Bill C-4 (Historical)

Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act

An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act

This enactment amends the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to, among other things,
(a) authorize the Minister, in certain circumstances, to designate as an irregular arrival the arrival in Canada of a group of persons, the result of which is that some of the foreign nationals in the group become designated foreign nationals;
(b) authorize an officer or the Minister, as the case may be, to refuse to consider an application for permanent residence if the applicant has failed to comply with a condition of release or other requirement imposed on them;
(c) provide that a person may not become a permanent resident as long as an application by the Minister for cessation of that person’s refugee protection is pending;
(d) add, as grounds for the detention of a permanent resident or foreign national, the existence of reasonable grounds to suspect that the person concerned is inadmissible on grounds of serious criminality, criminality or organized criminality;
(e) provide that the Immigration Division must impose any prescribed conditions on the release of certain designated foreign nationals;
(f) provide for detention rules and a review procedure that are specific to the detention of certain designated foreign nationals;
(g) clarify the authority of the Governor in Council to make regulations in respect of conditions of release from detention;
(h) provide that certain designated foreign nationals may not apply to become permanent residents until the expiry of a certain period and that the processing of any pending applications for permanent residence is suspended for a certain period;
(i) require certain designated foreign nationals on whom refugee protection has been conferred to report to an officer;
(j) authorize the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting the reporting requirements imposed on certain designated foreign nationals;
(k) provide that the offence of human smuggling is committed when a person organizes the coming into Canada of another person and knows, or is reckless as to whether, the entry into Canada is or would be in contravention of the Act;
(l) provide for minimum punishments for the offence of human smuggling in certain circumstances;
(m) in respect of the determination of the penalty to be imposed for certain offences, add as an aggravating factor the endangerment of the life or safety of any person as a result of the commission of the offence;
(n) change the definition of “criminal organization” in Part 3 to give it the same meaning as in subsection 467.1(1) of the Criminal Code; and
(o) extend the time for instituting proceedings by way of summary conviction from six months to five years or from six months to 10 years, as the case may be.
The enactment also amends the Balanced Refugee Reform Act to provide that a refugee protection claimant whose claim is rejected is not prevented from applying for protection earlier than 12 months after the day on which the claim is rejected, if it is rejected as a result of a vacation of the initial decision to allow the claim.
The enactment also amends the Marine Transportation Security Act to increase the penalties for persons who fail to provide information required to be reported before a vessel enters Canadian waters or to comply with ministerial directions and for persons who provide false or misleading information. It creates a new offence for vessels that fail to comply with ministerial directions. It also amends the Act to authorize regulations respecting the disclosure of certain information for the purpose of protecting the safety or security of Canada or Canadians.

The House resumed from September 19 consideration of the motion that Bill C-4, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee, and of the amendment.

Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, this afternoon I have noticed that this debate has dwelled a lot on the frame of mind of people who are refugees or in a situation of complete and utter distress. It is a situation I have never seen and I hope I never will. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of us if not all of us in the House have never been in that position. We have to juxtapose that with what is best for the nation and what is best for them. In saying that, there are several issues at play.

One is we are creating a two-tiered element. In the past we talked about country of origin and now we are talking about a two-tiered element. These are classifications put on human beings under an extreme amount of stress. This has to be a thorough debate simply because they cannot participate in it and I am glad it is happening in this way.

Shifting to the more domestic side of things, this is a question on what is contained within the amendment we put forward this morning. It is about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and protecting against arbitrary detention and prompt review of detention because Bill C-4's provisions violate international obligations relating to refugees and respecting the treatment of persons seeking protection.

I would like my colleague to comment on those who are seeking protecting juxtaposed against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

[Raymond Côté, NDP, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for her wonderful speech, which allowed us to see the human side of the situation of refugees and immigrants. It is important to understand the possible consequences of implementing the arbitrary measures proposed in Bill C-4. This can have human, economic and social impacts since a traumatic experience can take a very long time to get over.

Since the government is always going on about security, does the hon. member believe that this bill, as proposed, will somehow improve national security?

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to add my strongest opposition and objection to the bill at hand, Bill C-4, , the “Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act”. I put quotations around the title not because it is the short title of the bill, but because that is not really what the bill is about. It was presented by the Minister of Public Safety earlier as a bill that would protect Canadians and others from human smugglers. In reality, it is a bill that attacks refugees and the Canadian immigration system.

Let us be frank. This bill is not at all about human smuggling. Canada currently has the harshest punishment possible, according to Canadian law, if convicted of human smuggling. Under Canadian law smugglers are imprisoned for life. There is nothing stronger and no more severe form of punishment than life in prison in Canada.

Let us talk about what this bill is really about: playing politics with refugees and instilling a sense of fear in Canadians about refugees. We have seen this bill before. This bill was and is remarkably similar to Bill C-49 presented in the last Parliament. It was opposed by all members of the opposition parties and by so many Canadians across the country from coast to coast to coast.

Let me speak to the false claims and the areas of ambiguity this bill presents.

First, the bill positions refugees as “queue jumpers”. This is a falsehood. Refugees and asylum seekers must still follow the same processes and procedures of all claimants. It also creates a two-tier immigration system. It creates two different levels of refugees, and a new classification of refugee, a “designated claimant”. These are refugees who have an “irregular arrival”. That means anybody who shows up by boat. Of course the terms in quotations I am borrowing from the bill.

This bill essentially says that someone who arrives in an irregular fashion, such as by boat, is not a refugee but rather is a criminal. This bill says that people who wish to flee war or conflict zones or persecution but do not have the means to purchase an airplane ticket are queue jumpers. Instead, because they cannot buy a plane ticket, they risk their lives. They throw themselves on a rickety cargo boat, spend two months crossing the ocean, any ocean, but no, they are not real refugees. That is what this bill is telling us.

The bill is telling us that they are not real asylum seekers; they are not really fleeing a horrible situation, leaving their families behind, leaving their livelihoods, leaving their homes, leaving a horrible situation. This bill tells us that these people are liars, that they are not real asylum seekers, that they are not risking their lives to come to Canada hoping for a better life. This bill tells us that these people are criminals. This is what the bill and the government are telling us, unfortunately.

When we look at the history of this great country, it is very clear that Canada was built on the backs of immigrants. Historically, boatloads of immigrants arrived at Canada's ports for centuries. Canada saw an immense number of Irish refugees arriving at Canada's sea ports during the famine in Ireland. At that time, Canadians were strongly in opposition to these refugees staying in Canada, yet they were permitted to stay. Today we see that they contribute so much, and that they contribute positively to Canadian society. Now, we see people of Irish heritage all over Canada, including in this House. Many members of Parliament are of Irish descent.

Refugees are people who contribute positively to the land they go to. So how do we as a nation deal with boats carrying refugees that enter Canadian waters? Do we turn them away, forcing them to return to their country of origin? Or rather, as we saw recently, do we have other countries do our dirty work and intercept these boats in international waters so they do not make it here and we do not need to do anything?

Time and again we have seen the consequences of this course of action. In 1914, the Komagata Maru, which was carrying 376 passengers from Punjab, India, was forced to return. In the 1930s, the refugees on board the SS St. Louis were fleeing Nazi Germany, but were forced to return and were killed by the Nazis. There are many others. Forcing people to return to their country of origin is not the answer.

While this bill specifically attacks refugees who arrive by boat, it will have detrimental effects on all claimants regardless of whether they enter Canada by boat, by air or on foot. This legislation would require the mandatory detention of all designate people arriving in Canada, whether they arrive on foot, by boat or by air. This includes women, children, babies, the sick, the elderly. Anyone who arrives in Canada by any method would be required to be detained for a minimum of 12 months, an entire year. After those 12 months were served, they might receive some consideration, but they could also be held for up to five years. They would also be denied permanent residence or family reunification for at least five years after that. This is a clear violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In the past, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down mandatory detention without review. This is detention based on identity with no possibility of release until the minister arbitrarily decides that identity has been established. This breaches sections 9 and 10 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protect people against arbitrary detention and allow the right to prompt review of that same detention. Arbitrary detention is also a violation of a number of international treaties to which Canada is a signatory.

Why are we detaining these people to begin with? People are usually detained because they are a danger to others or they are a flight risk and could disappear before their questioning or trial happens. Should this bill pass, the government would have the right to jail or detain all refugees without proving that they are a danger to society or that they are a flight risk, for a minimum of one year without an appeal process. How is that just?

Do members know the psychological effects detention and imprisonment have on children? Some British researchers have shown that even in a few months of detention the psychological effects on children are tragic. They wet their beds. Some become mute. Others stop learning. They become withdrawn. They are not able to go to school because they cannot focus. Some lose weight. Some do not eat. These psychological and physiological effects have been seen in children who have been jailed for just a few weeks or months. Think of the psychological scars that we would be inflicting on these children who come to our country and are placed in detention centres. Some may call them jails but we call them detention centres. That is where children would be put for at least a year. It is totally unjustifiable.

Furthermore, these people are being detained until they can prove their identity through some form of documentation. Most refugees who come to Canada do not have documentation, regardless of which process they use to enter the country. When people flee their nation, they leave behind everything. When they leave their country due to a natural disaster, this documentation may not exist. How can we realistically expect people who have lived through an earthquake or tsunami and are fleeing their country to have appropriate documentation proving their identity? How can we expect people who have left a war-torn country to carry valid identification? A lot of refugees arrive at our shores without identification. These are people who could be classified as designated.

Some of the refugee claimants who arrived in Canada by the MV Sun Sea now live in my constituency. I have spoken with many of them. They have told me the stories of their trip to Canada and their arrival in B.C. and how so many of them were borderline holding on to their lives. We all know that one man perished on the journey across the Pacific. Many of them had United Nations identity cards. They had UNHCR refugee cards. Upon their arrival, the people who greeted them gathered all of their identity cards and then, when there were not the same number of identity cards, as individuals they were told that they did not have adequate identification onboard. Regardless of whether or not they had a refugee card, they were all detained. Thankfully, many of these people have been released because our great service men and women at the Canada Border Services Agency took the time to sort out the identity cards. Unfortunately, many of them are still being detained today.

Under Bill C-4, decisions on claims by designated persons cannot be appealed to the refugee appeal division. Eliminating the right to appeal can have tremendous consequences for these so-called designated persons.

I am sure that most of us have heard stories from our constituents about failed refugee applications, about a person who has left his or her country only to face a heavily bureaucratic process. The person does not have the right kind of supporting documentation to present at a hearing and his or her application is unfortunately rejected. Sadly, some of us have heard about the horrific consequences of these failed refugees and what awaits them when they are deported to their country of origin. Unfortunately, mistakes can happen, which is why we have the appeals process. That is why refugees deserve to be able to appeal to the refugee appeal division.

My personal story is like that of many immigrants to Canada. My father came to Canada as a refugee claimant from Sri Lanka. He was fleeing the civil war during the early parts of the war. Once he was granted permanent residency, he sponsored my mother and my sisters to join us. We were reunited in Canada. I am proud to say that the child of a refugee claimant in Canada is now a member of Parliament.

It is difficult for me to imagine in the middle of this violent conflict my father having the time to ensure that he had all of his documentation aligned, ready to go, everybody's identification ready to go, supporting documents ready to go, when he was running away from being shot or his country being bombed. How can we expect people fleeing persecution, fleeing a war, to have all their identification in order? Fortunately, his application was approved and my family was able to join him here in Canada.

It is absolutely unreasonable to expect people to collect all the necessary documents and to have them available upon arrival. My father was lucky that he left at the early stages of the war, but the people who left later, the people fleeing from other countries because they were being bombed, this is absolutely unfair.

That is why there are checks and balances in our refugee process and why they are so integral. This absolutely goes against the compassionate nature that Canadians are known for, Canada's values. Canada's values lie in being compassionate, being concerned for human rights and being concerned for human beings.

When I first saw the bill, I asked myself why the government would propose such legislation and why it would put forward a bill that attacked refugees.

I am taken aback by the idea of queue-jumpers. The government is trying to paint refugees as jumping the immigration queue. When people are fleeing persecution, fleeing a war or an area that is attacked by a natural disaster, they cannot be called queue-jumpers.

With a large immigrant population in Scarborough—Rouge River, I can easily say that the number one form of casework in my constituency is immigration-related. In my immigration casework, there is an unbelievable amount of family reunification cases. People in my area are frustrated that they are waiting 5 to 10 to 15 years in the process. They are stuck in the process waiting to have their families, their loved ones, join them here in Canada. When they begin the process of bringing their parent or sibling over to Canada, they are told that it will take 5 to 10 years. They apply and they wait and wait and continue to wait. The backlog for parents who are waiting to come to Canada is in the hundreds of thousands. Why? It is because the number of visas for parents and grandparents issued this year has been reduced by close to 44% of what it was. The wait times are getting longer and longer. This year, there are only 11,000 parents who can come to Canada. In 2005 and in 2006, the target was 20,000. Now it is only 11,000. This is a reduction of 9,000 people in this current year. This is not the only backlog that exists, unfortunately.

The government claims that it is clearing the backlog for skilled workers when, in actuality, the backlog for skilled workers grew. In 2005, there was a backlog of 487,000. Now, it is 508,000. In the past six years, this backlog has grown by 173,000 applications.

This so-called clearing the backlog is, unfortunately, not working. It is not working for skilled workers and it is not working for families trying to reunify. Immigrants are getting resentful because they are waiting longer and longer to bring their loved ones to Canada. They are being told by the government that there are people who are jumping the queue. There are hundreds of thousands of people waiting patiently, some not so patiently, to come to Canada. This is not due to nothing other than failed immigration policy. People are really upset that they have to wait so long.

However, rather than amending immigration policy to actually deal with the backlogs and the time constraints, the Conservative government is trying to find a scapegoat: the new refugees who are coming. This is not the government's fault or the fault of the failed immigration policies, but the refugees' fault. They are jumping the queue and taking the spots of all those other people who have been patiently waiting.

What the government has failed to mention is that for some refugees there is no queue to jump. There is no lineup for people who are in serious danger, for people who are living through a civil war, for people who are being persecuted because of their gender, their religion, their sexual orientation, et cetera. When their lives or the lives of their family is called into question, there is no line. Once they are safely in Canada, they must then join the exact same queue as everyone else and wait their turn to get their status in our country.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague on her speech. A lot of the conversation taking place is centred around the idea of queue jumping, whether or not it is a myth. The other issue pertains to the two-tiered system that would be created by Bill C-4 carried over from the last session. Could the member comment on that?

Also, has she had any experience regarding how refugees in the system are dealing with the fact that the bill does not go to the crux of the issue and does not really fix the problem in the sense that there is no great incentive out there not to be involved in this type of work?

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my question is with regard to the doors being open to legitimate refugees while safeguarding the integrity of our borders. Bill C-4 ensures that criminals looking to play our system and those looking to jump the queue are sent a strong message. Canadians will not tolerate this abuse of our generosity.

I call on the NDP to support the bill and stand with real victims of human smuggling and law-abiding Canadians.

I am curious to know what the definition of "maximum security" is in the hon. member's mind because to me it means something like Millhaven or Kingston Penitentiary. Could the hon. member please give us her definition of what "maximum security" really is?

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am profoundly sad that Canadians must once again stand to oppose this morally repugnant bill. Immediately I would like to remind the House that the people who stand to be criminalized by this bill, indeed the people who are already victimized as they languish in Canadian detention centres under inhumane conditions for excessive lengths of time, are children, women, victims of torture, abuse and rape, and victims of the kind of poverty that entirely eradicates an individual's inalienable right to self-determination and autonomy.

Already at any given point in time, Canada is holding around 450 non-status migrants in detention centres and maximum security prisons. Dozens of these people at any given time are children. Charges have never been laid against them and they have no idea when they will be released or if they will be deported.

Canada does not jail children unless they are seeking asylum. We do not jail people for years when they have never been charged with a crime, unless they are seeking asylum. We do not jail people without providing access to legal counsel, unless they are seeking asylum. We do not categorically bar prisoners from seeking bail, unless of course they are seeking asylum. We do no jail the traumatized victims of political conflict, abuse, and poverty, unless they are seeking asylum.

Canada is guilty of doing all of this already. The use and misuse of maximum security detention centres to imprison those seeking refugee status is a blight on this nation's integrity. The bill before us today will make this travesty infinitely worse. Among its many problems, Bill C-4 states that anyone arbitrarily labelled as a designated claimant, for reasons left to the discretion of the minister, will be mandatorily detained on arrival in a detention centre or prison and will not have their case reviewed for one full year. Once again, a remind the House that this does include children.

It is incumbent upon the House to consider the health and safety of individuals when we look at a bill that commits people to imprisonment. Health is rarely considered in immigration policy, but study after study from around the globe is proving that immigration detention strategies are creating significant health concerns. A study from the Centre for Population Mental Health Research that was published in the Public Library of Science journal finds that the rate of mental disorder among populations held in detention centres are substantially higher than those of people held in community settings. Not surprisingly, children in particular show evidence of severe mental health impairment. Rates of suicide and self-harm are at a level comparable to or higher than that among prison populations.

There is a strong correlation between the mental health of refugees and the length of time spent in detention. When finally released from detention they will almost always suffer from prolonged mental health impairment due to the trauma suffered while they were detained. These detention centres, like the centre for the prevention of immigration in Laval, where upwards of a hundred individuals, including children, are being held at any given time, or like the maximum security prison in Rivière-des-Prairies where refugee claimants make up one-third of the prison population while they have not been charged with any crime or convicted of any crime, are very often the site of human rights violations and abuse. The migrants held at these detention centres are routinely denied access to any health services, especially mental health services.

Are members here today prepared to assume responsibility for endangering the lives of these people by neglecting their health? When they are eventually assessed, so many of their claims are proved to be legitimate. The government is punishing innocent people. The Conservative members of the House wish to punish more innocent people with harsher mandatory imprisonment for longer periods of time.

According to his own discretion, this bill will allow the minister to retroactively wrench a whole family or part of a family out of their community where they are waiting to hear about their refugee status. In other cases, they may already have refugee status. They will be taken under this law and thrown into detention. Family members would be forceably separated. Children would be forceably removed from their parents despite the fact that their parents have not been accused of being unfit, if their case has never come to court or if they have been flagged by child protection agents. The lasting anguish inflicted by separating a parent from a child or a child from a parent would be, and already is, guilt on the head of the government.

The Canada Border Services Agency jailed 14,362 people from 2008 to 2009 for immigration reasons at the cost of $45 million of taxpayers' money. Under Bill C-4, with the minister's new power to arbitrarily define any migrant as a human smuggler, these numbers are sure to increase.

The government must make the definition of “designated claimant” clear and transparent. At this point, according to this bill, the minister would have the absolute power to label any group of refugees as designated claimants for largely arbitrary reasons that he will not disclose. Once labelled, a refugee would be subject to the litany of unfair regulations set out by this bill. The discriminatory nature of this arbitrary designation would create two classes of refugees in Canada. This is a clear violation of section 15 of the charter that states that every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination, even refugees and migrants. It is crucial to the integrity of our charter that all persons are afforded the protection of basic human rights under our law, including those without status.

It is the obligation of the House to not pass legislation that is in violation of our charter. Not only is this bill in violation of our charter, it is also in violation of the United Nations' protocol relating to the status of refugees and our own Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

We have to recognize that jailing people on Canadian soil in an effort to stop them from fleeing persecution and poverty from wherever they come is completely nonsensical. The bill intentionally and maliciously refuses to draw a distinction between those who are committing the crime of human smuggling and those who are victims of the crime of human smuggling themselves. It is true that people are trafficked to this country under false pretenses and are abused, raped and kidnapped as a result of the human trafficking industry. However, enforcing the same punitive measures against the victims and the criminals themselves is the very definition of the word “insanity”.

Earlier today, the member for St. Catharines excused this exact lapse of logic by saying that the human smugglers of the ships disguise themselves as those who are being smuggled. That is absurd. If a criminal wears a disguise while committing a crime, it does not give us reason to change our laws to erase the distinction between the criminals and the victims. Under any circumstance, that proposition is laughable. However, for some reason that line of thinking is tolerated when we speak of the plight of refugees in Canada.

The member for St. Catharines also pointed out that Canadians do not wish to share their health care services with those seeking asylum and who do not yet have status. I would like to state that I am one woman who would be perfectly happy to share the privilege of public health care with those who are most needy and vulnerable.

In December 2009, Jan Szamko died in an immigration centre in Canada after being denied medical aid. In December 1995, Mike Akhinen died from medical neglect at the detention centre in Mississauga known as Celebrity Inn. These are just two cases of neglect that resulted in death. Instances of non-status Canadians being denied medical attention is extremely common and this bill would make it 100% legal.

Refugees come to Canada with legitimate claims, fleeing the worst conditions imaginable. We have a moral obligation to help them. Would the Conservative members of the House be willing to look individuals in the face when they are desperate and ill and deny them a doctor? That is inhumane and I refuse to believe that Canadians are inhumane. I refuse to believe that we are as illogical as this bill. When my colleagues from the government speak endlessly on behalf of what Canadians want them to do, I would like to remind them that the majority of Canadians did not vote for them and they do not necessarily share the same values. I am proud to represent some of the many Canadians who did not vote for them and who do not support this bill.

This bill reduces smuggled human refugees to goods being illegally brought into this country. The government thinks that by raising the duty or the tariffs on the commodity will discourage this trade out of existence. Refugees are not cattle. They are not softwood lumber. They are human beings and human smuggling is not a commodity trade. Maybe we could compare it to a service. Even if we were to follow this line of logic through to its conclusion, we could assume that if this bill were to come into effect it would force human smugglers to raise the price of the service that they provide to refugees in response to the increased tariffs we are now imposing on them. Clearly, it does not make any sense.

Some of the members of the opposition have already spoken about history and historical precedent. I believe it is important to look to history before we act as a nation. Let us look to another time when human beings were treated like commodities to be levied. Imagine how history would regard us if we jailed the refugees coming through the Underground Railroad into Canada during the time of American slavery. I guarantee this bill would bring the same kind of shame on Canada. We would live to regret it.

Beyond the fact that the bill is morally repugnant for all of the reasons I have enumerated in this speech, it is not what it purports to be. How would the news that Canada has new tough-on-smuggling laws ever reach those who are actually fleeing to Canada by these means? How will the victims of poverty and persecution who come to Canada seeking asylum get the news that we just passed some tough new inhumane refugee laws?

The only way this legislation will ever be effective is if the government delivers leaflets around the world explaining our new laws. The bill clearly is not aimed at reducing human smuggling. It is targeting Canadian voters by making them feel like the threat of illegal immigration is greater than it actually is.

I join members of the opposition in opposing the bill. It not only creates an arbitrary process but indeed is discriminatory against the most vulnerable citizens of this world.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-4, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee, and of the amendment.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I have a number of thoughts to share with members regarding this particular bill. I will give a bit of an overview.

We look at Canada as a great country that has all sorts of hope and opportunity and that is fairly well established around the world. Today, we have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 0.8% in terms of our overall immigrant population, which is roughly 260,000-plus immigrants every year, and a portion of those immigrants come to Canada as refugees. We had higher percentages during the 1990s when more immigrants came to our country on a per capita basis. However, all in all, Canada has provided opportunity and hope for citizens from around the world to come here and call Canada their new home.

“Refugees” is not a bad word. The government has done a disservice to refugees as a whole because of the way it is branding refugees as being dirty and not really contributing to the Canadian economy. That is what Canadians are picking up on because of the manner in which the government continues to talk about refugees.

What is even worse is that we often hear people use “refugee” and “immigrant” as one and the same. I can say that there is a great deal of concern with regard to trying to fix the system we have, but, all in all, the vast majority of Canadians are quite happy with the contributions of immigration policies from the past that have seen a good balance of immigrants and refugees come to our country.

Dealing with Bill C-4 and why it exists today causes a great deal of concern for many stakeholders who have worked with refugees over the years. I have had opportunities to have discussions with a number of refugees over the years. I believe I have an excellent appreciation of what it is that many refugees have to go through in order to arrive in Canada, ultimately settle and become contributing members of our society. We sell refugees short when we do not better educate the population as a whole in terms of the valuable contributions that refugees make to our nation. Instead, I have found that the government has made the decision to try to come across as talking tough on the crime and safety elements. It has kind of roped in the whole refugee aspect of it, which is most unfortunate.

There are ads that say that the Prime Minister has a plan to crack down on human smugglers and bogus claimants. There is an interesting picture, to which I have made reference, showing the Prime Minister and, what appears to be, the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism standing on the back of the Ocean Lady. Members will be familiar with the Ocean Lady, the vessel that had 76 refugees on board.

It is interesting that the government seems to be determined to make refugees look as if they are bad. When we look at the number of refugees who have come in via boats, it is a small percentage of the overall number of immigrants, let alone the number of refugees that come to Canada. To try to put everyone in the same group and demonize refugees is just wrong.

I do not believe this is good legislation. I believe it establishes a second tier of refugee that is not healthy, that promotes and encourages some of the negative thinking and attitudes toward refugees that is out there. I believe the government has a role to encourage more tolerance and better education regarding issues surrounding refugees and so forth.

I was hoping to ask a couple of questions earlier when the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism spoke to Bill C-4. Usually members are afforded the opportunity to ask questions. However, the one question I was hoping to get an answer to concerns the boat on which he was standing side-by-side with the Prime Minister, the Ocean Lady. There were 76 individuals who claimed to be refugees. How many of those individuals are, in fact, settled today? It would have been wonderful to have heard a response from the minister. My understanding is that all of them had qualified for asylum here in Canada. That was a photo-op that the government used to tell Canadians that refugees are bad.

The feedback I get from the average person, because of the way in which the government has persistently attempted to make refugees look bad, is starting to have an impact, and it is not a pleasant impact. There is a percentage of Canadians who have very little tolerance toward refugees and, to a certain degree, immigrants. The government is feeding into that anger by taking the types of stands it is taking. It is a hatred.

I would caution the government in terms of the way in which it continues to move forward on this issue. If the government really wants to make a difference, if it really wants to have a more positive impact it should be focusing on how to bring refugees in and process them in a more timely fashion so that those who are legitimate can become a part of the Canadian economy. That would be something that would be wonderful to see from the government.

What was the minister talking about in his comments? He stated that the reason we have Bill C-4 is because of the profiteers, the profiteers being the human smugglers. That is the reason we have this bill. That is what the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism said just a few hours ago.

To what degree would this legislation penalizing the smugglers? The smugglers, generally speaking, are, as far as I am concerned, unethical individuals who base a dollar value on humans. They exploit tragedy. I and members of the Liberal Party have very little sympathy for these profiteers or human smugglers.

Having said that, the impact of Bill C-4 would be far more profound on the refugees, not the smugglers, not the profiteers who the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism says that he is trying to hit and hurt with this particular legislation.

If the minister does not change the legislation, the real victim here will be the refugees because he has established that second tier. He says that we will now be able to hold off in recognizing someone. It could be four, five years before they would ultimately be able to sponsor a family member.

As a member of Parliament, I am sure all offices have communications with immigrants who are trying to sponsor family members from abroad, especially if it is a parent, but also brothers, sisters, siblings, nephews, nieces, and so forth. Do members know what the processing times for those today?

What we are saying is that based on the assumption, and it is a fair assumption, 99% of those who are arriving on the boats are in fact legitimate refugees who need asylum. It would have been nice if the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism were here to provide an answer himself.

The Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism wants the power and the authority, which he would get through this legislation, to tell refugees that they cannot land in Canada for five years. We can just imagine leaving a country where we were being shot at, we were receiving death threats and so on, landing in Canada considering ourselves fortunate because we survived and then being told that our life was on hold. Yes, we made it to Canada but our life is on hold for maybe five years. After five years we may be able to sponsor our family. That would mean anywhere from nine months to twelve years. Considering the direction in which the government is going it would probably get closer to the latter.

Canada has a moral and legal obligation to accept refugees. We can imagine a 23-year-old man wondering when he would be able to see his wife and 6-year-old child.

I always thought that families were important here in Canada, that Canadians recognized the value of family. Do we see that value in this legislation? I would say no. The minister of immigration does not recognize the value of family and he wants to put it into law and wants us to pass it. Members need to look at what the minister is asking us to do. If the purpose is to target profiteers, then let us change the focus.

The minister himself, in addressing the legislation, said that the government was doing some other things in the background, working with other levels of government and that it has been very successful. He made reference to other boats that were prevented from leaving. Maybe the minister should invest more resources in that as opposed to bringing in legislation that is questionable at best. That would be a good direction for the minister to take.

I would suggest to all members, in particular, government members, that they hold their ministers accountable for the legislation they bring forward. Just because a minister brings in legislation does not mean that it is good legislation. If a minister brings in something and a little red flag, blue flag or orange flag goes up, we have a responsibility to look into it and hold that person accountable, just like I would have welcomed the opportunity to pose some specific questions to the minister of immigration on this legislation.

We do have an immigration standing committee. Even though I am somewhat new to the House of Commons, I am not overly impressed with the immigration standing committee because it does not allow for ongoing questions relating to the accountability of the individual who I believe is most important, and that is the minister of immigration.

There are so many issues facing immigration today and yet the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism would have us address a seriously flawed piece of legislation that would likely get defeated if it were brought to the Supreme Court. That is what he has us debating today. I can tell the House that there is a list of at least a dozen issues, maybe 20, that need to be addressed by the minister in his portfolio.

The minister made reference to the bill going to the immigration standing committee, which is great because that is part of the process. I still think we can strengthen the process by allowing critics and other members of Parliament to ask more specific questions of the minister, because. ultimately, we have the responsibility to think outside a political agenda. I have witnessed a political agenda in this particular bill and the agenda has more to do with hatred I would suggest, although I do not want to over-react. There was a bit of hesitation when I used the word “hatred”, so I will just rephrase it.

I am sure every member in this chamber would recognize that refugees contribute a great deal to our economy and they will continue to do that into the future. Overall, refugees have made a significant impact in our economy, our social fabric and who we are today as Canadians, as a country. I will acknowledge the fact that there is a small percentage of refugees that do create some problems and there are some individuals who will take advantage of potential refugees. Those ones upset me and many members all the time, and quite significantly.

The image and the message that the government sends out to the public are not positive when it comes to refugees, and I cited two specific examples. When we have the Prime Minister standing on the back of a boat saying that we are after the human smugglers and brings in legislation of this nature, many Canadians, and members can go and canvass their own constituents, are of the opinion that people who came in on that boat should be shipped back to the country of origin, whether they are legitimate or not. That is because the government of the day has fuelled that sentiment and given that impression either directly or indirectly. Tell me how that is a healthy thing for government to be doing.

I would suggest that there are things we can do, that we have to recognize the importance of the rule of law, that we have to ensure that individual refugees are provided the opportunity to appear and allow for a judge or appeal board to provide a decision in as quick a fashion as possible.

The reason I talk a lot about the process is because if we want to move forward and continue to be a country that can provide hope and opportunities, we need to recognize there are things that government can do to improve the system. We are spending too much time on things that I believe are hurtful. If we want to spend time on improving the system, the biggest recommendation I can give on the whole refugee file is to provide the resources necessary to ensure we have a process that is more timely and that is fair. Whether they are children or adults, whatever gender and whatever part of the world they are coming from, we need to ensure there is a sense of fairness to the process and it is done in a timely way. The quicker it is done, the sooner legitimate refugees will be able to settle and contribute to our communities and for those who are not legitimate, then the sooner they are out of Canada.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-4, first, because of its severe impact on legitimate refugees who come to Canada; second, because of its direct conflict with Canada's international obligations; and third, because it takes Canada once again down the wrong-headed road of trying to use incarceration as a solution for social problems.

Looking at the title, Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act, one might wonder why anyone would be concerned. We all share a common concern about the financial exploitation of desperate refugees. We all share concerns about the unsafe transportation of refugees to Canada. However, the title of the act is clearly more about spin than about information. It is designed to provoke a, “well who could disagree with that”, kind of response. Unfortunately, it is something we have seen all too often on Conservative bills.

Early in the debate, the parliamentary secretary for immigration said that Canadians clearly voted for this measure. In fact, if they had read the title and if this were a vote determining measure, then it was certainly with the expectation that this bill would contain significant measures targeting human smugglers.

However, when we actually look at the bill, what do we find? We find only two significant measures targeting those smugglers. These two measures might perhaps be helpful. One makes the endangerment of life and safety for those being transported an aggravating factor when it comes to sentencing. This is something for which we might find support from all sides of the House.

Second, there is a measure that would extend the time for initiating proceedings against smugglers from six months to five years. As we all know, human smuggling cases can be quite complicated. Again, this is a measure that might find a degree of support from all sides of the House and might pass quickly.

The other measures directed at smugglers are of questionable use. They once again stem from the Conservative's approach of trying to deter crime through mandatory minimum sentences and large fines even though all the literature in all kinds of criminal activity and behaviour show that these do not serve as deterrents. I think the problem for the government was that there was not much to do in the area of targeting human smugglers because the maximum penalties are already life in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

Why the dramatic title? Unfortunately, the government either believes in its own rhetoric, which is based on fear, or the government is attempting simply to enhance its tough guy image at the expense of legitimate refugees.

How large is this problem? Of the 30,000 refugee claimants who might arrive in any given year, less than 2% are estimated to have arrived at the hands of smugglers or in the famous cases of the two ships that came. That is less than 2% or 300-500 people out of more than 33,000 claimants. We are taking a sledge hammer to what is a very real but very small problem.

Still, if we were under siege by human smugglers, there are solutions that would quickly address this problem without draconian attacks on refugee rights and without incurring enormous long-term costs of incarceration. These are quite simple. They are enhanced enforcement and the expeditious determination of refugee claims. Both of those measures require annual adequate funding to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration and to law enforcement agencies. However, when we have a government that is now obsessed with cuts to public agencies, we cannot expect them to be able to do the enforcement work and do the determinations of refugee claims in an expeditious manner, which would actually take away the problem of smugglers and abuse of the system.

I will outline the main content of the bill because it is this content that gives rise to my concern. It is this content that I do not really understand. Bill C-4 is an attack on legitimate refugees who happen to arrive in a different manner than other refugees. I find the following seven things to be major concerns.

Bill C-4 creates a discriminatory category of designated refugee claimants based on their mode of arrival. It would impose penalties and disadvantages on legitimate refugees who have been forced to use the services of human smugglers to escape with their lives. It would impose penalties and disadvantages that would not be placed on other legitimate refugees who happen to arrive under their own steam, by air or crossing land boundaries.

Second, it provides for the detention of legitimate refugee claimants for up to one year with no review, including children. These are people who have perhaps suffered violence themselves, who have perhaps lost members of their family, who have certainly lost almost everything they had to their name. What will we do in Canada? We will further punish them by keeping them in detention for up to one year with no review.

Third, Bill C-4 proposes a ban on humanitarian and compassionate applications for five years. This would arbitrarily deny a right to those who have already been victims twice over. They were victims in their home country and victims of human smugglers. Now, in Canada, we would deny them a right to make their case on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, which all others have the right to do in this country.

The fourth thing of concern for me in Bill C-4 is that it would suspend the right to apply for permanent residency for five years. I cannot imagine what we think we would accomplish by doing this. It can only delay family reunification cases where families have been split up abroad and it can only delay the integration of refugees into Canadian society.

My fifth concern is that it would deny refugees travel documents that they would otherwise be entitled to if they were designated claimants. Once again, I cannot imagine what the problem is we are solving here, but the problem we are creating, once again, is with families who may have been separated abroad and who may need these travel documents to travel to help reunify their families.

My sixth concern is that it would allow the retroactive designation of claimants as possibly coming under this act. It is a fundamental principle of British common law which we use that we do not apply retroactive measures in criminal law. To me, the same thing should apply in the case of immigration law dealing with refugee claimants.

Finally and perhaps most egregious, Bill C-4 would exclude designated claimants from the appeal process, something which I believe the Supreme Court would find very hard to uphold in the long run.

Before I say a little more about my specific concerns, I want to talk a little about my own experience with refugees. As some in the House will know, I am the co-founder of the Victoria Immigrant and Refugee Centre Society. It is a society that was set up in the 1980s to employ refugees and immigrants to help other refugees and immigrants with their settlement services in the community of Victoria. I am very proud of my long association with the Immigrant and Refugee Centre Society and the very high quality of work it has done in my community.

In the 1980s, I worked with Latin American refugees who came from Central America. Many of them stayed in my home as their first base of arrival in Canada. I visited refugee camps in both Indonesia and Afghanistan and helped on international projects trying to get the safe return home of refugees. First and foremost, I can tell the House that refugees are looking for a safe place for their families. They are not examining the comparative refugee regulations in countries around the world. They are simply looking for a place to go where they can be safe.

I will tell you a short story about the Campos family who came from El Salvador in the mid 1980s. They had two sons. One of their sons was taken from their house and shot in the street by security forces. They left that night without any documents, taking their younger son and fleeing the country. They ended up at my house in Victoria. I do not know how they got there but I have some suspicions that it was not an altogether pleasant journey, and they may have used the services of human smugglers. They felt they had no choice but to try and save the life of their only surviving son. The Campos family, Arnaldo, Virgina and José are still friends of mine today and they are alive because we gave them refuge in Canada. They did not shop for a place to go. They fled for their lives.

In the late 1980s, I served as an expert witness at refugee board hearings on behalf of Indo-Fijians who fled the military coup in Fiji, as I was working at that time for an international non-government organization. Again, when the Canadian minister of foreign affairs at the time, Joe Clark, said that we would accept refugees from the coups, there was great surprise in Canada when tens of thousands of Indo-Fijians got on the next plane and arrived in Vancouver. If we had had this kind of bill in place, those who had organized the flights would have been defined as human smugglers. Those who raised money to help them come to Canada would have been caught in the web of this bill. These are very productive and proud Canadians today, still living and working in Vancouver.

When we ask about the definition of human smuggling, I should add that as my eighth concern. I feel the definition is so broad that we will inadvertently catch those who are helping legitimate refugees out of humanitarian concerns in the web of the bill. I bought tickets for people to come illegally into Canada in the 1980s who were fleeing for their lives. Would I have been defined as a human smuggler? I am afraid under the bill I might have been.

Earlier in this debate the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism used a bizarre market analogy about trying to affect the price charged by human smugglers. This is nothing out of the real world of refugees who are living in camps day-to-day, trying to find a way to reach safety.

On the other side, we heard the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration talk about queue-jumping, which implies that there is some kind of organized system for dealing with refugees around the world. This is a system that does not exist and cannot exist when people are fleeing for their lives. Again, there are undoubtedly a few who will attempt to exploit our refugee determination system. The solution for those few is enforcement and swift refugee determinations. This will eliminate the problem of those smugglers who try to target Canada.

My concerns are with legitimate refugees, people who have lost everything, people who have been victims of violence. My concern is how we will treat them when they arrive in Canada. If they arrive by boat, will we deny them the same treatment as other legitimate refugees? The discriminatory category of designated claimants is a clear violation of charter rights and I think the courts, again, would find it hard to uphold such a measure.

The provision of detention without review has already been ruled unconstitutional by the Canadian Supreme Court when dealing with security certificates. Plus we have a provision that says mandatory conditions will be placed on designated claimants who are released and those will be set by regulation. Again, I doubt the Supreme Court of Canada would uphold any such vague determination of conditions for release of detainees.

The bar on humanitarian and compassionate applications for five years and the suspension of the right to apply for permanent residence for five years clearly violate both our obligations under the international convention on refugees and also under the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. This convention requires that in all cases the best interests of the child be taken into consideration and I cannot see how that can be met with bans on humanitarian and compassionate applications and with suspensions on the right to apply for permanent residence, which would allow the reunification of families.

I would like to ask the House to listen to the voice of refugees and to those who have actually worked with refugees in the field. Listen to those like the Canadian Council for Refugees that have called for the abandonment of this draconian legislation. Listen to Amnesty International that works every day with those who live in fear of their lives and often tries to help them find safe places to go. Listen to the Canadian Bar Association and its severe reservations about the legislation. Listen to the many other community organizations that work trying to help those who have suffered severe traumas to integrate into Canadian society.

Listen to those voices when it comes time to vote on the bill. Can it be amended? Can it be fixed? My concerns are very severe and I have seen no inclination on the government side to listen to these arguments about humanitarianism, compassion, human rights and treating fairly those who have already been victimized by becoming refugees from their country and by having to resort to the service of human smugglers.

I know many of these people and I know many other members of the House know those who have come to Canada as refugees. The bill would have made that much more difficult for many people who are an important part of our communities now. Let us not deny ourselves the future potential of those people who choose not to come here, but make a wonderful addition to our society.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-4, Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee, and of the amendment.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Minister of Citizenship]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise in support of Bill C-4, a bill which would prevent human smugglers from abusing Canada's immigration system.

Human smuggling is a nefarious industry, one that exists around the world. Unfortunately, thousands of people die each year because of illegal migration and the smugglers who facilitate this migration.

Parliament needs to take action to put an end to the activities of human smugglers who have chosen Canada as a destination for their business, which is the dreadful exploitation of human beings.

Every year thousands of people around the world die in illegal smuggling operations organized by human smugglers. These people are not humanitarians. They do not assist people to become bona fide refugees and protect them from persecution. They are profiteers.

In the particular context with which we are dealing, namely those smuggling syndicates that are targeting Canada and which managed to bring two large shiploads of illegal migrants to our west coast in the past two years, our intelligence agencies and security and police partners in Southeast Asia all told us that these syndicates of human smugglers are essentially the gunrunners, the smugglers who helped to fuel the civil war in Sri Lanka by illicitly bringing contraband arms, bombs and guns into a theatre of conflict leading to the death of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Since the end of the hostilities in Sri Lanka, these smuggling syndicates have been looking for a new business model, and instead of moving guns and bombs, they have switched to moving people for a very high price.

We know that those who have enlisted these smuggling syndicates to try to come illegally to Canada in violation of our immigration laws, in violation of our marine laws, in violation of international law, in violation of every principle of safe migration, have been willing to commit to pay up to $50,000 to the illegal smuggling syndicates. Typically, they pay about 10% of the fixed price as a down payment. A typical down payment to the smuggling syndicate is in the range of $5,000. The balance is typically payable over the course of time after arrival in Canada and very often through coerced participation in criminal activity.

As I mentioned, every year around the world thousands of people die in smuggling operations, whether they were migrants who suffocated in shipping containers crossing the English Channel or whether they were people who paid smugglers to go to Australia in dangerous shipping boats that crashed up against the shore.

We must act to send a very clear message that Canada is the most open developed country in the world to immigration, to newcomers, to refugees who need our protection and seek new opportunities. In order to maintain that remarkable openness, which by the way represents in Canada the highest level of immigration per capita in the developed world wherein we add .8% of our population per year through legal immigrants, and the highest level of refugee resettlement in the developed world through the 20% increase in our targets for refugee resettlement, by next year we will be accepting some 14,000 resettled refugees. Last year we welcomed 280,000 new permanent residents and we are increasing our program for refugee resettlement.

In order to maintain that generosity, that openness, and the public support which is necessary to maintain that attitude of openness, we must demonstrate to Canadians that our system is characterized by fairness and the rule of law.

One of the reasons that Canadians are so understandably upset when they see large scale smuggling operations is that it violates their sense of fairness and their belief that our immigration system is characterized by the application of fair rules.

Millions of people have come to Canada through our fair and generous immigration or refugee resettlement programs. In my experience they are those who most profoundly resent those who would pay illegal criminal networks to be smuggled to Canada illegally, avoiding the legal system.

My friend opposite and others have said that there is no so-called queue for refugees. First, I do not know how he knows that all or most of those who pay smuggling syndicates are refugees. We constantly hear from the critics that when we talk about our efforts to stop smugglers from targeting Canada we are talking about refugees. How do they know that? We know that many of the people in the two vessels who came to Canada most recently were coming from India transiting through Thailand, both democracies, both with the rule of law and protection for human rights. Perhaps colleagues opposite did not see the CBC report from Chennai in Tamil Nadu in India. Tamil Nadu is a region of southeastern India where tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Sri Lankan Tamils migrated during the conflict in Sri Lanka, where they sought temporary protection or new opportunities.

The CBC interviewed a group of several young Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in Tamil Nadu, India who said they had made down payments of up to $5,000 to these syndicates to be transported to Canada. They were not in a war zone. They were not subject to persecution. They said they wanted to come to Canada because they had heard about our “free monthly salaries”. We have to be very careful. We cannot and should not prejudge newly arrived migrants as to their prospective refugee claims. Some may be refugees; some may not. Many may just be seeking economic opportunity and heard that Canada is a soft target and therefore they are willing to pay smuggling syndicates.

What this bill seeks to do is maintain Canada's commitment to our domestic and international legal obligations with respect to refugee protection and to respect our humanitarian obligation to protect bona fide refugees fleeing persecution while at the same time changing the business model of the criminal smuggling syndicates. That is the objective of this bill.

We seek, first, to increase in the bill penalties for smugglers so that there will be a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 10 years for those who are found to participate in a human smuggling event which involves at least 50 individuals or in which there are exacerbating circumstances such as loss of life. We also massively increase the monetary fines for the owners of ships involved in these voyages. It is typically ships, but I should point out that the bill could address non-marine human smuggling events which have occurred in Canada.

That is an important message, but let us be realistic. I have studied this issue very closely. In fact, just last month I was in New Zealand and Bangkok, Thailand meeting with international partners and our own security agencies, as well as international police forces. I was trying to get a better understanding of the nature of these smuggling enterprises. It is very clear that we cannot impose Canadian law in terms of these sanctions on smugglers who operate overseas. The kingpins of these syndicates very rarely come to Canada. They are most typically jumping around between transit countries in Southeast Asia beyond our legal reach.

Having said that, there is an important dimension of our fight against human smuggling which is not formally in the legislation. It is an operational dimension whereby our government, through the good leadership of my colleague, the hon. Minister of Public Safety and the security and police agencies under his ministry, have dispatched additional resources for investigation and co-operation with the governments, police and intelligence agencies in the transit countries. Thanks to the additional resources that we have put into the region, we have managed successfully to prevent any of the planned voyages that were to target Canada. We know, without getting into operational or confidential details, that several voyages were planned for Canada that have been successfully interrupted, thanks in part to the co-operation of Canadian security forces in the region.

Having said that, let us be clear. In any black market there will always be someone willing to provide the contraband good or service if there is sufficient demand at a sufficiently high price point, because we are talking about profiteers. If they are able to get commitments of up to $50,000 to come to Canada, they will continue to try to find the vessels and put together the complex logistics to bring people from Southeast Asia to Canada. Therefore, in this legislation we must reduce the price point that people are willing to pay to be illegally smuggled to Canada through these criminal syndicates. That is the objective of the bill.

I think some opposition members have not studied the issue in all of its subtlety, or perhaps they do not understand how we are trying to disincentivize people from being willing to pay up to $50,000 to the smuggling syndicates. That is what the bill seeks to do.

For example, by reducing some of the privileges that normally exist for asylum claimants in Canada, should someone who has arrived in a designated smuggling event under this bill be found by our legal system to be a bona fide refugee in need of our protection, we will not send them back to their country of origin. We will therefore respect and conform with our international and domestic legal obligations. However, there is no obligation on Canada to grant such persons immediate permanent residency, which is normally the case for successful asylum claimants.

What the bill would do would be to say that we would grant people who are deemed to be bona fide refugees who have arrived in a designated smuggling event a temporary residency status in Canada for up to five years, after which we would then reassess the conditions in their country of origin to determine whether the country conditions have improved and whether the risk that was determined at their refugee hearing still continues.

If at that point there is a determination that conditions have improved significantly in that country, that they would no longer face risk if removed, they could then face removal back to their country of origin. However, should conditions in that country not have improved after five years, they would then have access to permanent residency in Canada as a further reflection of our humanitarian instinct.

During those initial five years, here is the key disincentive. Such individuals would not be entitled to the privilege of sponsoring family members to Canada because here is the key aspect of the bill. We know that people are prepared to commit to up to $50,000 based on a calculation that they subsequently will be able to sponsor family members, so the $50,000 price point is really not associated with just the migration of one individual, the smuggled individual, but indeed all subsequent family members who may follow that successful claimant. There is a commercial calculation being made here that the $40,000 to $50,000 price point may lead to permanent residency for the primary migrant and then subsequently permanent residency for members of the family who in turn could help to pay off the debt to the smuggling syndicate.

In the bill we are seeking to create a doubt, a question mark in the minds of those who constitute the market for the smuggling gangs. Will they be able to get permanent residency in Canada? That would no longer be a certainty. Will they be able to sponsor family members and help pay off the debt? It would no longer be a certainty. We are very strongly persuaded that this is a balanced approach.

Thirteen months ago, when the last large vessel arrived off the west coast with some 500 illegal migrants, Canadians were understandably disturbed with this large scale violation of the integrity of our immigration law and with this mass human smuggling voyage. At that time public opinion polls consistently said that about two-thirds of Canadians thought the government should prevent such vessels from even entering Canadian territorial waters. About 55% of Canadians, and an even higher percentage of new Canadians, immigrants to this country, said that if people who arrive in such a vessel get access to our refugee system and are deemed to be bona fide refugees, they should be immediately returned. That is what the majority of Canadians said.

As a government, we do not believe that approach would respect our legal or humanitarian obligations. Let me be clear. Contrary to some of the demagoguery we hear from critics of the bill, we would continue, notwithstanding that public opinion environment, to allow illegally smuggled migrants who file the refugee claim access to our asylum system, which is the fairest asylum system in the world, bar none. They would continue to have access to that system. We would not send back a single person who is deemed by our legal system likely to face danger of persecution or risk to their lives in their country of origin.

This bill exceeds our international and domestic legal obligations with respect to non-refoulement of refugees. The opposition says that this is like refusing to allow Jewish refugees to come here during the second world war. Nonsense. This approach would allow any refugee, or even a false refugee claimant, access to our asylum system. It would simply reduce some of the privileges that normally are provided to asylum claimants in order to reduce their willingness to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a smuggling syndicate.

One of the contentious aspects of the bill is the enhanced detention provisions. I would invite members of the opposition, perhaps at committee, to ask members of our Canada Border Services Agency and lawyers from my ministry about the difficulty of processing hundreds of smuggled asylum claimants who are seeking release from detention, because we have to do detention reviews under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act every two, seven and then subsequent 30 days. This means that with several hundred people we have a non-stop revolving door of detention reviews which is massively inefficient.

I would also point out there has been a red herring created by the opposition about mandatory detention for up to a year of all smuggled migrants. The minister, under the bill, would have the authority to release people in exceptional circumstances, such as children. Under the new asylum system adopted by Parliament last year in Bill C-11, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, bona fide asylum claimants will receive a positive protection decision and therefore permanent residency within about three months of making their claim. Such smuggled migrants in the asylum system who are bona fide refugees would be automatically released from immigration detention when they receive a positive asylum decision, and permanent residency in about 90 days.

Let me point out by way of comparison, because there is a lack of perspective in context here, that most of our peer democracies, most other liberal democracies, including those governed by social democratic parties such as the Labour government in Australia, have mandatory detention for all or almost all asylum claimants, not just illegally smuggled asylum claimants, but all or almost all asylum claimants.

That was the law adopted by the United Kingdom under the previous social democratic Labour government. That is the law in Australia under the social democratic Labour government.

I remember Prime Minister Gillard of Australia congratulating the NDP on its 50th anniversary. She actually defends a policy that puts under permanent detention all asylum claimants until their status is resolved. This is, by comparison, a radically more modest approach which only addresses illegally smuggled migrants for a limited period of time until they receive status, which under the new system would be three months.

In closing, the bill constitutes a balanced and humane approach to combatting the scourge of human smuggling. It would allow access to our refugee protection system for bona fide victims of persecution. It would reduce the massive pressure on our system when we face hundreds of people arriving at the same time. It would provide disincentives for people to pay tens of thousands of dollars to criminal networks to be smuggled illegally to Canada, and it would encourage them rather to seek regional resettlement opportunities or protection, if they are indeed refugees.

This is a bill that Canadians expect and demand. We must stand up for our tradition of protection of refugees and our legal and generous immigration system by combatting those who would abuse our country's generosity.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-4, the Conservative government's bill to address human smuggling.

We in the official opposition and key stakeholders from across Canada from all walks of life are very concerned about the approach the Conservative government is taking with the bill.

The Conservatives claim that the bill cracks down on human smuggling, but in reality, as the bill has been written, it will concentrate too much power in the hands of the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism and unfairly penalize the would-be refugees.

New Democrats would rather attack the criminals, the smugglers and the traffickers. Instead of doing that, the bill will hurt legitimate refugees and people who try to help them. The proposed process is unclear. It is arbitrary and it is very unfairly discriminatory.

The House approved a strong and balanced refugee law in the last sitting. Instead of the new, flawed approach proposed by the bill, we need to have better enforcement of the old bill that was passed in the last Parliament.

Conservatives should be less focused on photo ops and more focused on enforcing the laws that we already have against human smuggling. The government's approach to human trafficking and human smuggling should be focused on providing law enforcement agencies and the Immigration and Refugee Board with the resources they need to get the job done instead of playing politics with refugees.

Bill C-4 takes the wrong approach in a number of ways. I would like to highlight some of the concerns of the official opposition today.

First, regarding designated claimants, the bill allows the minister to designate a group of refugees as irregular arrivals in a fashion that creates two classes of refugee claimants. This poses a possible violation of charter equality rights and the refugee convention.

Second, designated claimants, including children, will be mandatorily detained for a year on arrival or designation, without even a review by the Immigration and Refugee Board. This is an even more clear violation of the charter, as the Supreme Court of Canada has already struck down mandatory detention without review on security certificates. It seems that this could imply that indefinite detention is on the basis of identity, with no possible release until the minister decides that identity is established.

As I am sure members are aware, arbitrary detention is also a violation of a number of international treaties to which we are signatories.

There is also a concern with the release conditions imposed by Bill C-4, as the mandatory conditions set out in regulations will be imposed on all designated claimants released from detention. It is very troubling that the conditions are not specified, making this very unclear. On principle, though, mandatory conditions would be unfair, as they are unable to take into account individual cases.

The problem also extends to the appeal process, since under Bill C-4 decisions on claims by designated persons could not be appealed to the refugee appeal division. This is discriminatory and again risks violating provisions and the refugee convention.

The government has tried this approach before, and all parties opposed the previous bill that was introduced in the last Parliament, Bill C-49 when it was brought to Parliament because there were concerns about the undue amount of power it handed to the minister and because it would likely contravene Canadian and international law. Those concerns are still part of the new Bill C-4.

We can look at other international examples. My colleague from Vancouver Kingsway pointed this out earlier, and I will highlight it again.

When we look at what has happened elsewhere in the world, similar laws have been met with opposition by Amnesty International, which has started a campaign to tackle the same misinformation surrounding refugees who arrive by boat. The campaign highlights the fact that it is legal under international law to arrive by boat and that the vast majority of those who go to another country by boat are in fact legitimate claimants. This bill ignores this information.

There was a high court ruling in November 2010 in Australia that ruled in favour of two Sri Lankan refugees who claimed that laws barring them from appealing in Australian courts were unfair. The approach taken by the Conservative government in this bill makes it very possible that the same situation could arise in Canada if the bill is passed.

What is really happening is that the Conservatives are playing politics with refugees. That is the real optic of this bill. They are claiming this is a public safety issue and the bill was introduced by the public safety minister, but the issue is clearly one that primarily deals with the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. This is an immigration and refugee issue, not a public safety issue.

The official opposition recognizes and respects responsibility for refugees, unlike the Conservatives who have taken an approach that would damage Canada's standing in the international community and violates its commitment under the conventions relating to the status of refugees and the rights of the child. The process proposed by Bill C-4 is unclear, arbitrary and, ultimately, very discriminatory. Even more telling is that research and studies from other countries have shown that the bill would not curb human smuggling at all.

It is not just the official opposition that has concerns about this bill. There are many key stakeholders across our country with questions and concerns on this issue. They are outright worried about the approach that the government is taking to tackle this problem. The Canadian Council for Refugees has called for this bill to be scrapped entirely. Amnesty International Canada says that Bill C-4 falls far short of Canada's international human rights and refugee protection obligations and will result in serious violations of the rights of refugees and migrants. A program director with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has issued a very scathing attack on the Conservative government's attitude toward refugees generally and Bill C-4 in particular stating that there was no need for this draconian measure contemplated by the Conservative government.

Another organization that has spoken out against this particular bill and the one previous to this, the Canadian Bar Association, stated that it did not support the legislation in its previous form as it violates charter protection against arbitrary detention and prompt review of detention, as well as Canada's international obligations respecting the treatment of persons seeking protection. An expert panel at the Centre for Refugee Studies has called this proposed bill draconian.

As we can see, many organizations that come from various walks of life have spoken against this bill being proposed by the Conservative government.

It is clear that the bill takes the wrong approach. I will speak more specifically to why the bill is a wrong approach for Canada to take. First, current legislation already allows for a life sentence for human smuggling. Bill C-4 may be contrary to section 15 of the charter regarding equality under the law. Bill C-4 would create new second-class refugees who are denied permanent residency, temporary resident permits, denied on humanitarian and compassionate grounds and denied applications for permanent residence.

Many legal scholars and constitutional experts argue that this would create inequality under the law simply because the minister has designated immigrants due to their mode of arrival.

Bill C-4 may be contrary to section 9 of the charter, “arbitrary detention”. Bill C-4 would also impose a mandatory detention on designated foreign nationals for up to 12 months.

Bill C-4 is contrary to the UN convention relating to the status of refugees. In particular, Article 31 states:

The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article 1, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence.

In summary, given all the information, the official opposition, key stakeholders and many concerned Canadians across this country are asking why the Conservatives are taking this approach. What answers does the government have for questions about the unconstitutionality of this bill, in particular the arbitrary detention measures? Even more concerning is how the government can justify the mandatory detention of children.

My friend across the aisle talked about how Canadians have been compassionate about our immigration and refugee policies over the years. I would have to agree with that because I am an immigrant myself. I came here 31 years ago and it was this country's generosity that allowed me to migrate here.

However, I would ask my colleagues across the aisle if they are changing the definition of “compassion”. How can they justify putting children in detention? In my dictionary, the dictionary that Canadians have, compassion is not defined by putting children in detention centres. That is very troubling to me. Surely the Conservatives cannot justify putting children in detention.

This summer, I had an opportunity to attend a soccer tournament in my riding. I saw a program where new immigrant students were playing soccer matches with one another. The program was helping youth integrate into society. That is the kind of Canada that I envision. I do not envision a Canada where we put children in detention centres before we allow them to prosper in this country. Canada's compassion is why I am proud to be a Canadian. We need to ensure that children who come here from different countries where they were persecuted are treated with compassion and not put into detention centres.

I cannot understand how the government can justify the detention of children for over a year without any review at all. Refugees often arrive by plane. Does the government have any explanation as to why it is targeting the refugees on board boats? It is totally unclear what criteria the government would use to designate irregular travellers. Is arriving by plane possibly irregular or is it only by boat? It is even more unclear what would be defined as a group. Could two or more people be considered a group? This would mean that nearly all refugees would be designated simply because they do not travel alone. Is that fair?

The bill would block family reunification. As we heard previously, it would take five years after refugees have come here for them to be reunited with their family. That is not acceptable. It prevents some refugees from applying for permanent residency for up to five years. Why prevent family reunification? That is the question I have for my colleagues opposite in this House.

Bill C-4 would give the government the power to arrest and detain any non-citizens, including permanent residents, based on mere suspicion of criminality. Why is the government attacking the rights of newcomers?

The final question I have for the government side is as follows. In view of all the information, the concerns from key stakeholders, refugee groups and so many Canadians from all walks of life, would the minister tell us why the government did not decide to go after just the criminals and not the legitimate refugees?

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this issue this morning and have the chance to listen to my hon. colleague. I congratulate him as a critic at our committee. I look forward to working with him and his party as we work through a number of issues at citizenship and immigration, including this bill dealing with public safety.

I am very grateful for the chance to rise and support Bill C-4 and its legislation therein. It will allow Canada to crack down on dangerous and illegal human smuggling operations while still maintaining our long and proud tradition of providing a safe haven for refugees.

As several of my hon. colleagues have noted, Canada is a compassionate country that welcomes immigrants and refugees from all over the world. In fact, every year we welcome about 250,000 newcomers to our country, which includes granting asylum to more than 10,000 persecuted persons each year and resettling another 12,000 refugees from abroad. In 2010, we welcomed close to 280,000 new immigrants to our country, one of the highest numbers in post-war history.

Let me point out, when we passed the refugee reform legislation in the last Parliament, Bill C-11, contingent upon the passing of that legislation was that we as a country would accept on a yearly basis an additional 2,500 refugees to our country. It speaks to the compassion, care and concern this government has for refugees across the world. Quite honestly, that bill passed with unanimous consent. My congratulations to everyone in the House who chose to do what was right for our country, what was right for refugees and to ensure that we passed a piece of legislation that is good for Canada as well as those refugees who see Canada as their new home. In helping refugees begin a new life Canadians are helping to ensure that we maintain our international obligations and at the same time build stronger and safe communities and fulfill the promise of Canada, the most welcoming nation in the world.

Our government is committed not only to preserving but also strengthening this already impressive track record. As I noted, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, which received royal assent on June 29, 2010, will allow us to help more people and do it faster. We have committed significant dollars to ensure that this process and program is implemented to the best of our ability as a government and the best of our ability as a civil service. We have set aside that funding and the person power in order to implement the changes to the asylum system as well as to resettle an additional 2,500 refugees on top of what we already accept as a nation.

The government and many Canadians believe that Canada's generosity should not be extended to criminal smuggling. There is a significant difference when one talks about human compassion and treatment of refugees and the sick and utterly despised human smuggling system on which the government is prepared to take action to ensure it is lowered and lessened. Unfortunately, it will be difficult to get rid of it entirely. However, we strive to lower and lessen the opportunity for human smugglers to make money off the backs of other people in this world.

One of the strongest commitments our government made to Canadians when we were first elected in 2006 was that we would take action to make our streets, our homes and our communities safer for everyone. We delivered on that commitment in a number of ways. Again, when it relates to illegal smuggling operations of all kinds that are of concern to law enforcement officers, as well as all Canadians, the government has taken action to crack down on such increasingly dangerous and violent operations.

Shutting down these organized criminal networks is vitally important to both protecting the health of Canadians, as well as their safety and security. Our message in dealing with illegal smuggling operations has been crystal clear. Canada will take decisive action to protect our borders, as well as the safety and security of the law-abiding citizens who are proud to call this great country home.

Human smuggling poses significant risks to our borders and to all Canadians. It is a criminal activity that calls out for action both domestically, which we will implement with C-4, and internationally. That is what Canadians want. It is what they have asked for and that is what our government will do.

The bottom line is that human smuggling undermines Canada's security. Large-scale arrivals make it difficult to properly identify those who arrive, including the smugglers. They hide on these ships. They dress themselves exactly the same way as the potential refugees. It is almost impossible, and it takes a tremendous amount of work of both the CBSA, Canada Border Services Agency, and our RCMP officers to try to determine who will apply for refugee status and who is a smuggler.

Human smuggling is not just a profitable business; it is also dangerous and it puts the lives of those being smuggled in jeopardy.

I was in Vancouver, British Columbia to see the ship that brought those poor individuals to our country. It is one thing the opposition may not like to talk about, but the fact is these ships are not cruise ships, they are literally containers to stuff human life into. The ships are put out to sea in the hope that it shows up on the shore of a country that will accept it. This trip is probably the most dangerous trip that these individuals will have to face.

To do that to individuals, including children, is abhorrent, unacceptable and the government will ensure that it stops in our country. Under the Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act, our government is cracking down on human smugglers in a number of different ways.

The proposed legislation will enable the Minister of Public Safety to declare the existence of a human smuggling event, making those involved subject to the act's measures. It will make it easier to prosecute human smugglers. It will impose mandatory minimum prison sentences on convicted smugglers. It will also hold the shipowners and operators to account for the use of their ships in human smuggling operations.

These are proposed reforms which our government is proposing. They will help the safety and security of our streets and our communities by providing for the mandatory detention of participants for up to one year or until a positive decision by the immigration and refugee board regarding their refugee claims, or whichever comes sooner, in order to allow for the determination of identity, the identity admissibility and illegal activity.

It is unfair, unwarranted and unacceptable that in this day and age ships like these come into port and the individuals on those ships are simply allowed to move into the general population of our country. We cannot have that happen. We do not know who is on those ships. We have no idea whether there are serious criminals, smugglers or shipowners on them.

The process to determine the history of the individuals, the potential criminal activity of some of those individuals and the fairness upon which some of those individuals will receive refugee status in our country has to be done properly and right to ensure the safety of all individuals on the ship and all of the 34 million Canadians in our country.

Under the proposed act, our government is also reducing the attraction of coming to Canada by way of illegal human smuggling operations. We will prevent those who come to Canada as part of human smuggling events from applying for permanent residence status for a period of five years, should they successfully obtain refugee status, and prevent such individuals from sponsoring family members for a period of at least five years. These are not easy decisions to make. They are difficult ones to make in terms of how we will process individuals and families ending up on these ships.

Whether it is the United Nations, or international bodies or governments in our country, we have to stop the smugglers from doing this. It is not enough just to try to attempt to go after them internationally. We have to let smugglers know that it will be difficult for them to fill those ships, because individuals will not want to risk what may happen to them in the process of coming over.

Furthermore, after the passage of the act, our government will also make administrative changes to ensure that participants in a human smuggling events do not receive health care benefits that are any more generous than those that Canadians receive now. From my perspective, having gone across the country holding town hall meetings with a number of my colleagues, this is one of the principle parts of what it is to be Canadian, and we exude that with the principle of fairness.

Canadians accept and understand our role from an international perspective to help those who need it most. We have shown that during tragic incidents, such as what happened in Haiti. We have shown that in our acceptance and our obligation, punching above our weight in terms of the number of refugees that we accept from the United Nations to come to our country each and every year.

What we cannot do, and what Canadians do not want us to do, is to move beyond the principle of fairness. If those who come to our country receive health care benefits that exceed the benefits Canadians receive, then we need to act, and Canadians have asked us to act. We are doing just that in this legislation.

As the minister has noted, the reforms that our government is proposing are tough. We are not saying anything else about that. They are tough, but they are fair.

While Canada has a proud history and a tradition of welcoming immigrants who wish to start a new life here, Canada's generous immigration system has become a target for human smuggling operations. We must take action to end the abuse of Canada's immigration system by human smugglers because it is not acceptable. The majority of Canadians do not accept it and the majority of people in the House of Commons do not accept it. However, to do so we must have laws and measures in place that will deter and prevent these operations.

Canada's refugee resettlement program is one of the most generous in the developed world. As I mentioned, there is no country, on a per capita basis, that accepts more refugees than Canada. We continually punch above our weight when it comes to showing care and compassion for those who need it the most. Canada is one of the most generous countries in the developed world. On average, we take one out of every ten refugees from around the world who wants to resettle here, and it is a big world.

That speaks to the acceptance that we have as Canadians and it speaks to what we as a government believe must be maintained and be continued in the future. However, we must do so under some principles, issues, laws and measures that make sense to us as a government, but also meet the common sense rule and the principle of fairness rule that Canadians have asked us to do.

The critic for the NDP mentioned the issue of a queue not existing. Individuals in refugee camps have lived in squalor and have done so for the last five to ten years. They have been determined by the UN to be refugees. We as a country have an obligation to accept our fair and higher percentage than that which has been slated for us.

We are shutting the doors on individuals and potential families coming here when a boat with 500 individuals on it comes in. It may slightly open the door for the opportunity for a new life for those individuals who have been smuggled here, but it shuts the door on those who are already refugees who have been waiting for that same opportunity to begin a new life.

I beg to differ with my hon. friend. We have a process when these ships come here. It sets in place what we have determined is an acute problem with queue-jumping. When those ships cannot rest in any port across our country, then we do not have queue-jumping. Instead we have a fair process that has been determined by the United Nations to be an extremely good one.

All sides of the House of Commons determined that reform was necessary in our refugee legislation, and that was passed unanimously. We are now coming close to the end of the implementation point where this process, the new refugee act, will now begin. It has been hailed across the world as a system that will improve what has already been considered by many to be one of the best systems in the world.

It is unfair to those who have patiently waited, through legitimate means, to come to our country to have human smugglers illegally bring people into our country. It is that simple and the Canadian public understands this. In every town hall meeting, whether they were in total support of the legislation or had some difficulty with parts of it, one point individuals did not argue with was the fact that Canada had a principle of fairness that it acted upon when it came to all of its international obligations, specifically in dealing with refugee reform.

Queue jumping is not fair. It is not fair to people in our country and it is not fair to those who have been determined to be refugees to come here. That principle upon which fairness exists has to start and this legislation would help do that. When this happens, Canada's immigration system becomes less fair. More than that, our safety is actually threatened by criminal or terrorist organizations that can and often do use proceeds from human smuggling operations to fund other more violent activities, which pose a significant threat to our way of life.

No one in the House can tell me that these individuals who pay $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 and sometimes upwards of $50,000 for a place on what is deemed to be a boat have it in their pocket to do so. There is an obligation, in fact a price, that is on each one of those individuals to repay the exorbitant fee, the rip-off. The human smugglers could care less whether these individuals survive, only that the demanded payment is made in order to get these people from their country of origin. Those individuals spend their lifetime trying to repay that loan and they live in fear doing so. They have no idea what recriminations will be put upon them if they are unable to do so.

This circle of human smuggling has to stop. We have to find a way to erase the circle and not have it exist in the fashion that it has with Canada being a haven for these ships. Human smugglers cram individuals onto a ship and let it sail into a Canadian port. We will not let that happen in a way that Canada is seen across the world as the place to do this, or that Canada is a place for them to take a chance with hundreds or thousands of lives. It will not happen anymore. We are determined as a government to put a stop to it.

Canadians have told us en mass across the country. We just fought an election over a number of issues and this was one of them. Canadians sent us back to govern. They sent us here to implement this bill because they believe it is right legislation and it is timely. Perhaps it should have been implemented decades ago.

Under the legislation, the very ship that my hon. colleague from the NDP spoke about would not have been turned away. It would have had an opportunity. There would be a process in place with legislation and regulations that would work.

I look forward to getting the bill to committee. I look forward to getting this bill back for second reading and implementing the legislation.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand and give a speech on what is a highly symbolic piece of legislation, a piece of legislation that will illustrate to Canadians the very clear differences in the approach to governing between the government and the official opposition.

Bill C-4 purports to deal with preventing human smugglers from abusing Canada's immigration system, but in reality it is directed almost solely at refugee claimants who arrive in Canada utilizing whatever means are at their disposal. It is fair to say that it reflects a style of government that reacts quickly to exploit fear in our society, to take people's misery and exploit it for political purposes and to proceed with knee-jerk legislation that is not based on fact, not based on law, not based on reason and not based on fairness.

I am going to go through some of the major aspects of the bill so that Canadians can see exactly what the essence of the bill really is.

Bill C-4 would give the Minister of Immigration the power to designate, in his sole discretion, a group of refugees as “irregular arrivals”. He could do that based on mere suspicion and based on the definition of a group that is not specified in the act, but presumably means any gathering of two or more people.

Once designated claimants receive that title, they are then subject to all kinds of special rules and, as we will hear during debate on the bill, discriminatory rules. I will start with some of them.

Once designated as irregular arrivals, designated claimants, including children, will be mandatorily detained on arrival or upon designation for up to one year. There will be no review of their detention by the Immigration and Refugee Board for one year. Release will only be possible if they are found to be refugees, if the IRB orders their release at the expiry of a year, or if the minister decides that there are exceptional circumstances. Mandatory conditions set out in the regulations will be imposed on all designated claimants released from detention, subjecting these people to special conditions that do not apply to any other refugee claimant.

Designated arrivals will have their right to apply for permanent residency suspended. Under this legislation a designated claimant will be prohibited from applying for permanent residency for five years. If the person fails to comply with any of the conditions or reporting requirements, that five-year suspension can be extended to six years.

To show how arbitrary and ill thought out the legislation is, the five-year ban on applying for permanent residency applies even to someone who is found to be a legitimate refugee. Someone who comes here could be designated, satisfy the IRB within a year or two that he or she is a bona fide legitimate refugee, and still be prohibited from applying for permanent residency for five years.

A designated person cannot make a humanitarian and compassionate application or apply for a temporary resident permit for five years.

In terms of refugee travel documents, a designated person cannot receive travel documents. This means that designated refugees cannot travel outside of Canada for at least five years after they have been accepted as a refugee.

If we take these three things together, they mean that a designated refugee claimant, even if he or she is a legitimate, bona fide legal refugee, will be separated from his or her family for at least five years. He or she cannot travel to see family for at least five years. That is how Canada, under the Conservative government's legislation, is purporting to treat a bona fide refugee.

The legislation contains retroactive provisions so that the minister can make a retroactive designation for arrivals in Canada since March 31, 2009. Again, it has not been common in Canadian legislatures or in this Parliament to reach back in time and render illegal something that was legal at the time, but the Conservative government wants to do that in this case.

Bill C-4 is deeply unfair to refugees. It fails to honour obligations under Canadian and international law. It deprives individual cases from the independent review that justice requires. It would involve huge costs and unnecessary detention. Perhaps most pressing of all, Bill C-4 would do nothing to prevent human smuggling. The bill is unclear, arbitrary, discriminatory and ineffective.

More laws directed at refugees will not catch human smugglers who are overseas. Mandatory minimum sentences will not deter human smugglers who are overseas. Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, smuggling is already punishable by life imprisonment and mandatory minimums have been shown not to work as deterrents. Refugees know little or nothing about the laws before they arrive in the country of asylum and, even if they know, desperate fear for their lives often forces them to do whatever they must to flee persecution.

Australia recently tried a very similar regime to punish refugees to try to deter them. It did not work there and there is no reason to think it would work here.

I will go through f some of the major problems with the bill. Bill C-4 punishes refugees. The bill has been presented as legislation targeting smugglers but most of the provisions punish not smugglers, but the refugees themselves. I have already said that refugees, including children, would be mandatorily detained for a year without the possibility of an independent review. Under Bill C-4, refugees would be victimized three times: first, by their persecutors; second, by their smugglers; and finally, by Canada.

Bill C-4 violates the charter and our international human rights obligations, including the convention related to the status of refugees, commonly known as the Refugee Convention, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Bill C-4 is discriminatory and it would create two classes of refugees with one class, those designated based on their mode of arrival, treated worse than the other. This again is discriminatory and contrary to the charter.

Once again, the measures imposing arbitrary detention are not only likely to be unconstitutional, they have already been found to be unconstitutional. In security certificate cases, the Supreme Court of Canada has already found that mandatory detention without review violates numerous sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Bill C-4 denies the right to equal access to justice. The bill denies designated persons the right to appeal a negative refugee decision to the Immigration and Refugee Board's Refugee Appeal Division. An appeal is a fundamental safeguard in refugee decision making where a person's life and liberty may be at stake. By eliminating the opportunity to correct errors at the first level, the bill would put Canada at risk of violating its most fundamental obligation toward refugees, which is not to send them back to persecution.

I have talked about how Bill C-4 blocks family reunification, which has been described by the government as its key objective. The bill deprives some refugees of the right for five years to apply for permanent residence and, therefore, reunification of families, including their children. This is a violation of the right to family life guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

The bill also prevents consideration of the best interests of the child. The bill denies designated persons, including children, the opportunity for five years to make an application on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. This application is often the only avenue for consideration of best interests of the child under refugee law. Under the terms of the bill, however, children could be deported from Canada without consideration of their best interests, again in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I would like to focus on Australia's example because it is instructive to the House. Australia had policies to lock up refugee claimants long-term and to deny them permanent status even when granted refugee status in an attempt to stop refugees coming to that country by boat. It is exactly what is happening here. The policies resulted in refugees, including many children, being traumatized by their experiences in detention.

The Australian Human Rights Commission, an organization created by the Australian parliament, conducted a national inquiry into children in immigration detention and found that children in Australian immigration detention centres had suffered numerous and repeated breaches of their human rights.

Far from deterring people, depriving refugees of the right to family reunification appears to have caused some people to arrive by boat, later bringing the wives and children of refugees in Australia who were unable to bring their families through legal channels. This was a deeply divisive policy, with many people in Australia unclear as to what was the best approach. However, we do know that in the past three years Australia has moved away from its policies of detention and temporary status for refugees.

I want to chat a bit about history because there is the old adage that those of us who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Canada's history with respect to immigration and refugees is not perfect. The Chinese head tax and the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War are both relative and old discredited philosophies, sadly, of our past. Another event from our undistinguished past is the Canadian government's refusal to admit a boat load of Jewish people fleeing Hitler's Germany, a refusal that forced the MS St. Louis back to Europe where many of the passengers perished in the Holocaust.

The individuals on that boat were not Canadian citizens or even permanent residents. However, many Canadians feel, and the Minister of Immigration himself has expressed, a sense of responsibility for the passengers on the St. Louis and a fundamental ethical obligation to help people in desperate situations fleeing for their lives.

In the minister's words at the unveiling of the monument to commemorate the MS St. Louis just this year, the monument was described as a “concrete perpetual expression of regret”. The minister went on to remind us that we must learn from the lessons of history in order to apply them in the future, and said:

Canada will never close its doors to legitimate refugees who need our protection and who are fleeing persecution.

The official opposition agrees with that sentiment. That is the reason we will profoundly oppose this bill until the many problems are cleared. Otherwise, history will continue to judge Canada on the way we treat victims of international crisis. It is a bill that creates two tiers of refugees, violates our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and violates Canada's obligations under international law.

I will read a section from the UN convention relating to the status of refugees, which Canada has signed. Article 31 states:

The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article 1, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence.

The bill does exactly that. It violates that section because it is imposing penalties on account of people's illegal entry or presence on refugees who are directly fleeing persecution.

Last summer and the summer before, we saw two boats come to this country containing refugees fleeing what is agreed by every state in this world to be a terrible civil war in Sri Lanka. There were approximately 478 people on one boat and there were approximately 80 people on another boat. These were people who risked their lives to come to a country where they could be safe.

I would ask all Canadians what they would do if the country in which they found themselves threatened their lives and the lives of their husbands, wives and children; if armed people were coming to get them and draft their children into child armies; if armed thugs were coming to sexually assault wives and young girls or boys; if armed men were coming to kill them, what they would do. I dare say that all Canadians would answer that question the same way. They would do whatever they had to do in order to save the lives of their loved ones and to escape to safety. That may even include paying someone.

Another big problem with the bill is that confuses human smuggling, criminal organizations engaged in inappropriate criminal acts, with the irregular movement of refugees, which often involves the payment of money in order to have an organized subversive way to escape a country.

I also want to spend a moment talking about the nonsense of a queue. There is no queue when it comes to refugees. The government should be ashamed of itself for going out in public and confusing Canadians that these are queue jumpers.

There are two ways refugees come to this country. The first way is under the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. There are refugee camps where they are safe and they can make quarterly applications. The second way is refugees who are directly fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution. Those people fleeing a war zone cannot stop and make an application. Those people do not present themselves to the nearest authorities and queue up. Can anyone imagine the Jewish people in Nazi Germany showing up at German authorities and saying that they want to make an application to claim refugee status? That is absurd, and international law recognizes that.

The idea that refugees are coming here and some are jumping in front of others is absolutely false. People who are trying to muddy the waters for political purposes by confusing those two concepts ought to be ashamed of themselves. At its fundamental base, Canada has an obligation. We have signed treaties to be a mature country on the world stage and we have agreed to accept our obligations, and one of those is to do our fair share to accept refugees.

The definition of a refugee is clear. Refugees must show our country that they have a well-founded fear of persecution. By definition, we are talking about a profoundly serious situation where someone risks death, injury, torture or some unacceptable conduct or treatment that violates the common norms of civilized society. Those people need our help and Canada needs to have fair rules to adjudicate such claims.

Canadians of course do not agree with human smuggling. We want to do our fair share to ensure that criminal organizations that are trafficking in people or who are involved in the international sex trade are punished and stopped. Those are criminals. That is very different from refugees fleeing persecution and the whole network that has surrounded that activity of people who help them.

This act would criminalize the whole process. It would even criminalize those people who help refugees. Church groups, faith groups and refugee organizations all risk being deemed to be in violation of this act and being deemed criminals because they help and assist refugees. That has to be misguided. That has to be wrong. That has to be bad legislation.

Under the government, since 2006 there has been a concerted drop in the number of family-class visas that have been issued. There has been a dramatic drop in the number of refugee visas issued by the government. These are not New Democrat official opposition numbers. These are numbers published on the Citizenship and Immigration Canada website that just came out in June.

The government needs to restore Canada's reputation on the world stage by not only treating the refugee claimants who come to this country but by improving our system so that we allow more refugees to get to Canada and be settled, and so that we let more of those millions of people who are in refugee camps and in dangerous situations all over the world get to places of safe haven and safety.

I have seen members of this House from every party show up at commemorations of the Komagata Maru or the MS St. Louis, as I just pointed out. We all bow our heads and remember those days when Canada sent away boatloads of people who came to our shores seeking freedom and safety, only decades later to find out that we were sending those people back to their deaths.

Canada deserves fair and balanced refugee legislation. This legislation is not fair and balanced and the official opposition will work hard to amend this until it is or defeat it.