Mr. Chair, first of all, I'll speak in favour of the amendment. I think Ms. Kwan makes a very good case, and that's actually demonstrated by the level of redacted documents that are reported on in these stories.
I also want to echo the comments that Ms. Kwan made at the front end of her statement. I was trying to get at this with my first comments, but I think Ms. Kwan put it more succinctly, which is that the more headlines that we have like this and the less action that Parliament takes, the more room there is for misinterpretation or generalities to be spread in the community.
This is why I started the motion by talking about the fact that Parliament has the purview to hold the government to account in these instances. We have academics in these articles saying Parliament should be reviewing this, and that's what we've done here. It's a very benignly worded motion to simply examine the adequacies of these processes so we can have facts on the table, and be working from a position of fact. What we have in these articles are redacted statements, and essentially more and more stories every day. I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow there's another story that speaks to this particular issue, in fact.
To my colleague's comments about this not being the purview of this committee, the government can't appoint a minister who's in charge of this issue and have him before both SECU and CIMM for supplementary estimates and then argue that it's not the purview of this committee to look at the interface. That's weak sauce.
Second of all, the articles that I cited, to reiterate, show gaps between the processes for collecting information on screening and how that's fed into the immigration process. For example, there's this particular story that I showed, Mr. Chair, and I can put it in the record, “Botched handling of gangster refugee claimant exposes Canada's screening weaknesses”. It's Abdullahi Hashi Farah. To me, it's the perfect example of where somebody has come in; the CBSA and the RCMP have highlighted information and that has not made it into the Immigration and Refugee Board consideration process.
As a parliamentarian, and as parliamentarians here, I think it's incumbent upon us to ask why this is happening. Can we fix it? Immigration is important to this country, and people expect us to get the “how” right so that they're not questioning “if”. That's what I'm asking here.
With respect, the resettlement services study is very important, as is the other study, the work that we've had, but this is an emergent issue, where every single day there is another story about it. In my estimation, this is of utmost importance to this committee.
I'm actually willing, Mr. Chair, to sit outside of regularly scheduled committee hours to do both at the same time. As parliamentarians, the public pays our salary to do work like this. I would say that we could do both. We could keep the meetings as scheduled. I'm happy to sit weekends, evenings, whenever, to get this done. I don't accept the argument that we have other things to do—it's not adequate in this place. If anything, I would say that the security of Canadians and the integrity of our border screening processes would be of utmost importance to Canadians.
Therefore, I support the amendment, and I certainly reject the arguments made by my Liberal colleague.