Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to this bill. For the three years of my incarnation or reincarnation as a member of parliament in this place I have had the privilege of serving on the citizenship and immigration committee. This past year I was elected as vice-chair of the committee.
As a member of parliament from Mississauga, my riding, as members will appreciate, is a hotbed of new immigrants, refugees and problems dealing with citizenship and immigration. Indeed, I have a full time staff person, Terry Kirsch, who virtually does nothing but deal with citizenship and immigration issues. In our community, which is a very diverse community, this topic is near and dear to our hearts and is extremely important to my constituents and to constituents right across the region of Peel.
One of the things we have learned in our time in federal office is that the citizenship and immigration system appears to have bogged down in a tremendous amount of bureaucracy and red tape. The minister has recognized that exact problem and has brought in changes that will improve the system. She is really known as the just do it minister, the let us fix the problem minister and the let us find out where the problems lie minister.
It was interesting to hear some of my colleagues speak, notably the critic for the official opposition who spoke for about 40 minutes. In the first 15 or 20 minutes of his speech he talked in terms of all the positive things he saw. I was getting a little nervous. I thought he was about to come out in full support of the bill and that we might have to go back to the drafting table. However, that of course did not happen. As is usually the case, while he and other members opposite were able to find some good things in the bill, they tended to focus on the negative. That can be no more clearly demonstrated than when we deal with the very sensitive issue of refugees.
As everyone knows, this country became a signator to the Geneva convention in 1949 wherein we agreed to take our share of refugees, of people in trouble because of conflicts in their country. The issue then is how to define our share. In reality it has defined itself in terms of the numbers. Where we may see 200,000 plus or minus new immigrants come to this country, we will see approximately 20,000 declaring refugee status.
What happens in the case of a refugee? If individuals quietly show up at Pearson airport, come forward without documents, simply claim refugee status and then tell a story of persecution and problems back in their homeland, they go through a process. In years gone by that process has taken several years to play out. However, if they arrive on a rusty boat off the shores of British Columbia or wade ashore in the maritimes, soaking wet, having come out of some kind of a boat, the TV cameras go on and it then becomes big news.
Just to put this in perspective, while we were dealing with approximately 600 migrants coming ashore on the west coast in what has been termed an illegal way, which it clearly was, we deal with close to that number every single month at Pearson International Airport. Do they get the attention? Do they get the media? Do they get the negative comments that we hear from critics of the government who simply want to use this tragedy?
Let me be clear. This is a human tragedy. This is as a result of bondage, of trafficking, of slavery. This is as a result of organized crime. It is easier today to smuggle people than it is to smuggle drugs and, some would say, it is even more profitable and less dangerous.
They get all of the attention when, as a result of the interviews that have been done, they show that the majority of these people are indeed victims. They are victims of an international crime ring, of human traffickers and smugglers who must be sought out, punished and dealt with in the strongest possible terms.
I was proud to see our minister in China last week telling the Chinese government that it must help us put a stop to this, and going to Fujian province and telling the officials there that they must tell their sons and daughters that this is not safe, that paying $40,000 or $50,000 to be put on an obviously unseaworthy, rusty, old tanker of a ship and being sent out to sea for weeks to cross the ocean is just not safe, not sensible and must stop. Our minister told the people in China that they have the key to solving this particular problem.
However, there are people on this side of the ocean who would like to use this for political advantage. I understand the sentiment of, for example, the Chinese community in British Columbia who said “We are upset because we do not want people jumping the queue. We came here through the proper channels, through the right methods and we don't want people coming in the back door”. I understand and sympathize with that.
I say to them and to all Canadians that we must understand who the victims are. The vast majority of these people who are in detention in British Columbia are women and children. They are not the criminals. The criminals are the people who organized this trip from China with promises of better lives and days of wine and roses or whatever. What happens? Why are they in detention now when it is so costly to keep them there? If they are released as refugees, the young girls could wind up in prostitution, in the drug industry or in all kinds of illegal underground activity that is equally unsafe.
This is not an easy problem to resolve. We are dealing with language and cultural barriers. It is extremely difficult to communicate the facts properly and appropriately to the people in China but our minister is trying. In taking that message directly to them and I am hopeful we will see some success. Notwithstanding that issue, the bill brings forward some ideas that members opposite have talked about, some in support and some not in support, that will streamline the process.
It makes no sense whatsoever to put someone into a motel unit in Mississauga or somewhere in this country to live as a family when they have children who should be in school. Why are they here? They are here because if they are legitimate refugees they have a serious problem. As a result, it is up to Canada, as one of the countries involved in the Geneva convention, to find a solution to the problem.
I believe that most Canadians, the vast majority of Canadians, notwithstanding some of the rants that I have heard from members opposite both in this place and in committee, would say that if they are legitimate refugees, if they are in danger of persecution, if they are in danger for their lives, if they are in danger of being thrown into a rat infested prison somewhere, then we should not send them back. We should find a way to make that determination in as timely a fashion as possible so that if they do have children they can get into the education system and have the opportunity to build a new life.
I thought it was interesting this weekend, as we witnessed the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, that someone talked about the boat people. In fact, John Downing in the Toronto Sun wrote about his experience in helping a number of the boat people settle in the Toronto area when they arrived. They rented a couple of houses. They put those people up first in one house until the health authorities came along and told them they had too many people crammed into the house and Downing and the Sun rented another house to make more room for these people. We all remember them. They were called the boat people.
There was this great paranoia, this fear that they were coming up the credit river in tankers, for goodness sake, and that they would somehow destroy our communities. The misinformation was frightening, but it was fuelled by the negativity that existed in people who opposed Canada accepting its fair share of refugees, and that was the minority in my view.
I thought that Mr. Downing's article was brilliant because it talked about the success of those people today. There was the story of the Vietnamese refugee who showed up here, wound up in Winnipeg and started a small tailor shop. Today, with no education and no financial assistance, he has built a family business. He has kids and a wonderful life in Canada. That is what it is all about. That is what the Citizenship Act and the Immigration Act should be about. How do we share the wealth of this country and at the same time solve the problems, whether it was 25 years ago coming out of Saigon or today coming out of the Fujian province of China, wherever it is coming from?
I understand the frustration when people hear that refugees show up at Pearson airport without identification. They must have had it when they got on the plane. Where did it go? We know that it gets flushed down a toilet, it disappears somehow or it is given back to the carrier who sold it to them. We know that there is illegal activity and we must put a stop to that.
The bill will increase the fine to the potential of life imprisonment for trafficking in human beings. In fact, when we spoke at committee I suggested that we need to create a crime against humanity status for trafficking in human beings. It is not referred to as that, but I believe it should be. There could be nothing in this world more hideous than taking money from people through criminal activity and putting them into a situation where they know not what they are getting into. They wind up in this country in detention, in uncomfortable situations, and it is absolutely a crime against humanity.
The minister will close the back door; the back door that is opened and fueled by criminals, whether they are in organized crime or in ad hoc crime, who are using the situation to line their pockets.
The minister says we have to close the back door. Then, very interestingly, she says “so that we can open the front door wider”. It is an interesting idea.
If we were to ask in the good times if we should bring in more immigrants, some Canadians would say yes, some would say no, and some would say that we should ensure we get our employment up. The reality is, what is Canada if it is not a land of immigrants? If it is not a land built by the toil and the blood, sweat and tears of immigrants, then I do not know what this land is.
My father came from Cardiff, Wales to work in the steel mills. I am sure most of us could trace our ancestry, history and family lineage to another part of the world. Some of us are even first generation. That is one of the greatest things about this country. Imagine coming from someplace else in the world, maybe even destitute, and rising to become a member of parliament. It is a job that I happen to think is dignified and worthy of the respect of Canadians, notwithstanding comments made from time to time in the media and by those on the opposition benches. It is all about immigration.
We recently dealt with the citizenship bill. We see the pride that new Canadians feel every time there is a citizenship ceremony and they become new Canadians. It sends shivers up our spines to see how they feel about it. People can be proud anywhere in the world they go to say that they have a Canadian passport.
We say often that Canada has been voted the greatest country in the world in which to live for six years in a row by the United Nations. I always say it is the greatest country in the world in which to live unless people live here, and then they just want to complain about it.
I went on a trip with a colleague from the Conservative Party and the minister. We went through London, England and spent three days meeting with our Department of Citizenship and Immigration staff there, the visa officers, the young men and women who try to process all of the applications for visitor visas, landed immigrant status and refugee status. They try to deal with all of that. In London they are overwhelmed without a doubt because they have the reputation of being the most efficient and the best place to go. People from Nigeria and all over the western world are funnelling into London saying they know they will get their visas quickly and that is why they are there. They line up.
I sat in on some of the interviews. The London experience was very insightful, very interesting and very educational for me. I was astounded at how many we turn down. I thought this was a rubberstamp and they all just came through, one right after the other. Not true. They are turned down if there is even the slightest inkling that they are not telling the truth. They are turned down if there is even the slightest inkling that there might be some security risk or danger to the Canadian public.
I was extremely impressed with the dedication of the people who work for us in London, England, but the experience of a lifetime in my 20 years in elected office was the next leg of the trip. That was to Nairobi, Kenya. It is a city of six million people. It is a city where 500 people a day die in the hospitals from AIDS. It is a city where one dares not go out at night. It is a city where, the minister will remember, people do not even drive with their arm outside the window of the car for fear someone will hack it off to get their watch. It is a city where our employees, about 80 people in total, live in compounds that are surrounded by a wall with electric fences, with 24 hour security guards and with bars on the windows and doors of these beautiful, magnificent homes with yards to die for. People would think they were in Florida or Hollywood.