Mr. Speaker, I too will be sharing my time.
The American public and particularly the politicians must wonder what is in our water. A senator in the United States stood up at a press conference and held up a study that she purported proved that the Canadian border was a sieve and that our country was a haven for terrorists. When she was asked where she obtained her information and how she could justify her statements, she said “I got the information from Canadian press reports”. This is remarkable. They read the newspapers and hear people in this country making these allegations, so they say that if we in this country are saying it, it must be true.
I find it incredible that we have an official opposition that would actually make statements which would undermine the ability of this country to negotiate a fair and reasonable response to the tragedies that have befallen our complete world as that relates to trade between Canada and the United States. We know that 87% of our exports go south of the border. We also know that 25% of theirs come north. If American authorities are seeing and hearing Canadian authorities say that the sky is falling and we are a haven for terrorists and we are this and we are that, would it not seem reasonable that they would be loath to enter into new arrangements and new agreements?
Winston Churchill said that the first casualty of war is the truth. Never before have I seen it be more obvious. Let us take a look at what the motion calls for. It says that immigration officers and customs officers should be granted “full peace officer status” with the ability to arrest and detain criminals and terrorists. Would it come as a shock to the author of this motion that this is the fact today? Our people have the status of peace officers. They have the ability to arrest and detain.
It does not matter that this is the current situation. What matters is that there is an opportunity being seized upon by the official opposition to somehow fearmonger and, in its members' minds, enhance its political status within the Canadian system and within the country. I suggest that it is not going to work.
First, they know full well, or they should know, that previous critics from the Canadian Alliance and its predecessor, the Reform Party, refused to attend trips with the minister of immigration to actually investigate, on the ground at our foreign posts and in our embassies, what goes on. Their reason for refusing was that they insisted on being given the opportunity to attend every meeting the minister went to. When we went to Kenya, we did not have the critic from the official opposition with us because he wanted to attend a meeting that the minister was having with the president of that country.
I am a member of parliament in support of the government. I would not be so presumptuous as to insist that unless I am allowed to attend a meeting between a member of cabinet and the president of another country I will not go. It seems to me that is a bit of a cop-out. In not going, that critic failed to see what was there, and this has happened in Moscow, the Ukraine, London, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, all over the world. They do not want to know because it takes away from the ability to stand up in the House, as members shamefully have done, and make wild accusations that the foreign service is subject to bribery.
I have heard statements made by members of the official opposition that visas are given out in return for favours and bribes. To make those kinds of allegations with no evidence whatsoever, except to have the opportunity to hear from someone like Diane Francis writing in the National Post with the most extraordinary accusations based on fantasy, is not becoming of a member of parliament.
The first point in this resolution is that our people already have that authority. It goes on to say that we should detain all spontaneous refugees. I would like to talk about that. A spontaneous refugee as defined by the official opposition is someone who shows up on our shores uninvited. Is it not astounding that a refugee would actually arrive somewhere uninvited? Let us imagine that.
We have millions of refugees in campsites. I have been there. The critic once again refused to go to the desert in Africa to meet the refugees and to talk to them about their plight and how they lost their families, homes and infrastructure.
Do members opposite think the people in the Sudan have the opportunity to go to a government office and apply for a passport? The Sudan does not have such an infrastructure.
There is no doubt that we have people who show up here without ID. In many cases they leave their homes in the middle of the night with the police coming in the front door. That is not an exaggeration. I have met and talked with them. I know it happens because I have seen it with my own eyes. They leave in the middle of the night with their children and the shirts on their backs. They do not have time to stop and ask where is their driver's licence, if they have one to begin with.
We have an international tragedy that was in existence before September 11. It is a tragedy to see refugee camps with hundreds of thousands of people, insufficient water and no infrastructure, not knowing what to do and wanting to go home, might I add. That is what they truly want to do. They want to go home.
What do we hear? The opposition wants us to detain everybody who comes here uninvited. What happens now if people show up who do not have proper ID? We interview them at length. We determine whether or not their story is true. We fingerprint and photograph them. We check them through international security services and computer links. We attempt to find out who they are and what they are doing here.
If we do not get satisfaction on those points, they are detained. It happens now. Does that matter to members of the official opposition? Would they rather perpetrate a fraud upon the public in this country that somehow or other we are simply releasing people willy-nilly into the community, even if it is not true?
The accusations that were in the media about 50 Afghani and Pakistani refugees arriving here less than 10 days ago and being released into the community without any security checks whatsoever were absolutely false. Does it matter, though, that they were false, or does it only matter that it was in the paper so it must be true? The opposition then has the ability to propagate that information even further.
I urge Canadians to remain calm and to recognize that the politics of hatred and fear being propagated by the official opposition is not the Canadian way. We need to be secure in our borders. We need to keep trade flowing between Canada and the United States. Telling the international community that we have all these problems when in fact we do not is the most irresponsible and reprehensible action that anyone can take, yet alone a member of this place.
That is not to say improvements do not need to be made. They should be made. There was a breakdown in immigration. Unfortunately it was in the United States and it led to that tragedy. We need to work with the Americans to secure our borders, keep our goods and services flowing both north and south, and keep Canadians safe. My government is committed to that.