Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to this debate on refugee status in Canada.
We have in front of us a very fundamental bill, a bill that is not just about how we treat refugees but how we consider ourselves.
I want to say at the outset that we want to see the backlog dealt with, we want to see a way of reducing the number of people who make claims that are not accurate or false and we want to see fairness and speed put into the system. However, there are fundamental questions.
Is this a reform bill? Does it ensure fairness and balance?
The fundamental thing that we need to arrive at as a Parliament, and as a committee when it gets there, is whether the government is engaged in fairness and balance in reform, or whether it is just mining a weariness on the part of Canadians and cultivating the wrong idea about who is taking advantage. Is this a bill that can move forward when it is admittedly something of an intractable problem over some period of time, or is it simply a cover for lack of effectiveness on the part of the minister and on the part of the government?
For example, the crux of the bill is to contend with the backlog of refugees claiming the protection of Canada and yet the government has allowed compassion to be denied because it has been so delayed. This has caused thousands of people to have a shadowy existence in our communities, with no real status and trying to find a resolution to how they are being regarded.
Two-thirds of the current backlog of refugees comes from the government's action and inaction. When we look at the presumption that somehow we need a law to change things, we also need a government that is committed to treating people fairly, equitably and in a manner that actually respects their rights. Currently, 60,000 are waiting for that treatment and 40,000 of them were put there by the government and by the minister. It is very important that people understand that in some ways we need to evaluate that. The government was busy replacing every appointee of the previous government, no matter how qualified, with its own highly partisan replacement. We need to ask ourselves why else the government was taking its time. Was it trying, as some of its ideological colleagues have done in other jurisdictions, to create a crisis that would then be stampeded into having to be reckoned with?
What is worrisome is that the government's behaviour today belies some of the goodwill that it says it wants to generate in the House and in subsequent considerations at committee. It is worrisome that the government has, at different times, taken sweeping aim at anybody who has disagreed with the bill, trying to discredit the dialogue and the opposition on it. The government is limiting debate. It is forcing it to second reading and not considering hearings after first reading. The test will be how it behaves from here on in, because there are fundamental issues at root here on which Canadians need to be heard. They need not to have this debate put on artificial timetables. I just want to outline some of those for the House and for the people who will, I believe, pay fundamental attention when they realize exactly what is at stake.
We need to step back and realize that the whole idea of acknowledging refugees is based on their individual claims. In the name of convenience, in order to get rid of some of the problems in processing, the bill would take that away from whole groups of people. Refugees would no longer be considered by Canada for protection on their individual merit, but rather governed in large part from what country they came from. That has huge ramifications for legitimate people claiming and needing the protection of Canada.
Instead of actually finding a better way to run the system, the government is proposing a shortcut and one that short-circuits the consideration for people in terms of the fundamental reason they are appealing to us. The bill could cause thousands upon thousands of people to end up going underground because it would not give them the consideration they are looking for.
In the bill there is a tremendous tendency to give arbitrary powers to the minister to create something called a safe country. It is not referred to in the bill. There is no definition of what is safe. There is no definition about how we would find out whether that country was safe or not. Even in democratic states, it does not consider what could happen to certain minorities that are being subject to persecution. The minister only would have a say, with no check or balance, because the government wants to avoid the determination of a country of risk to be something that could be appealed.
In the context of doing that, it would set it outside of the reach of anyone. Neither the courts nor this House, no one could comment on the designation of countries. That is a first time event as a way of dealing things and it smacks of convenience, not of a real goodwill effort to try to deal with the problem. The arbitrariness that could happen there would undermine the reason to have the system in the first place.
I would put forward, for example, Gustavo Gutierrez, a police chief from Mexico who has a well-founded threat of prosecution and who has difficulty being heard. Even under the current system, Mexico, presumably, would be declared a safe country of origin and he would not even get a hearing. He comes from a state where nine police chiefs have been killed.
Mr. Gutierrez has been trying to uphold the law in parts of Mexico, where the law has become almost impossible to uphold, in the face of some of the anarchy that is happening either by organized crime or by the misplaced efforts of states to deal with things, and the gross violations of human rights that have been well-documented. This House will get a chance to consider some of these as we bring some of these people forward.
I want to touch on some of the specific provisions.
In terms of getting a hearing, it would be terrific if it could be done in eight days and it could meet the test of fairness but the people coming forward would not have any access to counsel. Somebody who manages to come here from a country like Iran or some other place where he or she has been tortured in a prison will need to deal with his or her own case within eight days and go in front of an official who is only responsible to the minister who devised the system. This certainly has to ring alarm bells for people concerned with justice and a fair process.
Those who were listening closely to the speech given by my colleague from Vaughn would have heard a very clear articulation of what happened in the United Kingdom when it did this very thing, when it made the front line response come from bureaucrats. Tens of thousands of cases ended up going to appeal and 23% of those cases, almost one-quarter of them, were upheld at appeal.
The appeal rate at the court of appeal in Canada is only 1% successful. Our courts will be plugged the way the courts are plugged in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom has an 18 year backlog as a result of adopting a system very similar to the one that the Conservative government is bringing forward.
It is at least worth asking these fundamental questions here in the House and in committee. The minister himself cited in his speech that we have made mistakes in the past, that we have refused people who should have been able to come to Canada. In the run up to World War II, entire groups of people were turned away.
We know the problem with labelling people a certain way and then not accepting them. This House should not repeat that mistake. We need to fix the system, not because we will get a pat on the back from weary people out there who want the so-called refugee system fixed, but because people in here will stand on principle, roll up their sleeves and do the hard work. We need to ensure that this House does not become the House that does a sloppy repair to a system that needs attention.
When people ask why this did not get fixed, I think everyone in this House and everybody watching knows the answer. It is because refugees are perhaps the most powerless group in this country. They are not able to articulate for themselves. If we do not do this carefully, prudently and in alignment with principles, they will get left out of this equation.
This is not about the convenience of the rest of us. The character of a country, the character of a political party and, indeed, the character of all of us in public life is told by how we attend to the quiet noises, to the things that happen when no one is paying attention.
I would like to think that Mr. Gutierrez and others can depend on us to bring forward significant amendments to this bill or to not bring this bill all the way through the House. We stand at the precipice of getting rid of individual assessments and denying people on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
I can see the genesis of this bill. Some may look at how many people make claims but we must understand that when people make a refugee claim, they need to make a choice. Will they have a chance under that system? Will they have a chance on humanitarian or compassionate grounds? Under this bill we would have to make that an absolute choice. People would not be able to appeal on humanitarian or compassionate grounds if their refugee claim was rejected even though there are different considerations there. Even if they make the choice for door number two and take humanitarian or compassionate grounds, they could be deported from this country before their case is heard. Under the present government, it takes over three and a half years to hear from people with legitimate humanitarian or compassionate claims.
If this is a sincere effort to reform the system, where is the reform of the people who are the middlemen, the false arbiters of hope who are making huge amounts of money here in Canada and in places abroad by bringing people here to abuse the system? Where is the effort to actually focus on where people are coming from in the first place? Rather than trying to arbitrarily label people for our convenience, why are we not trying to fix the system?
If we are being frank in this House, what is happening with the changes to the IRB, a politicized system? By the minister's own admission, that system held up at least 25,000 applicants because of delays he created by hand-picking his own partisan cronies to sit on the actual panels. There is an ideological bent that is discernible.
The Colombia free trade agreement has been discussed in the House and suddenly all claimants from Colombia are having tremendous difficulty.
We need to fix this. There need to be independents sitting in front of people. We are conveying a chance to be part of this wonderful country and we dishonour that if we do not do that in full, good faith. We need to do that with people who have no other answerability, no other accountability than doing a good, fair and just job.
That cannot happen if the bureaucrats are responsible to the minister. For my money, it cannot happen by appointed people whose only pleasure is whether or not they keep the minister in power happy with their performance.
There needs to be a turn taken. We should use the bill to reform that system. I ask the question, why in the House, and we need to repeat it again in committee, are we not taking on the people who bring people to Canada, who instruct them and counsel them falsely to break the rules? Why are there no penalties for that in the bill? We want to avoid visas for innocent people. We should be looking at systems that bring people to us rather than just reacting. The bill only gives us the capacity to react.
There are things in the bill that we do need. There does need to be an appeal process. We need to relieve some of our court system by getting a fair appeal process in place, but that is going to be denied to a very large number of people who will be screened out. They will be screened out on criteria that do not exist in the bill. They will be the criteria determined by the minister of the day who will have imperfect information.
I challenge the members opposite. Let Amnesty International, let the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Refugees, let someone objective set those labels if they must have them for those countries, but do not have it as part of our diplomacy or our economic relations because Canada's standing, which the minister relied on as part of his moral authority bringing the bill in, will be lost.
We may accept 10,000 or 11,000 people a year, but we cannot just do that where it is convenient for us. Human rights is not necessarily convenient and many of us are here because of our heritage, a million people who were accepted as refugees in this country. The only way to honour that heritage is to create a bill and amendments to this bill that are really going to follow the footsteps of what has gone on before.
This has been framed with the idea that there will be new quotas, that there will be an increase in the number of people who will be welcome. That is a chimera off in the distance. It is not to be found in the bill. The idea that we are going to accept additional people is nowhere to be found.
In the 2010 budget there is no extra money. So the minister has committed in the House that he would be fixing the backlog in tandem with these new rules, but he does not have the fiscal ability to fulfill that promise.
On the government side, it really bespeaks a certain kind of challenge for the public and for people everywhere in terms of being able to believe that this is a goodwill real reform, or fairness and balance in the system. Or is it just something the government wants to make it look like it is being tough on, a certain class of immigrants who cannot speak for themselves, for whom every person elected to this place has a special responsibility, not because they can vote for us but because they cannot, not because they can donate to us but because they do not have a lot of means.
We cannot fail the people who have gone before us and create a mess of a system simply because we did not meet the challenge of having it better run. A government that let the backlog triple should come to the House with humility. What it needs is some assistance. It needs the best ideas to come forward from those who are housing, sheltering and representing real refugees in this country. It needs to hear about the systems of deceit that are out there, counselling, aiding, abetting and scalping people who have gone through tremendous trauma of their resources or bringing people in to make false claims under false assumptions.
That is what should be targeted here. It is not to be found in the bill and I wonder why not. Why can we not take on the shady consultants? Why can we not take on the people who are mocking the compassion of Canada? Why do we not protect Canada's compassion before it wears out rather than trade on it for changes that on the face do not seem to really go to the root of where this problem has come from: not having enough people in place, not having enough resources, and ultimately not sending the right signals out to countries of origin where people are coming from.
There are even in countries that we respect and admire exceptions for humanitarian and compassionate grounds and even people who can be persecuted for their status, whether as women or sexual minorities. Those things need to be considered because they are part of our values: to have as broad as possible a tolerance for people and to accept that as a basis for being able to be here. There are different definitions for that, that need to be entertained, and a one size fits all which could come with some of the provisions of the bill would really give us difficulty.
The minister, in his remarks, stated that we would not be increasing detention, which happens in a lot of other countries that have this system. It is not in the bill, but his sticker promise is a 60-day turnaround for hearings. How, but through detention, will he be keeping track of people for that period of time?
We need clear talk on the part of the government. Is it planning to put tens of thousands of refugees in some form of detention centres on their way to these streamlined hearings? That is the experience of other countries and it is what happens when they artificially and conveniently try to manage this flow of people instead of trying to understand it and finding principled ways to separate it.
If we had the right of counsel at the beginning, answerable to independent people, that would be a means to have a trustworthy way of weeding out good and bad cases, or at least understanding that the people who are applying have their documentation in order and they are not surrendering rights, which will be applied for anyway.
Why should we be passing this on to the much more expensive system of the courts? Why should we be putting people through the vagaries of that kind of process, when we could be fixing it right here, in this House, in committee?
There are people out there who are discouraged by the manner in which the government has come forward, that there has not been a real openness to listen. The Canadian Bar Association refugee lawyers and Amnesty International issued a statement today saying how disappointed they were that they are not going to get a chance to get at, what again I started my remarks with, which are the principles underlying this, because once we go to second reading, we are not able to discuss the principles of the bill. I would say that the principles of this bill are either very hard to find or they are founded on a skewed idea of why we have this welcome system in the first place.
We need to accept proper refugees. We need to not have the system be clouded and corrupted by false claims, but to do that, there needs to be a system of management.
We need a welcome system that respects the rights of all citizens, but first we must establish the targets of this program.
We have to have the refugee in mind because this is not a group of people who will otherwise be present in this place. We need a time for reflection that need not get in the way of this longstanding problem being resolved, but we cannot rush this and feel like this place is functioning the way it should. There are certain matters that need delicate handling.
Most of us do not come from backgrounds of people who have been persecuted. Most of us do not understand what it is like to be part of 10.5 million real, genuine refugees worldwide. The fact that we are taking on 10,000 of them should be a credit to us. If we end up excluding people, as we have, whether it was inadvertently due to a misunderstanding or a social conception that we did not come to terms with in the past, as we did with Jews trying to get admitted to the country before the second world war, as we did with Sikhs seeking refuge from India, as we did with other people, then we will not give honour to this place or to the values that are supposed to be reflected in this bill in the first place.
My challenge to the government is not to accept any blame but to rise to what is required here, an openness, an unlimited number of hearings in the sense of not being artificially restricted, a reasonable amount of time for Canadians to be heard on this, for the refugees themselves to be heard, and for us to deal with this complex matter in a way that brings honour to ourselves but also to the courage of the people that we want to admit as new Canadians.
