Minister, with all due respect—I even asked Mr. MacDougall this question—I must say that we make a very sharp distinction between what is in this bill and this safe third country agreement. Indeed, the United States signed the Geneva Convention of 1967, under the auspices and umbrella of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. We did some work as a result of this. As you will recall, we discussed the matter in all its aspects. At any rate, we had some ad hoc policies that enabled us to apply exceptional measures.
You are creating a diversion. As Mr. MacDougall rightly said, the safe third country agreement is completely different from this list stating whether or not such and such a country is safe. Essentially, you want to repair the mistake you made with Mexico by imposing a visa. You are grappling with this mistake and you are not prepared to assume the political consequences. You want to rectify this by implementing a list so that you can finally tell Mexico that it is deemed to be a safe country and straighten out the issue pertaining to nationals from this country. You do not need to change the legislation in order to deal with the flow of refugees. When we left government, there were 20,000 refugee determination cases, and now you have 60,000.
We need regulations and political action, but you are somebody who is responsible for the policies. You make decisions and you are responsible for these decisions. If we had a visa policy that worked very well, you could deal with the flow of what you refer to as false refugees. We did this, for instance, when I imposed a visa on Costa Rica.
Mr. Minister, I know that you want to develop your legacy. Every minister tries to flaunt his accomplishments. Nevertheless, why not set up a system, through regulations, that would allow appeals to be heard and shorten the timelines? You said so yourself, you quite rightly bragged about my colleague from Vaughan—because there is a little bit of us in all of this. You already have the tools to strike this balance with respect to the visas. Mr. MacDougall said so, and rightly so. So why does it bother you to set this aside and adopt the rest so that we can have a process?