Mr. Speaker, I know that my constituents consider what I am saying to be extremely relevant to this bill. The fact is the bill does not address the problems that they have identified for years. They have begged the minister to deal with them. I have already given some examples.
One of the things my constituents have suggested to the minister, and she heard it on radio talk shows when she was out there last year, was that she include in a new bill an ability for us to get rid of these criminals, to deport them in lieu of sentence.
We have this absolutely ludicrous situation where a refugee claimant can come in and commit a crime, they go into the court system and if we are really lucky the person gets put in jail. As soon as that person is released on probation, that is considered to be a part of the court sentence. So the immigration deportation process cannot start up. The person can wander around the streets, commit another crime and go back to jail. This process is repeated over and over again. Thousands of people are doing it in the Vancouver area. I am certain it must be happening in Toronto and it has to be happening in Montreal.
For an unknown reason the minister is ignoring the problem. She brings in these bills that fiddle around the edges of the problems but never deals with them.
Let me give the House some examples of the sorts of things that happen in my office. On a weekly basis we get anything up to about a dozen immigration case inquiries. I am an immigrant. No one can say I am against immigration. I could not have come here if I was against immigration. But what I stand for is a quality in immigration. There is nothing wrong with screening people to find quality immigrants to come here and who want to be Canadian, not for them to bring their problems from some other country or to bring criminals into this country, but to bring decent, hardworking people who can contribute.
About 20 years ago the immigration department worked through the embassies to find quality people to come to Canada who had skills and who could help the country grow. Now the immigration department is captive of its own system. The quotas are filled almost exclusively by family reunification and people who come to invest money. It is not done in a proactive way to find people we really need.
Let me give the House four or five recent examples of the types of cases that come to my office. A short time ago a man called to say he was having trouble sponsoring his wife from Pakistan because the Canadian embassy refused to recognize his marriage. We did an inquiry. What did we find out? This man married someone he had never met. He had never seen the women. He had never been to the town she lived in. He could not produce any wedding photographs. Someone else stood in for him so all the photographs were of someone else. He expected me to be an advocate for him when he had not even met the woman he was sponsoring.
Last week an Iranian man called me. He already had a sponsorship list of five people he wanted to bring in. He called to ask us to cancel the five he had already decided to sponsor. He wanted to change them to a different five. What sort of nonsense is this? A person does not know who he wants to sponsor into the country? It is an indication of another problem that occurs in the Vancouver area which is a pyramid selling scheme for citizenship.
People sell sponsorships. I know my colleague with the same name from Fraser Valley had a problem in his area where there was a big pyramid selling scheme. People would go back to India, get married and sponsor the person who would then sponsor the family. They would go back and get married and sponsor the next group. There was a huge amount of money changing hands. That structure was broken up a couple of years ago. It gives us an idea of the sort of problem.
I had another case a week ago where a refugee claimant who was sponsoring his wife from India called to ask why they had done nothing for almost a year.
Our contact at immigration Canada advised that the refugee claimant in my riding was due to appear in court on kidnapping charges. He had actually kidnapped someone in Canada. At the same time as he is committing these crimes he is trying to sponsor more people in. It is absolutely ridiculous.
The state of our immigration system is appalling and the minister's bill is doing nothing to address these problems.
Toward the end of last year another woman called asking me to write a letter of support to immigration Canada so that her husband, who had already been deported back to Iran, could come back to Canada. He had committed a crime in Montreal and had been deported twice. He was counterfeiting money in Canada and this woman wanted me to write a letter in support of his coming back. It is absolutely amazing what is going on.
We have had more cases over the past few years than we can count of refugee claimants in my riding who have actually gone back to the country that they claim they were persecuted in. They claim to be destitute and persecuted but somehow they have the money to go back on a vacation to the country that is supposed to be persecuting them.
Then of course they get found out. One would think that it would be an easy job to deport them. No, sir. It is impossible to deport them. On average it takes 10 to 12 years to get that done.
As members can tell I am just getting warmed up. I have a list of stuff here but with only one minute left I know I will not get through it all. However, perhaps I have been able to illustrate very well the sorts of problems this minister has not addressed.
I will try to sum this up in the last minute I have. Last March a refugee claimant from Sri Lanka was arrested near Toronto with 10,000 fake Canadian citizenship cards in his possession. He had paid about $15,000 for them, $1.50 for each Canadian citizenship card. A Nigerian was arrested in May with dozens of false immigration documents, citizenship cards, social insurance cards, drivers licences and false passports. Even here in Ottawa the RCMP is constantly confiscating false passports.
The system is in a mess and Bill C-63 does absolutely nothing to address it. It is a disgrace.