I provided my opening remarks, and as well, the actual paper that I wrote for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a couple of other papers to the committee, so you will have access to that.
I totally agree with respect to border issues not being really included. I don't think that was the intent, frankly, in the drafting of Bill C-59 and fair enough, you use other legislation. But there are so many things that could and need to be done in my opinion. I wondered when you had your last witnesses here including from the RCMP, who had some unusual remarks in my opinion, but they're not so much legal as they are practical.
Do we have a bad guy lookout system in place supported by face recognition biometrics? I know this may come as a surprise but the bad guys use phony ID. Why are our border officers not allowed expressly to be doing enforcement work between ports of entry? It's ridiculous. We need to renegotiate the safe third country agreement.
Let's me clear, obviously you can call it global migration or human smuggling but it's not an accident that these people happened to coincidentally.... More than 50% of them by the way, in these latest waves, were not just people who were Haitians expecting that they were going to leave the United States but people who had actually lawfully obtained visas to come to the United States to illegally enter Canada. That should raise an eyebrow. Why is that? The word is out essentially that it is something that can be done.
What I would suggest is that there are so many issues that are involved in this. It merits a separate study and analysis and not necessarily tacking things on to Bill C-59, because there are enough other things in Bill C-59 that are legitimate but our border security issues I think.... We haven't completed the commitments in the Beyond the Border program or the border integrity technology enhancement program for border surveillance technologies. Those are things that absolutely need to be done.
As I say, the bad guys tell us what they're planning on doing. Remember when this all started and there was a flow of refugees into Europe and they said, we're going to embed our people in amongst them. There was a report out last week from the EU about that fact of those people retuning. That's something we need to pay attention to.
On the final last point just about this, I thought that the Immigration and Refugee Board has done a pretty good job of releasing statistics on the numbers of people who have been ruled inadmissible or timelines and things like that. The one statistic that you don't see is how many people have actually been removed? In our system that's different from being ordered removed.
That's information that is available and it would be a good idea to actually get it because our system in my experience is too bureaucratic and process focused. Process is supposed to serve purpose. If I could add an insight from a career in law enforcement, all too frequently it doesn't, especially in border issues.
You'll see a whole list of recommendations, sir.