I guess I thank you for the question.
When I spoke to the committee about the safe third country, there were certain things that we predicted, and they have all come true. The numbers of refugees entering Canada have dropped dramatically, some say by 50%; I think it's more. Many people are prevented from even leaving their own country.
Again, this was done by stealth. I think if most Canadians had been told point blank, “We are shutting the door on 50% of our refugees”, most would be upset. Most Canadians are quite decent when faced with that kind of thing.
The other thing we predicted was the number of desperate people who would then try to enter Canada illegally, and we have some anecdotal evidence of this through people who have arrived.
I'm going to give you a very concrete example. Yesterday we had a family arrive at our houses, a mother and father and a little boy from Colombia. Colombia is not on the list of countries that we will allow to enter. Colombia has a terrible problem. They will not be accepted by the United States, because the United States is saying that their government is in control.
Desperate, this mother and father and little boy waited in the bushes on the American border. As a train passed over a bridge—and there was a river hundreds of feet below—they hopped on the train. They clung to the side of the train with their little boy on their back, counted to 20, I think they said, and then they were told to drop off; then they hid in the bushes on the Canadian side.
That's what people are doing. And there are couriers making a lot of money. We have a history of what happens during times of prohibition: big business for crooks; thousands of dollars to deliver people across remote border entry points; thousands of dollars to pack tour buses through more visible places. But the ones that bother me the most are these people forced to hop onto trains or forced to go under trucks. It's happening.
I know that none of you here like that; we're better than this. People whose lives are in danger should be able to go to an officer representing us and say: “This is why I'm afraid”; and “This is why I need the protection of your government”. Corruption has increased, and danger has increased, and my fear is that we do not know the ones who have died. We know of one person who drowned in the river. We know that in other countries, when officers come near a boat and there are illegals, they are pushed over. We don't know those stories.