Mr. MacKenzie, to be clear and on the record, the Muslim community in this country are Canadians. We're proud to be Canadians. We share many of the values of this country. Our values are not any different from Canadian values.
I wanted that on the record so there's no misunderstanding.
I opened with unequivocal condemnation of violence against any civilians, but al-Qaeda, unfortunately, is not the only group, and terrorist groups aren't state terrorists, we know. I was born in South Africa under a state terrorist regime, and there are many other examples. We won't go through them.
We're not going to change the whole world by going after this thing and watering down our fundamental values. I'm not here to be an academic lawyer looking at the charter that was drafted as some idealistic document. Clearly, the criminal law standards, the adversarial process--he can tell you more than me because he's the expert--is not here simply to protect criminals. The fundamental process in our system, the adversarial process, is to find the truth so that we're all safer.
At the end of the day, many of these men have said, “Show the evidence. Let's have a go at it, and if I've done something wrong, then I'll be punished.” That's all they're asking. At the end of the day, it's not only a turnaround of you coming.... Some of these people have set up lives here, and it's not a matter of it being easy to ship them off to torture.
The issue about criminals and someone showing up at the border and being turned back is significantly different from people who have children here, who have lives here and are established, and those are the kind of people we're trying to turn away.