Mr. Chair, I had decided I would only speak once on this, but Mr. Weston leaves me no choice but to respond to some of the comments he made.
To talk about people who arrive by the so-called newly designated irregular mode, or the irregular arrivals, as not legitimate refugees, I find it very difficult. Even the two boats that came from Sri Lanka had very high acceptance rates for refugees under the Geneva Convention. Surely, we are not saying at this table that your mode of arrival determines whether or not you're a refugee under the Geneva Convention.
We are creating two tiers because we're saying that if you arrive in a grouping of two or more, you could actually end up being detained. All we're suggesting now in this amendment—because I want to get back to the amendment—is that while we do identification, verification checks, and all of that, and while we do security checks to ensure Canadians are safe, surely during that time it is not too much for a person who's being held in prison to expect that within 48 hours, and then 7 days and then 30 days thereafter, there will be a chance for them to appear before a panel or a review to have it explained to them why they're being detained and for their case to be reviewed.
We are not saying that everybody who arrives without identification should just be released. We're also not saying that everybody who arrives should not have a security check. We're saying all that should happen.
To assist the government, we were willing to take a look at—even though we're against designations of irregular arrivals—a number that would kick that into operation, simply because our feeling was that if you've got this huge volume, then we could take a look at different timelines. But the government didn't see the need for that, and because it didn't see the need for that, I want to go for this.
You know, New Zealand has a very quick turnaround time for a very simple reason. We heard the number of people who want to go to their country. We know the size of the country and all of that as well. We also heard from Australia about the devastating impacts of detentions.