Mr. Speaker, before I came to the House I travelled extensively. I spent 30 years travelling around the world. I truly want to emphasize just how critical it is that the government preserve the integrity of the Canadian passport.
The Canadian passport is a ticket to freedom. It may be the most treasured passport in the entire world. Our passport is a key which opens the door for Canadians wherever they go.
That is exactly why the Canadian passport is so important for a man named Ron Ready. Ron is a Canadian who has been in Jordan for the past six months on important personal business. He does not want to come home until he has completed his task, but now he says that he may be forced to.
Things changed for the worse for Ron only a few hours after two individuals carrying what are now being called forged Canadian passports attacked a Hamas leader.
Ron says he was contacted in his hotel by the police and told that as a Canadian he should stay indoors because his safety might be threatened.
We have talked to Ron four or five times, almost every day, to find out how things have changed. Ron did contact foreign affairs, both over there and here in Ottawa. He called the prime minister's office for action. When he received no answers, he contacted the official opposition.
After communicating with Ron we were shocked to find that so little had been done to protect Canadians in Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East. In fact, we can think of nothing that was done at all. Ron says that the only help he received was the same advice he got from the police: Stay inside.
Jordanian acquaintances told him there was talk of killing westerners. Meanwhile, he said, the embassy would not even pay for him to call the foreign affairs department in Canada. When Ron Ready really needed the foreign affairs department, foreign affairs was inept and unavailable for him.
At the very least, Ron thought the Canadian government should issue a travel advisory so that other Canadians would not wander into the situation, but foreign affairs refused to do it.
When an incident takes place anywhere in the world and Canadians are at risk I believe that the government should do what it can to help them. Instead of taking action the government stalled. Instead of thinking about how life would be for Canadians stuck in this situation, the government was only hoping that no one would ask the difficult questions that would embarrass it.
If the media and the official opposition did not push for answers I doubt the government would have told us about this situation at all. The government waited for days, hoping no questions would come. It did not even think for a moment about the implication and the threats this placed on Canadian passport holders travelling abroad.
We think the government owes it to Canadians to get an assurance from Israel that our passports will not be used in covert operations ever again. A Canadian passport is too important to be muddied doing the dirty work in undercover operations.
I ask the government what specific actions it will take to ensure this will not happen again.