Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Surrey North. I am pleased to be the next to speak because I can clarify something that was said by the member who just spoke.
I visited the Vancouver airport immigration processing centre last Thursday with the member for West Vancouver--Sunshine Coast. The hon. member for Chatham--Kent Essex needs to visit an immigration centre to find out what actually happens.
When the member says the people who get off planes are fingerprinted he is correct. They are. However does he know that it takes 10 months to get the fingerprint results back? Does he know that it is only for fingerprint records in Canada and nowhere else in the world? A person can turn up and give any name such as Joe Smith. CSIS will check only that name in its records. The fingerprints take 10 months to check and they are only for Canada. Can the hon. member not see that a criminal can walk into Canada instantly?
There are no medical checks. The member can verify this any place where there is an immigration port. The refugee claimant is given a package of documents, asked to report at a certain time to a certain place, and given an application for a medical check. However there are no medical checks at the airport before the person is released.
As for detention, yes, technically it is true that people can be detained. However last week when we were in Vancouver there were only five people detained and awaiting deportation. They were all international criminals with lengthy international warrants for their arrest who had been identified. For people who are detained because they are uncooperative, the maximum amount of time is two to three days in the Richmond lock-up and then they are released. As soon as they give any name at all they are given the refugee package and dispensed out the door.
I challenge the hon. member or any other person on that side who has been brainwashed with their talking points to go to any port of entry in the country and prove me wrong, because that is what happens.
Everyone in this place knows it is ridiculous to suggest there could be refugee claimants from Amsterdam in Holland, Heathrow in the U.K. or Frankfurt in Germany. That would be ridiculous. These countries do not produce refugees. However for Canada they do. We accept refugees from Heathrow, Amsterdam and Frankfurt every day of the week. These are people who get on planes in countries where they need to change planes. They change planes at Frankfurt, Heathrow or Amsterdam.
The UN charter on refugees allows refugees to claim safety in the first safe country they get to. I challenge anyone on that side of the House to tell me how people can be refugees if they change planes at Heathrow, Amsterdam or Frankfurt and choose to come to Canada. Did they not forgo their opportunity to claim refugee status in the first safe country they reached?
When it comes to refugee producing countries I cannot think of many. The only one from which there is a non-stop flight to Canada is Cuba. There might be others; I could be corrected on this point. However everyone else must change planes somewhere, and that somewhere is always a safe country. When people get on a plane with a $600 U.S. ticket, I want to know where they purchased it, who gave them the money and if they came from Somalia or Afghanistan. I want to know how they got the ticket.
The U.S. takes the attitude that if people arrive with no documents it is a pretty good indication of the type of character they are. It indicates that they trying to hide something. They do not get admitted. They get shipped out right away. Anyone who has no documents does not get into the United States.
In other respects the United States is as weak as us. It detains people for a short time. It has in the past, as we have, released these people for medical examinations and so on. It needs to tighten up its rules as well.
The member who just spoke said it is wrong to say Canada is a haven for terrorists. However CSIS has told us there are more than 300 people with terrorist links in the country right now. Can Liberal members deny this? CSIS has identified them for us. In addition, 50 or more organizations with terrorists links are raising money.
If there were no problem why is it the new bill the government has put on the table includes provisions to take away the charitable status of these terrorist organizations? I wonder how many Canadian people know that terrorist organizations at the moment can legally set up a charity in Canada under the umbrella that they are informing people, that it is an information service about terrorism, and all the while they are happily raising money.
The Minister of Finance attended a fundraising dinner that CSIS warned him could be a fundraising dinner for terrorists, the Tamil tigers. There is a lot to answer for on that side of the House. They can wax eloquent on their talking points all day and quote their brainwashed programming from upstairs but it does not alter what is happening at our border crossings.
I asked the NDP member who stood up earlier whether she was aware that on any particular night in downtown Vancouver 50% of the arrests made by police are refugee claimants. Surely that is an indication there is a problem. If that is occurring at every major centre across the country, we have a huge problem on our hands, and that is the amount of resources being consumed because we were careless at the borders.
When we had several boatloads of Chinese migrants arrive here last summer, the immigration minister finally showed some courage and detained those people while we processed their claims, considerably faster than average I might add. What did we do? We rejected more than 90% of those people. More than 90% were found to be cheats, queue jumpers or non-refugees. They were opportunists trying to come in through the back door when they should have been coming through the normal immigration process.
Last Thursday immigration officials told us that for every 63 people arriving at the airport claiming refugee status, 200 people claim refugee status at a downtown immigration office in Vancouver, that is 200 people who have slipped through with forged documents, visitor visas or some other way with the intention of claiming refugee status, getting on our social welfare programs, obtaining free dental care, a free apartment to live in and 12 years of appeals before their refugee status is ruled on.
My riding has probably one of the largest refugee claiming populations in the country. It has been estimated that up to 50% of the people in the Iranian community are refugee claimants. I have had genuine Iranian immigrants call my office identifying some of these people by name and asking me why we let them in. They give me names of certain Iranian individuals who are criminals and wanted for bank robbery or other crimes in Iran. I always report the names to immigration Canada but it never has any record of those names because these criminals do not use their own names when they come to Canada.
The fact is that anyone coming to our border and making a refugee claim when they changed planes in Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Heathrow is a queue jumper because there are millions of genuine refugees in United Nations' camps around the world waiting for us to help them. We should be sending a strong message throughout the world that we want to help genuine refugees and we will take the maximum number we possibly can within our economic constraints, but they will all come prescreened from United Nations' refugee camps. If people want to get into Canada they must go there. They should not bother trying to queue jump into this country because it is not right and we will not tolerate it. The other side loves to talk about tolerance and that Canada is a wonderfully tolerant country, but we will not tolerate queue jumpers, cheats, criminals or anyone else who is taking advantage of our system.
I would like to actually compliment the government for stationing immigration officers in places like Heathrow, Amsterdam and Frankfurt because they do a great job prescreening and assisting the airlines in tracking false documentation, but they are spread too thin. The airlines have told me that they have one of these people on hand who can be called if necessary but it is not for every flight and every passenger. There are still plenty of people sneaking through.
I would put to the other side, who happily quoted that we prevented 6,000 people from getting on planes last year, that figure might have been 60,000 if we had been checking every document and every flight carefully at Frankfurt, Heathrow and Amsterdam.