Mr. Chair, we're talking about amendment NDP-2. I will be supporting the NDP amendment, because we've had witness after witness after witness.... I think this is the one where I was doing a poll of many of our witnesses who came before this committee. This is about the value of permanent residents in this country and the value of the time of people in their pre-PR time in this country.
We've had many people testify that international students, for example, who come in through the Canada experience class program of immigration, spend at least four years here as international students doing their undergraduate degree, let's say, and usually they are working here and paying taxes. They're integrating and learning life as Canadians in our universities or in our colleges. Bill C-24 is saying that those people don't have any value and that their time spent here in Canada doesn't have any value.
This amendment actually makes it so that their time during their pre-PR time is valued. We need to make sure of that for people who are coming in through the experience class, such as the international students, or even the live-in caregivers, who, depending on their arrangement with their employer and their work permit, are spending years here raising our children in this country. Yet we're telling them that their time here in Canada—the taxes they pay to this country, their integration with our society, whether they're volunteering in our communities, our hospitals, or our nursing homes, whatever it might be—has no value. That's not right. That's why I will be supporting amendment NDP-2, which says that all of these people do have value and that their time spent in Canada does have value in their pre-PR time.