Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-11. Earlier in the debate one of the members from the government side asked for specifics. I am here to provide some. My riding is one of the areas with the highest rates of immigration. I have helped many individuals get into the country
I will not speak to that aspect today. I will speak to how the refugee system has failed us and how criminals take advantage of it. I will also talk about what can be done in legislation to fix the situation.
I have already heard from members opposite that these kinds of things have to get fixed, but in all fairness I do not think the government is headed toward fixing this problem. I also do not think it has the desire to do so. I will point out several specific cases with regard to that.
I wish to congratulate you on your appointment to the chair, Madam Speaker. I will go back a ways on immigration and talk about how criminals abuse the system. I choose to talk about criminals because I spent a lot of time as justice critic and now as solicitor general critic on these kinds of issues. I seem to be one of the few who is fighting them. I have spent many hundreds of hours fighting these kinds of cases on behalf of victims. Each and every time I have been involved in them, I have been asked to intervene on behalf of the victims.
I refer to an article that appeared in a trade magazine printed in Central America, the United States and Mexico. I raise this because it emphasizes in my mind how other countries think of us. The following paid ad appeared in the magazine: “Guaranteed immigration to Canada with the purchase of a Fleet Rent-a-Car franchise. Total investment of $50,000 Canadian, approximately $30,000 U.S. You are guaranteed”, and the word guaranteed is underlined, “immigration to Canada even with a criminal record”.
I pursued the particular ad because it gave an address on Bathurst Street in Toronto and a phone number. I had an organization interview these people under the auspices of being from another country and having criminal records. Sure enough, they validated exactly what they said in the ad. They essentially said that they could fix it up for those with a criminal record who wanted to get into Canada. Then they were asked questions about how such people could get into Russia, England, Canada and so on. The most outstanding point was: “Just get your foot on their soil and you are in”. In fact that is true.
I recently spent some time with police in an area well known for its drugs. We stopped and picked up three Hondurans. They were asked for their papers. All three individuals came to Canada illegally. One had been here for 10 months. He had two criminal convictions and one outstanding charge for trafficking. One was here for something like six months. He had an outstanding charge for trafficking. One had just arrived in Canada, I believe under a train car from the United States.
We have a situation where these young men are selling drugs to our kids, sending the money back home and not being deported. Therein lies part of the problem with our refugee system. I will go through the reasons it has to be fixed. I have no illusions about it. I have spoken to these issues time and time again in the House and they do not get fixed. I am putting on the record today that the problem still exists and I do not think the propensity is on the other side to deal with it.
A fellow from Cuba came into our country a very short time ago. I was asked by parents to look into the situation because they had an underage child. I should say that the child used to be underage but both the Conservative and Liberal governments took it upon themselves at one time to change the age of consensual sex from 16 years to 14 years. This child, who is now legally able to have consensual sex is 15 years old and the fellow who is dealing is 32. The parents asked me to intervene, so I did.
We are not sure how he got into the country. Nobody was ever really sure. Once he found out that I was on the job on this particular issue, I knew what would happen. He was advised to apply for refugee status. Word gets out pretty fast to apply for refugee status and get into this morass that lasts forever and keeps a person in this country, so first of all I applied as an intervener at the refugee hearing.
He, at his discretion, tried to keep me out of the refugee hearing. I had to apply to the refugee board to get into the refugee hearing. I had to fight that battle. I won that. It is preposterous that a Canadian citizen cannot sit in a refugee hearing at his or her own discretion and that an individual applying for refugee status in Canada, regardless of whether he or she is a criminal or not, has the option to kick out a Canadian citizen. That is just preposterous.
I won the right to be in the hearing. In the refugee hearing, since I was allowed to be there, I was my own intervener. I am not a lawyer. I have only picked up the basics of this through self teaching. In the hearing I was passed a document—from the right source—that identified this fellow as being wanted by the FBI in the United States for trafficking. He was wanted in Nevada and California.
There he had a 15 year old child from Canada, the parents did not want him, we did not want him, he was trafficking and the Americans were after him. We found out that he had been living in the United States for four years, but at his own discretion when the heat was on in the United States he skipped across the border to Canada to say that he was applying for refugee status, solely to avoid the law in the United States, not as an applicant from Cuba, although that is what his application said.
I fought this in the refugee hearing. I asked what we were doing to ourselves and why did we not ship this fellow the next morning over to the States and let him pay his dues, but no. We had more than one refugee hearing. We were to have numerous refugee hearings on this guy. The parents were beside themselves, not quite understanding why it was that Canada was even entertaining a refugee hearing in the first place, much less a refugee hearing on an individual who had been living in the United States for four years.
As time went on we actually won the battle and the refugee board declared that he was not a genuine refugee. After the board did so, I said to the refugee board that the guy had better be put in holding because he was going to jump. No, the board did not want to do that because then his rights would have been violated. So the board told him he was not a refugee and what did he do? We do not know where he is today because he skipped, exactly as I told them he would and exactly the way it has happened countless times when I have fought these issues.
A person has to wonder what bright light comes on at the immigration and refugee hearings such that people will not listen to reason. I recently found out as late as last week that this person has absconded with the young girl. The parents are wondering why we even entertained the refugee hearing in the first place, much less not holding the guy once he was declared deportable.
What is wrong with that philosophy?
Let us turn to more examples. There is a fellow by the name of Chander in my riding. He arrived in 1996 as a visitor from India and quickly got married. He beat up his wife several weeks later, but he was married and figured he was going to stay in Canada. I was asked by his wife to intervene. The moment I intervened, this individual, charged with assault and in Canada basically under false pretences, applied for refugee status.
It is just the common thing to do. I have even heard immigration adjudicators say that if a deportation fails the person can always apply for refugee status. It is used for the wrong reasons by some people.
This individual started to fight. He tried to kick me out of the hearing. I had to fight to make sure I stayed in the hearing. I did that. It was the same thing. It was the same advice they get from all their legal aid lawyers. It was identical.
We fought the case all the way to the refugee board and the board found that no credible or trustworthy evidence was available on which to base a convention refugee claim. I said he had better be kept behind bars because I could tell the board where he was going and that he would not be around on the day he was to be deported. He has gone. We are not sure where he went.
However, there is a little law that says if everything fails on the application and if a person returns to his or her country and comes back here after 90 days, he or she can re-apply.
About six months later I got a call, from Calgary this time, not Abbotsford, British Columbia. Guess who re-applied for refugee status? By luck I found out. Had I not found out, it would have been clear sailing.
So we went through it again. He applied to kick me out of the hearing. He did not want the public involved. He had the right. I fought that and won. We went to the refugee hearing in Calgary, fought there and won a second time. For the second time I advised that if the person was to be deported he should be locked up because he would disappear and he would claim again somewhere, maybe in Halifax next time, who knew? That could not be done because that was against his rights. Today we again do not know where he is. Very likely he has already had another refugee claim that I have not heard about, or he is about to and I may not hear about it.
The system is used and abused.
Get the logic he used. This fellow even claimed that he was a refugee from India—a democratic country yet—because he was being persecuted. He failed in his refugee application, then came back and had the audacity to lie at the second refugee hearing. He said he went to India, stayed a while and came back in. He was asked if he was persecuted there. He was asked why he would go back if he would be persecuted. He did not have an answer.
This is going on every single day, time and time again every day in our country. I cannot believe how preposterous this system is getting. Yet when we stand up here and talk about an immigration act, there is no mention of these difficulties.
In our sorrowful areas where we see a lot of drug use and abuse, on the downtown east side of Vancouver, we have many individuals trafficking in drugs who are non-Canadians. Some of them have not 2 or 3 charges and convictions but 20, 30 and 40. I have the records. They are not deported. They are selling drugs to our children and they are not deported. If we try to deport them they claim refugee status, and the deportation and refugee boards do not talk to each other. One will say that is their business, not ours. Then when they jump over from deportation to refugee board application, the refugee board says yes, that is our business and not theirs. However, it is the business and concern of all of us.
While there are many genuine people coming into the country as immigrants and as refugees, and we are happy for that, there are those who are blatantly abusing the system. It must be dealt with. It cannot be dealt with by tabling legislation and not talking about it. It cannot be dealt with by someone like myself standing up and trying to defend the rights of victims who have been abused while someone else over there is saying I must be a racist because I am talking about the immigration system not working.
I have been asked to speak about these issues on behalf of victims, some who have been raped by some of these individuals. One individual, a friend of mine now, was raped by a man from El Salvador. He was ordered deported. We shipped him out to El Salvador on the condition that she drop the charges. She agreed in order to get him out of the country.
After he was escorted out—we flew him to El Salvador—she was getting gas for her car in my community six months later and guess who was gassing up beside her? The very guy who raped her, who we shipped out. Do members know what he did? To avoid being deported again, he stood up with his legal aid lawyers, two of them this time, and said he was a refugee. We went through the whole process for two years. For two long years this girl went through this. He was one of those individuals, by the way, who refuse to take a test for HIV; that is her problem.
If the House wants specifics from the other side, I have them and dozens more stories like this. I am not trying to paint a picture of a terrible, chaotic system. I am telling the government for the umpteenth time in the House of Commons that there are problems that need to be fixed.
Victims are hoping that we in the House of Commons do something about it rather than standing up and saying that all is well, that we want everything to continue on the way it has been with a couple of changes. There are people who need our help.
Criminals in our country and in all other countries see us as a haven. That is not made up. All we have to do is pick up the FBI directory or the CIA documents in the United States. They will tell us that criminals see Canada as a haven, because once they get here they are entitled to the charter of rights and freedoms and they get legal aid if they get into trouble. What is the worst that can happen in Canada? Conditional sentence, suspended sentence, stay of proceedings, charges dropped? Even if they do a couple of years in prison they are seldom deported. We can look at the disgusting track record on that.
A Czechoslovakian sexually assaulted a very good friend of mine in my riding, Joan. Joan is 63 years old. The man served time in prison. It was only after spending three long years with government officials and Corrections Canada that we basically forced them to ship him back to Czechoslovakia. That should not happen.
A person who is a non-citizen and comes into the country has to obey the laws. For goodness' sake, that is all we ask.