Thank you very much.
Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee.
As you may know, I'm a criminal defence and immigration and refugee lawyer here in Vancouver.
I began my career at the Immigration Prevention Centre, in the Montreal region, while I was studying law. That's where I really discovered immigration security issues.
As I speak Spanish, I work a lot with Spanish speakers.
I'll start with an example of one of my clients from El Salvador. He was a police officer in El Salvador. He was involved in the investigation and ultimate incarceration of I think more than 200 gang members. He was hunted down by the gangs and ultimately had to flee, because his country, the police, couldn't provide protection for him.
He came up through the United States, where he was found not to be an asylum-seeker because of some technicalities in the law of asylum in the United States. He ultimately has found a home in Canada. Although he did not become a protected person here, for reasons I won't get into, he hopes one day to become a police officer here.
I think it's important to understand the situation in El Salvador. Why am I talking about a small country in Central America? El Salvador, aside from being a corridor for the transit of drugs, which is directly related to our policies of drug prohibition in Canada and the United States and other places, is also currently in a battle with very powerful gangs. Two of those gangs are Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street. The 18th Street gang refers to a street in Los Angeles, California, in the United States. The Mara Salvatrucha gang also started in the United States.
Why are these powerful forces now overwhelming the authorities and the safety situation in El Salvador? In large part it's as a result of policies of removal and deportation both from Canada and the United States, but primarily in the United States, where we saw gang members being removed back to El Salvador, Honduras, and other countries in Central America, and the citizens like my client who would arrive here and, for example, hopefully one day become a police officer here, would be able to stay.
Now, we have no indication to say that immigrants or people arriving from other countries have a higher rate of being involved in gangs, but for those who are involved in criminality or in other forms of behaviour that challenge security, one of the solutions we use is to send them back. The impact of that in other countries is absolutely devastating. What I'd like to talk to you about today is the fact that it is directly related to Canada's security. It's directly related to a vision of Canada's security as to whether or not we see our security as creating, or whether we even have the ability or the desire to create, a gated community in which we have the illusion of being secure.
In my submission, that's not the vision that Canadians...or that it is a long-term vision. I would submit that, in the end, security is always going to be a trade-off. There is always a trade-off with any kind of security. There is no absolute security and there never will be.
You heard the professor talk about security and liberty. There are obviously other trade-offs as well. This committee has talked a lot about exit controls. Whether or not they could increase security in the immigration system, checkpoints are clearly very powerful security tools. Checkpoints are used in many countries as very powerful security tools, not just limited to borders but throughout the country. In many countries, there are military checkpoints throughout the national territory, and it's a very powerful security tool.
Now, there's obviously a cost associated with that tool. There's a cost in terms of economic costs, there's a cost in terms of time, of inconvenience, and the resulting loss of privacy and freedom that comes with those trade-offs.
But we shouldn't have any illusions...that there's always a trade-off when we're talking about security. So when we talk about imposing exit controls, or when we talk about removing individuals who pose a danger to Canadians, we have to understand that there are trade-offs.
I would hope, and I would encourage the committee, when we're considering Canada's short-term security interests today, that you also consider what our long-term vision for Canada's security is. What kind of world, what kind of Canada, do we want our grandchildren to live in? Do we want to have a gated community where we live behind walls in fear of what's on the other side, in fear of letting people pass through the walls, or in the hopes that in some fictional world we might be able to keep all of the bad people outside the walls?
I'm going to submit to you that this is not a realistic vision, that many of the security problems or the problems we have in our society are inside the walls, and that those we send outside those gates are not going to go away. They do directly affect Canadians in the sense that our friends and relatives live in those countries. Our neighbours' friends and relatives live in those countries, as do your constituents'. I would imagine that you'd be hard pressed, even with the small number of members on the committee, to find a single country in the world where you could send a dangerous individual and there would not be constituents in your ridings affected in terms of their friends and families being put at risk, and their security affected.
Ultimately, although these are complicated questions, I would hope that when we consider the security of Canada we also have a vision for the bigger picture in terms of the impact and in terms of what the long-term vision for a secure Canada looks like.
I am happy to answer questions, but those would be my opening remarks.
Thank you very much for your time.