Mr. Speaker, I want to reassure the member for Lakeland that there are those on this side of the House who share some of the views he has just expressed about the urgency of coming to grips with the problem of the migrants on the west coast.
In my six years in the House I think I have only once heard a suggestion from the Reform Party that I fully agreed with and that was the suggestion that the migrants should be detained until their cases are disposed of and it is determined whether they are refugees or not.
This seems like a harsh thing to do. We are actually keeping people confined, as they would be in any kind of detention, which is a type of jail. The alternative is too much to even contemplate. What we are really dealing with is trafficking in human beings. So long as these people are released back into the community—and I know the Department of Immigration has already experienced this—they are immediately drawn into absolute slavery. The condition of their passage is to work it off in one manner or another.
In that sense I think the hon. member is entirely correct, even though the prospect of detaining people is very unpalatable to anyone who wants to give people the benefit of the doubt and freedom in the process thereof.
While I am certainly in agreement that the refugee system needs fixing, I do have to acknowledge that the problem really is with the charter of rights, which unfortunately gives the full rights of citizenship to anyone who sets foot on Canadian soil. It is that which is the root cause of the problem. I wonder if the member would comment on that.