Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for giving me the opportunity to expand on this topic.
I am an immigrant. When I applied in 1977 to come to this country I was turned down the first time. Some may say that was good but the fact is that I was turned down the first time and I think that was very wise. The first step is to make sure that the people who decide at a party on a Saturday night that they want to go to Canada need to be weeded out right away. I applied again wondering why I did not get in the first time? It took two years for my family to get approval to come here. It was 1979 before we came and we felt we had earned our right to come here. We went through the process and did it properly. We did not try to queue jump.
We should have a similar process for refugees. As I mentioned and as the member knows, there are many refugees waiting in United Nations' camps around the world. I believe those refugees have every right to expect prompt attention to their plight. For every person we accept at our border and use resources and processing time on, it is one or more people who we cannot use resources and processing time on from those United Nations' camps where they have already been proven to be refugees.
I would say that anybody who comes to this country via Heathrow, Amsterdam or Frankfurt is probably not a refugee and is jumping ahead of the proper process, which is to be recognized as a refugee first. That is what is happening at United Nations' camps. We should send the message that nobody is coming to this country pretending to be a refugee when they more properly should come through the correct channels and get in the queue along with all those people who have been waiting patiently for years in refugee camps.