Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the speech given by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. She is a great expert and very competent in the field. She did outstanding work when she was in the opposition, but I admit that I do not follow what she was saying in her speech today. On the one hand, she talks a very humanitarian line, she always did, but on the other, how can she justify this Bill C-44 which I think is contrary to several principles of the Geneva convention?
For example, a political crime is not distinguished from a common law crime. How can she justify transferring much of the IRB's mandate to the department and the minister? For example, how can she justify no longer allowing permanent residents who have been here for 10, 20 or 30 years to appeal to the appeal division of the IRB?
She will expel these people because they committed a crime punishable by 10 or more years in penitentiary but in fact were fined, given a suspended sentence or put on probation. Why did the parliamentary secretary not admit, as the member of our party just said, that the crime rate has gone down in Canada in recent years and fell by 5 per cent in 1993?
Why does she not admit that the crime rate for immigrants is lower than the crime rate for Canadians who were born here and
that on the whole immigrants are more law abiding than Canadians born here? I do not follow her. I admit that she is very competent, she knows the field well and she has always taken a very humane position in this regard.