Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I applaud everything you do. You're very compassionate people. You're clearly intelligent. You've thought this out. You're looking towards the safety of children, as we all are, and I think it's very important that we do that. This country is compassionate. It's built upon immigration, on many generation of immigrants coming from all over the place.
To give you some context, since you brought up World War II, my father was in a gulag, and my mother was taken to Nazi Germany as forced labour. They came back certainly with their scars from those endeavours. Of course they came to this country and relocated essentially as refugees, because they couldn't go back to their home country. They had to build a new life, so I understand that. As a soldier I've served in a war zone and I've seen the psychological impacts on people, not only on the people we were trying to protect, but on my own soldiers who right now are dealing with a myriad of difficulties and psychological traumas from all sorts of incidents, not just Afghanistan or Bosnia or other places. So I understand all that.
I will tell you I think that when you're talking about psychological trauma of children in detention, the root cause is not necessarily that detention. I acknowledge the factors you've discussed, but a lot of these things are from the places they come from, and from the trauma, the tyranny, the oppression, and possibly the mass killings and other horrific things they've witnessed.
I would suggest to you that's probably a greater source of that trauma than being here in detention. A comment was made that we would try to appease “these conditions”. Well, these conditions are some of the best in the world. We have a right as this country to defend the security of our country. I understand sometimes it's only—
