as the Sun Sea as an irregular arrival.

As an irregular arrival, individuals would be detained until the Immigration and Refugee Board determines that they are legitimate refugees. If they are still detained after one year, their detention would be reviewed at an IRB hearing that would decide whether detention should continue. Subsequent hearings, if necessary, would follow at six-month intervals. Where exceptional circumstances exist, the minister would have the authority to order early release.

Other changes in this bill would require designated arrivals to wait a minimum of five years before they could apply for permanent resident status in Canada or sponsor family members who come to our country. Designated arrivals would also not be able to access the supplemental benefits under the interim health plan, which provides benefits more generous than those available to Canadians. This is only fair. People who push to the front of the line should not be rewarded.

The changes that we are proposing in this bill would enhance the safety and security of Canadians and protect the integrity of our immigration system. Every successful incident of human smuggling encourages more people to try to take advantage of Canada's generosity, to cut in front of those who have followed the rules, who have filed papers, who have filed proper papers and waited patiently for the opportunity to begin a new life in Canada.

Canada needs immigrants. We cannot afford to allow criminal acts to discourage the newcomers to our country. We cannot afford to allow human smugglers and queue jumpers to undermine the public support of our immigration system. That is one of the reasons I am urging all members to support this bill.

Let me just say this. The hon. members across, the Liberal Party in particular, like to wrap themselves in the cloak of a generous party, as people who care about refugees and immigrants. We have heard constantly today, speaker after speaker and the critic talking about the Tamils. I do not have to remind the hon. member that it was a Conservative government in 1984 that began to open the door to Tamil refugees in this country.

I represent the riding of Oak Ridges—Markham, which is home to a large diaspora of Sri Lankans, both Tamil and Ceylonese people. We have been working together to try to find solutions to the problems that they have back at home. What we consistently hear from the Liberal Party are these great platitudes of what we should accomplish, but they never have solutions to the problems.

Here they have an opportunity to vote for a solution, to put an end to human smuggling in this country, and what are they doing? They are wrapping themselves up like pretzels. They are flip-flopping. What they are doing is ignoring what Canadians want.

I just hope that by the time we get this debate completed they will actually see the light, they might listen to what Canadians want, they might read the hundreds of emails and letters and listen to the phone calls, and the opposition coalition might for once listen to Canadians and vote the right way.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's discussion. He has been here all day asking questions and talking about this very important bill.

I just want to say that my in-laws are of Italian descent and my mother-in-law came here on a boat. I can say that when that happened earlier this summer in Vancouver, the first call I got was from my in-laws asking what we were going to do about this issue, and this bill addresses that issue.

I want to thank them for that call and I want to thank my colleague for his presentation today.

I would like to know, as the hon. member talked about the Liberal side flipping and flopping, if at any time today the Liberals indicated whether they were supportive of this bill going to committee so that they can actually have a discussion.

The Liberals claim they have all these people who are opposed and know all these groups that are opposed. Well, if we went to committee with it, we would be able to study the issue and have a discussion at committee.

Can the member tell me if the Liberal Party indicated whether it would be supporting this bill or not, based on his time here this afternoon?

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Madam Speaker, I have been here all day, but I have been having trouble following the Liberal position on this. On this particular bill, they seem to be flip-flopping more quickly than they have on some of the other things that they have flipped and flopped over.

My parents too came from Italy, through Pier 21. They worked very hard and they built a spectacular life here in Canada. They have a son in Parliament. That is the type of Canada we built. We built the type of Canada that encourages immigration to this country and that respects those who need our help. We have always been a very generous country.

To answer the hon. member's question directly, I have no idea where the Liberals stand on this. I have no idea where they stand on anything, to be honest. I know one thing for sure. They will always stand on the opposite side of where Canadians stand, and that is a true shame. They are working with their opposition coalition here to subvert the wishes of Canadians.

What Canadians really want is an immigration system, a refugee system, that respects those who come to this country, work hard and build a better life for themselves. That is what this side wants. That is why we are building a better immigration system. That is why we reformed the immigration system. That is why the immigration backlog has been reduced. That is why we are opening up our arms to those who come to this country and who need our assistance.

I think about what happened in Haiti and the quick response this government had to the people of Haiti. The opposition is suggesting that we should forget emergencies and we should look at other instances.

I think it is about time the Liberals did what is right, paid attention to what Canadians want and voted in favour of this bill. Let us get it to committee and make it better.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

When this debate resumes, the hon. member will have two minutes of comments and questions. As it is 5:30, the House will now proceed to the consideration of private members' bills as listed on today's order paper.