Mr. Speaker, it is true that my riding includes constituents who belong to various cultural communities. These are the people who voted for me, and I want to thank them again for doing so.
I have had the privilege of working with these people for fifteen years. The hon. member for Bourassa knows that I have been working with immigrants for 15 years. In fact, these very same people agree that we must do something to deal with the abuse in the system.
I will repeat what the minister said, which is that we are not trying to penalize immigrants who have not committed serious crimes. We are only trying to eliminate the abuse that exists in the system and ensure that criminals are deported from this country.
You said something I thought was very interesting. You said that we favour European immigrants. I do not think the minister of immigration ever said that this government only favours European immigrants. It is not this government's policy, and it should not be, as far as I am concerned.
I repeat what I said in my speech: We are a generous society and we want to keep it that way. Genuine immigrants who are not criminals are aware of this. Canada will continue to keep its doors open.
What we want to do is close the loopholes in the law.
I find it rather unusual that we have one opposition party saying we are going too far and the other one saying we are not going far enough. This indicates to me that we are doing the right thing somewhere along the line.