Thank you.
As I said, one of the things I really value about this country is that we see quite a broad and deep public consensus across the political spectrum in favour of immigration and refugee protection. We need to only compare the debate in Canada or our levels of immigration and refugee resettlement to those in other developed democracies.
We have the highest per capita level of immigration in the developed world. We resettle one out of every ten resettled refugees worldwide, and we will, with the increase in refugee resettlement, have the highest per capita number of resettled refugees in the world. That's phenomenal when we look at other countries.
We don't, thankfully, have meaningful or significant voices of xenophobia or anti-immigrant, anti-refugee sentiment in our politics, and I want to keep it that way. I think it's hugely important. It's incumbent on all of us, regardless of our political persuasion, to maintain public support for immigration and refugee protection.
I believe that public support is largely conditioned on two factors: one, that Canadians see that immigration is serving the interests of Canada, and two, that Canadians see our system as one characterized by the consistent application of fair rules.
The sense I've gotten over the three and a half years I've been in this job, when reviewing all of the public opinion and meeting thousands and thousands of new Canadians especially, is that the perception of widespread abuse of our generosity, of queue jumping, fake asylum claims, human smuggling, etc., undermines public confidence for the broader system.
We saw that very pointedly following the arrival of the MV Sun Sea and the Ocean Lady. I recall polling within months after the arrival of the Sun Sea indicating, for example, that over 60% of the Canadians surveyed said that we should not allow smugglers' vessels like that to enter our territorial waters, and over half of Canadians said that if such illegal smuggled migrants were deemed to be bona fide refugees, they should be immediately deported. New Canadians were disproportionately more likely to take that position than native-born Canadians.
I do not think we can underestimate how strongly Canadians feel about a fair rules-based system that dissuades smuggling operations. That's why I think there's it's imperative for all of us to take this very seriously.