As I've said before and as I've said often enough, immigration has been, is, and will continue to be the lifeblood of Canada. Certainly we're involved in a committee and in a department that have both helped build this country and will continue to do so.
The real significance of the Hungarian exodus being handled by Canada was that Canada was never as generous to anybody as they were in 1956, following the 1956 revolution. There were various reasons for it. The main one—considered black and white—was that you had the Soviet communist state versus a small country such as Hungary. But the drive to make the politicians act really came from the public opinion of the day. It really did. It came from the people, from Canadians themselves, reaching out. To some extent, there was competition between the federal and provincial governments, particularly the federal government and the Ontario government, on how they could do more.
The really nice thing about it is that in many ways it paved the way for the other refugee movements—the boat people, the refugees from Africa, from Bosnia-Herzegovina—and really put Canada at the forefront.
I often think how fortunate my family was to end up in this country. I sort of wonder if, in today's climate.... If I want to look at a country that resembles Hungary and resembles the circumstance we dealt with, it would be the Russian suppression of Chechnya right now. It's safe to say that the Chechens aren't getting anything like the reception we got.
Overall, then, it was a very good experience for the Hungarians, and it was a very good experience for, I think, the whole process of how we deal with refugees in Canada.
When I get passionate about the workings of the committee, as I tend to do, I guess I do so because I knew oppression. I knew what oppression meant. I knew what it was to be reported on at any time by the secret police and hauled in front of officials. If you were lucky, it was your school officials. If you were unlucky, it would be down in the jails. There is a jail in Hungary that still stands—very close to the Canadian embassy—where most of the torture used to go on. Torture was a very regular occurrence.
If you ever get a chance to go to Budapest, I invite you to visit the terror museum. They have a uniform there, a flip-side uniform, if you will. On one side you have the Nazi uniform and on the other side you have the Soviet uniform. It's quite a museum. It just shows you that it really doesn't make much difference if it's communist terror or fascist terror. It gives the history of oppression in the country.
So when I get excited about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I do it because I think it's so fundamental to us. When I was going through the determination of trying to decide which way to go after 9/11, at the end of the day I had to remember where I came from. I had to remember that the most efficient instrument of terror has always been, and will continue to be, the state. Those are things that we all have to stand on guard for.
As we go into the summer recess, let me recommend a couple of books you might want to read.
One is Refugee Sandwich, by Peter Showler. It will really give you an understanding of why we need a refugee appeal division.
Another is War Brides, by Melynda Jarratt. It was just released a couple of days ago.
Another important one is Voices of the Left Behind . This is something we haven't even touched on. One of the people who visited me in my office on Friday discovered her father 11 years ago. He lives in Cambridge. She was an illegitimate child left behind in Holland. She reunited with her father 11 years ago, and it was very fortunate for her father that she did that, because she was the only one he really had left.
Somehow we have to deal with some of those issues as well.
I hope you get a chance to read that stuff. I hope you get to reflect on what's happening in Chechnya, because the oppression is horrible. It's not dissimilar to what happened to the Hungarians, but in our case, because of lucky circumstances and the split between the east and the west, we probably got the Cadillac treatment.
All in all, we live in a great country. I think we can be very proud of the way we reflect the world and how we interrelate and model ourselves. I think we have a real opportunity to help the rest of the world, particularly the countries that are badly off, get into the same kind of situation as we are in.
Those are all of my comments.
I'm sorry that all of you guys have to be here. I'm very pleased—