Mr. Speaker, I want to put this private member's motion in context. It does not bar the door to legitimate refugees. That is the last thing our country should do. As a matter of fact, throughout all of the world Canada stands as a beacon of hope to thousands and thousands of people. That should never change.
However, putting out the welcome mat does not mean that we have to be the doormat. That is what we are talking about.
Most Canadians intuitively understand the difference between welcoming people, in particular refugees, to our shores and being a doormat to anybody who wants to use and abuse the system. That is what we are talking about in this bill. We are talking about sending a message to the world, to people who would misuse our generosity and say to them you have an opportunity to come to our shores and apply for refugee status but if it is determined under a fair system that you are not a genuine refugee, then you cannot use taxpayer money indefinitely to try to work your way around the system. That is all we are talking about here.
We are not talking about barring the doors. We are not talking about being meanspirited. We are talking about using a little common sense.
We need to understand that new Canadians come to our shores through three separate doorways. One is the sponsored immigrant status. A sponsored immigrant is usually when someone has a relative who has come here before and sponsors them. Another is the landed immigrant status whereby someone applies on their own merit under the point system and is able to come to Canada because they have the ability. We also have the category where people are able to buy their way in. The category that we are talking about right now is the refugee status.
Canadians should really think about how we handle refugees and people who come to our country under the refugee status. I ask members to think about this. By definition how is it possible for someone to arrive on our shores from the United States, from England or from another safe country and apply for refugee status? Would it not make more sense if our country were to go to those places in the world where people who are genuine refugees, who do not have the wherewithal or the money to find their way to our shores, and would it not make more sense for us to make the refugee determination on site so that when people come to our shores they do not have to have this sword dangling over their heads of are they going to be granted landed refugee status or not?
That brings to mind the Somalis in Toronto who were invited to our shores by our government, welcomed by our government and then put into this limbo for all of those years where they are not granted landed immigrant status. They are left in this limbo, where they must utilize Canada's social safety net because they cannot work. We cannot assume that refugees coming to our shores do not want to work. Everybody knows that is not true. The vast majority of people who come to our shores are just dying to contribute, just aching to be part of our country. But if we do not allow them to work, then they have to access our social programs.
We need to make sure that our refugee claimant process is swift, accurate, compassionate and once a decision has been made, allow people to get on with their lives. It is this never ending opportunity
for people to appeal and appeal. Meanwhile all the time they are doing so they are accessing the very short funds that all provinces find that they have for social security.
One of the reasons that the provinces have a dramatic shortage of funds for social security is, as we all know, that under the Canada health and social transfer the transfers to the provinces have been reduced by $7 billion by this Liberal government. Therefore the provinces find themselves having to deal with more and more expenses with fewer and fewer resources.
My hon. colleague from the Bloc who spoke earlier mentioned that this motion was out of order because welfare and items of this sort were a provincial responsibility and not the purview of the federal government in any instance.
While it is true that welfare is a responsibility of the provinces, we are in a federal state. This government will be announcing today that the Prime Minister is on the west coast in Vancouver and that he will make a great to-do about making a deal with the government of B.C. for residency requirements for welfare recipients. As long as the federal government has its oar in the water through spending and taxing power, it has a role to play in the purview of the provinces whether the provinces like it or not.
It is interesting to note that on every single bit of legislation that comes before the House, members of the Bloc are very quick to defend the honour and the jurisdiction of their province but they are not so quick to say that they would be quite happy to pay for it themselves. The idea is "send us the money and let us make the decisions on what we are going to do with it".
There is a very genuine role for the federal government to play. The federal government makes the determination for what the international covenants on refugee status and claimants will be. The federal government has a role in the transfer of resources from the provinces to pay for social assistance and the federal government sets the rules by which all members play. The federal government has a very real involvement in this issue.
This is our obligation as a nation. When we open our doors to refugee claimants, we should do so expeditiously. We should make it possible for people to come to our country, to become landed immigrants and eventually citizens, the vast majority of whom will make great contributions to our country. We can see in the mosaic that is Canada there are people of all nations from all parts of the world who are coming together to build the democratic land that is one of the most cherished in the world.
Our doors should always be opened to genuine refugees. But again, we do not need to be a doormat in order to extend the welcome mat to genuine refugees. When people who have come to our shores as refugees have under fair and impartial hearings been determined not to fit the refugee classification, then it makes sense to me and to thousands of other Canadians that the taxpayer not be obligated to foot the bill indefinitely. That is what we are talking about here. It is not meanspirited; it is merely common sense.