Yes, such an important riding. As a matter of fact, from a citizenship or immigration perspective, perhaps my riding was rather pivotal in bringing this issue to parliament because that is where the boats carrying the Chinese migrants landed last year.
What are Canadians looking for in our immigration act? That is the key question we should be asking. The official opposition has a very clear picture of what that is.
Canadians want an immigration system which will accommodate independent immigrants who will quickly add to our economy, which will welcome genuine refugees and which will reunite these people with their families as soon as possible. This government has failed to deliver what Canadians want in this new bill. That is a pretty simple equation, but it is a very important question.
The fabric of our country and the future of our country is dependent on people. We all know that. People are what make this place. We all came from somewhere. We are all basically immigrants from somewhere, or progeny of immigrants.
The minister is saying that the changes to the act we are debating today are the result of consultation. All I can say is that it is pretty selective choosing from that consultation. I cannot find in my heart or in my head where the changes being brought forward reflect the concerns of Canadians when it comes to our immigration system. Those concerns are many.
People are not concerned about the level of immigration; people are concerned about the components of immigration. People want assurances that we are bringing to Canada people who will benefit Canada in the long run and people who need the safe haven of Canada. We want to do good for the world, but we also want to look after the best interests of the future of our society and of Canada. That means we have to put some safeguards in place, and those safeguards are very important indeed.
As members of parliament we all work with immigration cases every day of the week. Our administrative staff work on immigration cases every day of the week. We also work with immigration officials. We know what the problems are in the system. We probably know the problems in the system better than almost any other group of Canadians as a collective.
A major question right now is how to take whole issue of people smuggling and turn it on its head. Canada, as we know, has become a target. There are two ways to do it. We can use the hammer and try to penalize the people smugglers or we can remove the incentive to smuggle people.
Canada is not particularly good at using the hammer. As a matter of fact, we are terrible. We have an international reputation for it. One way to describe the posture of successive governments in Canada when it comes to this kind of issue is to say that we are not warriors, but boy scouts
All things being equal, an incentive is always better than a penalty if the same results are achieved. It usually costs less and is much more effective. People do it because that is the natural course of events given the set of rules and the circumstances.
We are operating under a perverse system when it comes to immigration in Canada. The way our immigration act is construed and the way these changes have been made still lead us to the very same place where the likelihood of penalty that is meaningful to a people smuggler is almost nil and the likelihood of a major reward is infinitely large. The consequence of that is like a government subsidy. If something is subsidized, we get more of it. There is nothing here to tell me that we will reduce people smuggling as a consequence of this bill.
This is a status quo document that the minister is using as a public relations message in order to defend the Liberal love of the status quo while at the same time trying to sell to the public the fact that she is actually doing something when we know that this is not going to work.
We have a larger problem here. The United Nations has defined a refugee and we signed that convention. Canada, in its wisdom—and I am being facetious when I say Canada in its wisdom—has chosen not to follow the UN convention on refugees. If we had followed that convention, most of the people who have arrived and declared refugee status would not be refugees because they arrived through a safe country.
Part of the UN convention says that refugee status is declared at the first safe country of arrival. If Canada has refugees arriving in large numbers there can be only one reason: we are being targeted and it is symptomatic of a bigger problem.
The bigger problem we have is that we have the easiest, most vulnerable, most generous and easiest acceptance ratio of any western nation community. That is not doing us a favour.
What it is leading to is that we are not getting the average or better than average client refugee profile. There is a tendency, when creating a system such as ours with all those vulnerabilities, that we will end up with a lesser group. We will particularly end up with that element, a small element admittedly, but an element with criminal intent to a larger degree than countries with tougher standards. I think the Canadian public has again been sold a bill of goods. The changes in this bill will ensure that Canada remains the number one target for human traffickers and queue jumpers.
The 1985 Singh decision has led to all sorts of problems in the way we apply our immigration and refugee system. It is a prime example of how parliament has been usurped by the courts. Parliament has been complicit in allowing that to happen. It is time for the government to reverse that trend, that tendency and, in this case, that decision. That will allow us to fix our system and retain the sovereignty on immigration and refugee determination that Canadians deserve.