I'd like to welcome you as well. Like my two colleagues who spoke French before me, I represent a riding in the province of Quebec. However, unlike my two colleagues, I'm a member of the Liberal Party; I'm therefore not a member of a separatist party.
However, I've done a lot of work in immigration for a very long time and I have a few comments to make.
First of all, let me disagree totally with my colleague, Barry Devolin.
We had an immigration policy in the 19th century by which we chose the countries from which we accepted immigrants. These were, by and large, the British Isles. Then we expanded that and went into northern Europe. Then we expanded and went into southern Europe, after the Second World War, and so on and so forth.
We are now at the point where we have a point system based on how old the candidates are--I am sure other people have explained this to you--how many young children the candidates have, their level of education, and so on.
What we have tried to do--whether we've achieved it or not, I don't know--is make our immigration policy as free of racial or religious prejudice as possible.
If I may be so bold as to say this, Mr. Devolin, the danger in choosing a country is that you might choose a country you think is very much like yours in terms of culture, economics, and so on, and then you're going to be absolutely criticized because you're not choosing from another country. That is the first comment I would like to make.
The second comment is about the importance of settlement programs. When I was with immigration in the Quebec government, one of the things we worked very hard on was the welcoming society, what we call in French la societé d'accueil, the people who receive the immigrants, that is, the homegrown families, and what we ought to be doing and what information we should give them so they see immigration as a plus, not just a plus for the country but a plus for them personally, so they know how far they should go to meet the immigrants halfway. We are always saying that the immigrant must modify his ways in order to fit into our society. That is true to some extent, of course, but society--and I think it was my colleague Bill Siksay who said this--also has to change. It can be a very dangerous thing for some families who are more traditional. That is a big problem.
In my riding, I have a lot of immigrants from the Near East and the Middle East. This would mean the Maghrib, Algeria mostly, and then Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and so on. That brings in another problem, and that is the problem of religion and its role in society and its role in schools and in Canada. I think it is the same in your country. We tended, until fairly recently, to have lay institutions that were free of any slant toward one religion or another. But there have been demands from various religious groups--not only from the Muslims, but it does include Muslims--to be able to keep a certain number of their customs within these non-religious institutions.
That is a big question. It is a question that France has had to deal with, and Britain as well. And we are dealing with it.
I think that contrary to what France, Belgium, and Britain are living through, one of the pluses your country has is that it is not a former colonial country. France and particularly Britain, and Belgium, with the Congo, had to live through that period, and are still living through it, in which the people who live there feel that France or Britain or whatever owes them something because of the wealth that was taken out of the colonies for centuries.
You don't have to worry about that. This is one thing that we Canadians don't have to worry about. That is one reason why we do well in our relationships with countries in the developing world, because we don't have that history with them.
I could talk forever about immigration. It is my favourite subject.
As far as the consequences of the terrorist arrests last weekend, I agree with my colleagues. I don't think it is going to change anything very much. But where it is going to really hurt us is in our relationship with the United States, because the Government of the United States has always been convinced, ever since September 11, that all the terrorists came through Canada and it was our fault.
I've heard Mrs. Clinton say time and time again that people were going through our border like it was a sieve. Now it's going to hurt us even more in our relationship with the United States. What we're trying to do is to keep our border with the United States as open as we possibly can. It's obvious that this is going to be an element that is going to close the border much more than we would like to.
Those are the comments I would make for now.