Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by complimenting the member for Winnipeg Centre for his very reasoned comments about the over-reliance of this new legislation on regulation rather than having the rules clearly stated and built into the bill. This is just another of hundreds of examples that we have seen in the last seven years of the gradual erosion of the powers of parliament and the handing over to either the centre of the government or the bureaucrats, or both, the powers which should be exclusive to us in this Chamber.
As the son and grandson of immigrants I have a very keen interest in what I see happening around me these days. We have become, for the third time in a century, an immigration dependent country, an immigration dependent economy. I do not think anyone would deny at this point that in order to keep the pump primed we do have to bring in more people, preferably people with skills, people with ambition, and people who can contribute physically and financially to the maintenance and growth of our economy. This should be the prime purpose of immigration. This is what Canadians want.
For the record I would like to quote the policy of the Canadian Alliance Party on that particular point:
We should have an immigration system that will accommodate independent immigrants who will quickly add to our economy; a system which will welcome genuine refugees and which will reunite people with their families as soon as possible.
The government has failed to deliver that, and I do not see any sign in the new act that it is on the line for the future.
I should like to address briefly the question of refugees, which seems to be the part of the Canadian immigration system that is attracting the most public attention and is causing the most concern to the general population. It really hurts me as a Canadian to see how our country has been made a laughing stock of the world because of the way we handle refugee claimants.
Migrants get their toes on Canadian soil, say the magic word refugee, and they are in. That is a wonderful setup for criminal traffickers in human beings or for plain scofflaws and queue jumpers. This is not the way to run a country. If we to do it that way, why have an immigration department at all? This issue is that it is becoming a rubber stamp. It makes no sense.
This goes back to a court decision in 1985. The Singh decision made very clear that once people gets their toes on the ground they have all the rights and privileges of a Canadian citizen, or at least that is the way the decision was interpreted by the immigration department.
The government extended the Singh decision to mean that all refugee claimants, in fact any foreign national who lands on Canadian soil, should be given the full protection of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That interpretation is certainly a major contributing factor to Canada becoming the favoured target all over the world for people traffickers, for scofflaws, for people who cannot be bothered to go through the formalities of proper immigration procedures.
This new legislation will outsing Singh. According to the new act anyone who applies for entry into the country, no matter where in the world, automatically gains protection under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There is no other country on the face of the earth that gives citizenship rights, or rights equal to those of citizens, to foreign nationals outside its borders. People trying to get into this country will think we have lost our minds.
I have talked to immigration officials who have read the bill and see what is coming. Obviously I cannot quote their names but they are appalled. They are asking what they are going to do now when what looks like a spurious applicant comes before them and they say no for a good reason. The person will then immediately invoke the rights our citizens would have under our constitution to challenge the decision made by these officers.
If the officers are confronted with this often enough, they will simply throw up their hands and say “It is no use. We cannot keep bailing. The hole in the boat is getting bigger all the time. Our jobs are without purpose. We will just have to open the floodgates and let people in”.
I sincerely hope that clause in the legislation will be amended out before we finally get to vote on it. It is an absurdity. I do not know who makes up these things, but it must be somebody with a fine imagination.
I have talked about the idiocy of the new legislation, but there are some good things in it. There is the stiffening of the penalties for trafficking, for example. However, if we look at that closely, those clauses are without much meaning.
If someone is a big time people smuggler, that person will not come to Vancouver, set up a booth on Hastings Street and say “Come now and we will arrange your illegal immigration”. He will reside either in his home country or in a third country where we cannot get at him. We have a law that says one could get a million dollar fine or a year in jail. So what? It has no effect.
I have heard today a couple of times about how our minister has presumably partially stopped the flow of illegal immigrants by going to source, making trips and talking to officials in the source countries of illegal immigrants. I am sure, oh so sure, that really deterred a lot of people. In the real world how many do we think it deterred when we have legislation coming up that will give people the right and the opportunity to say that if we do not want to let them into our country they will appeal again and again and eventually get in. What is our minister doing?
I deeply regret that I have only 10 minutes. I wanted to tell the House a whole bunch of horror stories on the other side of the coin about legitimate immigrants, people who have come here with the best will and intent. They have good jobs and are contributing to the country. However, after years and years of effort, they have been unable to get landed. I have a number of them in my constituency. Even though I am in a rural and so-called remote area, I get more of these kinds of cases than of almost anything else but income tax.