Mr. Speaker, obviously I do not know the reasons why the minister has done this, but the way that we interpret it and the way that I interpret it is that the minister does not wish to have a full debate on this question. As I mentioned in my speech, the question is an important one for Canadians. So many of us have immigrated from other countries, and if we ourselves did not immigrate, our parents or our grandparents did.
What the minister is trying to do is to hide this bill, knowing that the bill goes against what Canadians want. Canadians want more immigration. Canadians have learned their lesson from the terrible immigration of the Chinese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where families of Chinese workers were not allowed to come into this country. These Chinese men, for the most part, stayed in this country alone without their own families and were not able to integrate.
We learned our lesson and after the second world war, we opened our doors to family reunification. The Greek families and the Italian families who came, came as families, and they are now fantastic citizens of Canada. They have changed the economy of Canada. They have changed the face of Canada. This is something that the immigration minister and the Conservative government do not understand or perhaps refuse to understand. Families are important.
The second reason, I think, that the minister and her government are so secretive is that instead of coming forward and saying “This is what we believe, this is what we want, let us discuss it, and let us debate it in Parliament”, they are hiding bills under the guise of other bills so that we do not notice what is going on.