Before the agreement, we had a very organized system whereby the person went and made a claim at the border. Everybody went to identify to the Canadian authorities. You had a procedure. The process went to the Immigration and Refugee Board, the person was determined to be a refugee or not, and it resulted in their removal or their staying in Canada.
But the key thing here is that people were encouraged to go and present themselves to the authorities right at the border. Now, with the agreement, we have said to everybody, if you don't meet the exceptions, don't go to the border because you will be sent back. So they find their own way to cross the border undetected—I don't want to use the term “illegal”, but “undetected”—and they make a claim later on. So you have a period of time when people are not presenting themselves to the Canadian authorities, and they are in the hands, sometimes, of smugglers and the illegal activities around the borders when you put a barrier to them.
Our goal is to scrap the safe third country agreement because it doesn't meet any goal in terms of generating access to refugees and it is based on criteria that don't have anything to do with the genuineness or not of the refugee claim. If you feel persecution back in Colombia, what does that have to do with having an uncle in Canada? It doesn't have anything to do with it, and in that case what we are trying to do is to select people for reasons of familiarity, or family reasons or whatever, that don't have anything to do with the refugee designation we have. Therefore, we are suggesting the way to create access is to abolish the agreement as soon as possible and let people come to the border, present themselves to the authorities, and the authorities can fingerprint them. Let the people come into Canada, with medical exams, whatever. That is the way we were doing it for years and years before the agreement.