Thank you very much.
I think the Canadian Council for Refugees wanted to respond to what the parliamentary secretary had to say, Mr. Chair, and they never had their opportunity.
Dr. Jeffrey, I very much appreciated your input, and the same goes for the Canadian Council.
In the last couple of weeks there was a write-up in the paper--and maybe you can help. I was thinking to myself where it might be, because I'd love to follow up on that case. It was a case in which, in Toronto, some trafficked persons of Russian origin were being exploited, and they ended up going to the police and they ended up getting an operation busted.
Now, it seems to me that if you want to deal with breaking up those rings, you let the people know that if they come forward, they're going to have some kind of an amnesty.
I'm going to do something here. I'm going very quickly give you an example of an undocumented worker who was sexually assaulted. She phoned up and got the police involved. She looked really young, and the pedophile was taken off the street. Then Immigration turns around and wants to deport her for being an undocumented worker in Canada.
I'm going to say something nice about Mr. MacKay and Mr. Jason Kenney, because I got them involved, and we stopped the deportation of this woman in less than 24 hours. She has since been landed.
The big policy question, as I put it to them, was whether they wanted to send a message to all these undocumented workers that if they came forward and put somebody behind bars, we were going to deport them because they're undocumented. Those two folks managed to give a permit and let this woman stay, and this woman has stayed. I think those are the kinds of messages we should be sending out.
John, I think you'd agree with that as well. Those are the very realistic approaches we can take if we want to deal with the problem.
The problem with this piece of legislation--and it really bothers me--is that from the bureaucratic perspective, I'd say, hey, we have more powers to turn people down and we get more money to do it. From the political viewpoint, I'd say--and I can see it already going in the next election--we passed legislation to stop strippers coming into Canada.
These two, one as a political consideration and one as a bureaucratic consideration, are an unholy alliance that ends up producing bad legislation. There's no way we're going to deal with this. There's no way we're going to be passing any of this kind of legislation.
In the meantime, we have lost Canadians--second generation born abroad--who are losing their citizenship every day that we put off passing new legislation. The government said that this was a priority and nothing is happening on this. We're going on a wild goose chase on legislation that's going to go absolutely nowhere, except the government would love to posture and say, “Hey, we stopped this”. It ends up serving no one's interest.
John, because you said you kind of approve of this stuff, $50 million going out, educating people, investigating trafficking--because Canadians get trafficked as well--don't you think that would be a better way of spending those resources to have a better impact?
I will ask all three of you to very quickly answer.