Thank you.
Good morning, minister. First of all, I want to congratulate you on your appointment. I haven't previously had the opportunity to do so.
I'd like to ask a question, mainly of Greg Yost or Mr. Bird.
As we know, the Canadian Criminal Code was introduced in order to protect Canadian citizens within their country. Naturally, under the bill that we have considered, we know that we have to communicate with foreign countries. At the risk of repeating myself in my question, you currently seem to have — at least I saw yesterday — “very nice and very efficient” laboratories. I think we can congratulate you on that. However, something intrigues me.
We know that we can send samples to one or more countries for comparison purposes. You said that the reverse was also done, but in accordance with very strict criteria. When a person, a refugee for example, enters Canadian territory, the country where he comes from has, in many cases, been completely destroyed. We don't know what's previously happened to him. Was he a drug dealer? Did he kill someone in his country? As a result of a change of government, did he switch from being an oppressor to being oppressed from one day to the next?
So this person enters our country, and we have extremely generous immigration laws. It would naturally be interesting to know whether he has committed an indictable offence in his country, if only to be able perhaps to monitor that person, without necessarily denying him entry.
I'd like to ask the question, but I don't know which of the two could answer it. Do you have a way of determining this problem? We're in an extremely welcoming country for refugees. These are all good people, but people who may have committed crimes are part of these groups of people. If their country had not been destroyed, and if we had had agreements, perhaps it would be possible to trace them. Do you have something so that we can have what we can call a firewall?