Mr. Speaker, first, I agree with the member in terms of the role of the opposition. It is the opposition's job to criticize and sometimes yell and scream and do all sorts of things to attract attention. I did the same thing when I was sitting where the member is.
In 1993 when we won the election, I remember thinking, my goodness, now we have to do this thing. It was frightening. It was easy to sit over there and criticize, but it suddenly dawned on me that night that we had to be responsible and do it. It puts a certain responsibility on us here on this side to do things that those in opposition do not have to consider.
Let us talk about the Vienna convention. As much as anything else, the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations is there to protect Canadians abroad. It is very important that we have this convention. We would not want our Canadians representing Canada to be mistreated in other parts of the world. It is important that we have this and that we reciprocate.
That does not mean we have to accept the fact that sometimes people come into our country and commit crimes, obviously not. There are no guarantees and there can be no absolute guarantees to ensure that all of the people who come with immunities will obey the law at all times. When persons with immunity commit serious crimes, the Canadian government has one of the most stringent policies in the world. We seek waiver of immunity to prosecute the individual. Unfortunately we rarely get it, but we do seek it in every instance. Where the request for a waiver is refused, other sanctions, including expulsion from Canada, are taken.
However, what we have to understand is that this piece of legislation does not grant different immunities to this group of people. They would have been granted these immunities by ministerial permit. They would still be allowed into the country for the period of that conference. We would still screen them in the same way. All it does is concentrate them in the same place, those treaty organizations, where they are dealt with. That is what it does. It does not change the level of immunity they would have had if we had left it the way it was. It just streamlines our way of dealing with it.
We are not intent on adding and expanding immunities. That is not what this does. We still screen each person on the list as it is submitted. The foreign affairs department and all the departments have a whole screening process. It is very important to remember that. We do not just admit everyone because they happen to want to come to a conference and claim to be with a particular group. They have to be part of the official list. All the names on the official list are screened, much as, by the way, what happens when we Canadians go to a conference. Our names have to be submitted in advance. Those countries screen the names in the same fashion we do. It is not something new. It is something that carries on, but it is a streamlining of the way we do it.