Mr. Speaker, as Canadians we are known for our willingness to welcome immigrants and refugees with a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
If we have a failing though it would be our tendency to assume that every new entrant will leave behind any long held prejudices and deeply held feelings related to conflicts in their previous homelands.
In fact, as the experience with the Babar Khalsa charity in B.C. taught us, criminals and undesirables do infiltrate our society from overseas and use our willingness to embrace other cultures as a way to raise money for wars and terrorist activities abroad.
It took years to get the Babar Khalsa deregistered as a charity, even though CSIS had identified the group as raising money in Canada for terrorism, because those who spoke out about the problem were unfairly labelled by political opponents as intolerant and racist.
Let us not make the same mistake again. Let us begin listening to authoritative warnings about terrorist fundraising activities in Canada.