The best and most detailed study is by the Australian Human Rights Commission, which has demonstrated that there are devastating effects on children held long term in migration detention. One of the changes between Bill C-4 and Bill C-31 is that the new legislation does not call for mandatory detention of children. But it does not address the question of what will happen to children whose parents are mandatorily detained.
Currently, much detention of children is considered to be optional or is detention that is chosen by their parents. I think this is an issue that really needs to be tackled head-on. It's simply unreasonable to say that we're only going to allow people to be detained when their parents make that choice for them. We know that detention is very detrimental to children, and we also know that parents who have arrived in a foreign country and who have no family, no resources, and no connections are not going to choose to have their children separated from them.
So this is an inevitable consequence of that legislation, on which we've made some progress, but not enough.