Mr. Keddy made a couple of statements.
It's strange to suggest that refugee claimants were not stripped of health care when I have a press release from the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration restoring health care that had been stripped from refugee claimants. So it's one or the other. The government did, in fact, do this. The court ordered them to stop. Then the government's own release says—and I will turn back to this clause, Chair—that they're going to temporarily restore health care access for refugee claimants and their children until all legal avenues have been exhausted.
So it was the federal Conservatives' decision to then return to the courts, spending more taxpayer money to strip medical access to refugee claimants. That's exactly what the government did. So to try to deny it now.... They only need to restore the access to health care if they stripped it out in the first place, which is exactly what the government did.
In respect to this, the government is asking Canadians to believe that the Canadian Medical Association, the nurses, these charitable groups, and these Christian houses, are all completely wrong with respect to social assistance in application to refugee claimants, and that it's somehow in this other narrow definition of these groups that are going to be affected by this.
This was a measure that was looking for a problem, and if there is some great exposure, or some great abuse of the social assistance program that the government's aware of, they didn't make that known to us. If there's some evidence of medical assistance that's being abused by refugee claimants, they also chose not to make it known to us. This is decision-based evidence-making at its worst.
The government's fine to stand behind its particular initiative, but it simply can't say it has an anecdote or that this should be of no consequence or concern to everybody, when the only testimony we heard was evidence condemning the government's action both on health care and assistance. If the government had evidence that was contrary to this, it was welcome to provide it. It chose not to do so.
In terms of making politics out of something, I have looked through some of these responses to stories that have come up, and there is a disturbing level of xenophobia within those and a constant misperception of who these claimants are, which I think is perpetrated sometimes by the government's own action. That's what's disturbing.
Sit with the policies that the government chooses to make, but don't pretend that everybody's got it wrong, that everybody who actually deals with refugee claimants is somehow ignorant of the facts, and that the government is the sole proprietor of truth in this matter, when we have groups across the non-profit sphere and across the religious and political spheres condemning the government for its actions, and federal courts and federal judges saying the same thing.
The Conservatives got this one wrong. I wish they'd put a little water in their wine and take a step back from this, rather than spending taxpayer money fighting this in court.
Thank you.