Thank you very much.
I'm really glad to see all you folks here.
Sima, I remember we were battling under the Sossa family. I think it's an opportunity to let my colleagues know and let the record show that the Sossa family came from Costa Rica. Their children were doing exceptionally well in school. Immigration officials went into the school and held the children hostage to try to lure in their parents so they could pick them up and deport them. It was just reprehensible. I took that back to the House at the time; I raised it in the House. Anyway, the minister said that no more of this will be happening.
I point this out because here we have again a bureaucracy in action that tends not to be accountable and really points to the need of having good political accountability, transparency, and oversight. We spent a lot of money and effort in getting the Sossa family out. Their kids were doing great. They were established in the community. The father was a foreman on a construction site in this city and the wife was working very hard at another job, I think. It was cleaning or something like that that other people didn't want to do.
It seems to me that here we have the perfect candidate to come to Canada. So what do we do? We ended up sending him out of the country and then we ended up bringing him back. So a lot of money, time, and effort was wasted going through this exercise. There are undocumented workers like this all over the place. It would have been so much simpler to go through a regularization process. As mentioned before, we have people living in the shadows. Do a regularization, which the previous government was on the verge of doing but they got defeated. Then you know what happened: the bureaucrat said, oh, here's our opportunity to put this off again, because we're against it; essentially, these people are the result of the mistakes we made by changing the point system on the Immigration Act in 2002.
I mention it to committee members because it's a perfect example of how we could have saved a lot of money. We could have saved a lot of effort. We could have saved a lot of heartache. We could have dealt with some more of the backlog but instead we chose to expend our moneys in this way.
Ms. Chen, I agree with you in terms of what you're talking about in Bill C-50, because what we end up doing is giving more control to the bureaucracy, taking away even oversight from the courts as well as from the politicians, from this committee, from the minister, which makes the whole thing very dangerous. So when you say that, yes, we racialize our migrant farm workers, it's certainly the same thing we did with the Chinese. We brought them in, they built the railway, and we got rid of them under the Chinese exclusion act and put on the Chinese head tax.
You guys are doing a remarkable job on probably not a very popular topic. How do you keep going? I really want to know. I commend you for what you're doing, but how do you keep yourselves going, as advocates?