Instead we got mediocrity at best. My friend and colleague from the NDP agrees with that position.
Robert F. Kennedy stated:
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this great generation.
Every member in the House had an opportunity to take an incremental step to augment the legislation, to bend history and bring forth a better piece of legislation.
What I am concerned about is that the party of Pearson and Trudeau has had its traditional position eclipsed by individuals who see immigration as a problem, as opposed to something that is an economic necessity and is something that actually builds a greater Canada, economically and with respect to human diversity. The party has been sucked into the debate where it is easier to talk about the .00001% of immigrants or refugees who have criminal difficulty of some form, as opposed to talking about the fact that the glass is very full.
The tough sounding legislation is not necessarily going to help the Liberals obtain their one per cent target with respect to immigration. Stripping rights of permanent residents and refusing to protect refugees to the degree we should will only make life unfair and difficult, if not unjust, for many people who fall within the 99% range with respect to the immigrants to our great country.
As a point of fact, we heard officials infer and offer in committee that the problem with addressing the criminal aspect of immigration and refugees and removing undesirables was not the bill. They even advocated that the bill would not even enhance the situation. It was the application of the act.
I very much want to help the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. She simply does not have the resources to actually do what she wants to do. In order to cover it up politically, we have a bill that sounds tough but really does not provide an additional tool kit. It merely strips the rights of permanent residents and does not protect refugees to the degree that we should. Moreover, it really taints the traditional position of the Liberal Party of Canada with respect to immigration.
However there were some actual wins in the bill. I would like to point out one. The Progressive Conservative Party tabled a particular amendment, which was passed, and I will refer to it as a great Tory amendment. It specified that both permanent residents and protected persons shall be provided with status documents which allow travel, ID and access to school. I thank my colleagues on all sides of the House who actually supported that amendment tabled in the name of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
I will just touch on other problems with the bill. We know that it strips rights of permanent residents unnecessarily and denies them the fundamental justice of due process. In fact in regard to the protection of refugees, I have two problems. The bill does not provide for an oral appeal in the final application. I will give credit to the government for adding an additional appeal to the process, but it is a mere paper trail. It is not an oral appeal.
We need that extra appeal because of the very fact that we have moved from three adjudicators to one. With a single person making the determination, it is that much more important to have some form of review of what took place in that particular determination. I think this is a point that all members understand, but the bill fails to deliver on that particular aspect. If we want to move faster, because we move from three adjudicators to one, so be it, but we need to have an oral appeal. If we get it wrong and make an error in the determination of a refugee, people die, people get tortured, people get persecuted. Those are the facts we have to endure. I believe the bill falls short in this aspect.
There is another aspect that I believe falls short with respect to refugee protection. We proposed an amendment that was supported by the opposition and was supported in spirit by members of the government side. I want to pay tribute to the member for Winnipeg South Centre, who actually helped provide a compromise amendment. We said that there should be a capacity to make a second appeal for refugee status if the circumstances in the country drastically change or if there is some reason why evidence could not have been deduced properly in the first hearing.
I have a brief example. Convention refugees receive status here in Canada after they were able to escape persecution in their home country. Then things turn around in their home country, or they think so, and they go back. Five or six years later or maybe even a couple of years later they look at it and say the country has gone to hell in a handbasket again, so they want to survive and find refuge. Under this law it is a grey area. I will not say that there is no chance of them getting a second application approved, but it is a bit of a grey area.
Those are the particular problems I have with the bill. We thought the government missed some opportunities to further describe common law partner as meaning same sex and opposite sex, which would have meant a lot to a certain community. We should have embraced that. Also, the head tax is still there and has not been addressed.
As you know, Mr. Speaker, I am sharing my time with the learned member for Dauphin—Swan River, so we can actually have a diversity of opinion.