First of all, we're talking here about irregular arrivals. As I understand it, this legislation targets asylum seekers or people arriving in larger numbers.
There are a lot of issues that you've brought up in your question or comments to me. First and foremost is the right of Canada to regulate migration. I don't think anybody would disagree with you on that front. The complexity arises because the laws you are proposing go far beyond measures that would just protect Canada's interests, in terms of working out who is coming into the country. There is detaining people for the purpose of identification, seeing whether they represent a health threat to the country, and there are laws that mandate detention for one year.
One can operate in the national interest, but clearly the other one moves from the national interest to punishing people in the effort to deter irregular arrivals. There is no law that prevents a country from looking after its own national interest in terms of protecting itself against people who might present a threat to security or to health. It's quite different, however, when you start introducing laws that are not based on any reason but are just blanket, mandatory laws that have no reason for them that relate to national interest.
The problem for me is that there is an assumption being made that if you copy the laws Australia has been using for a number of years, it will somehow have the effect of deterring irregular arrivals. What I'd like to put to you is that Australia's experience does not bear that out at all. Mandatory detention has never deterred anybody, and it's not about to here. What it will do, if you're interested in knowing what the cost to the taxpayer in Canada is going to be, is put your bill through the roof. The cost of building detention centres.... We've spent half a billion dollars building a detention centre on Christmas Island. The cost of construction alone is phenomenal, when you start looking at this. I advise you to look at that.
The social costs, however, that I've been trying to explain are also quite enormous.