I want to open by saying in 1933 the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the fundamental principle in the prerogative of mercy case. Deportation is not a punishment. You are not to use deportation as a punishment, but that's what this legislation seems to be doing. You have six months, no second chances; one shot and you're out.
The United States put in a law like this. We have dozens of people in Windsor who've been kicked out of their homes. They've lived all their lives in the United States. They have a felony conviction. They're in Canada making refugee claims so they can be close to their families. Do you want the ones in Canada going over to the U.S. doing the same thing?
These are people, some of whom have lived all their lives in Canada. All we are saying is to have discretion. Leave the discretion there. This brings me to my second point.
Clause 9 and clause 17 of this amending legislation take away humanitarian and compassionate discretion and the discretion to issue a temporary resident permit to people who have been found to be inadmissible on security grounds, organized criminality, or war crimes. What you don't understand, or what I think you need to understand, in terms of that legislation is that for persons for whom there are reasonable grounds to believe they were members of a terrorist organization, or at some point in their youth they may have been involved in street gangs or something like that, and they have grown up and left it behind them, it leaves them without any remedy whatsoever on humanitarian grounds.
That is not a piecemeal change to the legislation. That is a fundamental change to our immigration history. From the time we got legislation in 1910 there has always been a broad discretion on the part of the minister or a body like the immigration appeal division to allow people to remain in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds in recognition of the fact that hard and fast rules don't fit with the fact that people are human beings.
This legislation will mean that for the first time ever there will be classes of people who don't get any kind of discretion, who don't have access to any kind of discretion, who won't have anybody looking at their case. That is so out of keeping with our humanitarian tradition in terms of the way our legislation has always been structured.
Another point I want to cover is the misrepresentation bar. I want to cover it in the same way as with the other bars. If a person misrepresents, they are barred for five years under this legislation. Right now it's two years. The problem with these provisions is that they're all very broadly interpreted.
I'll use an example of a member of a terrorist organization. Mrs. Joseph Pararajasingham's husband was a member of Parliament in Sri Lanka who was assassinated. He was in a democratic party, but that party negotiated to try to end the war for the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. They were negotiating on the part of the LTTE because it was a banned organization. She's a terrorist because she was her husband's secretary, and her husband, although elected to a democratic party of the House of Parliament in Sri Lanka, was for a party that helped try to negotiate an end to the war, so she's barred. This legislation means that this woman, who must be close to 80 now, whose only two kids are in Canada and are Canadians has been branded a terrorist. It means that she doesn't have any way around it in terms of humanitarian discretion. She can't go to the minister and request a permit to stay or say, “Please let me stay on humanitarian grounds.”
On the misrepresentation bar, we had a case in which the dad was being sponsored. In his past history, back in the 1960s, he put that he'd worked as a Hindu priest in training. He left out that he'd worked as a mechanic part-time throughout those four or five years that he was a priest in training, because his principal occupation was priest in training. He misrepresented. It was not relevant at all to his sponsorship as a parent. It didn't matter where he worked, but he was barred on the misrepresentation. His only son can't sponsor him for five years under this legislation. This is extremely harsh legislation.
The rule in Canada has always been that you allow someone to look at the circumstances or the facts of the case, and then they make a decision on whether or not the person should be exempted. If you want to keep criminals out—