Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by congratulating my colleague, the member for Nepean—Carleton, for his longstanding initiative on this issue that has led to the bill before the House today.
Whether the bill is perfect of not, the credit must go to the member for Nepean--Carleton for keeping the government's attention on the issue. The member made a number of visits to Sierra Leone and saw firsthand the awful conflict, financed by the type of diamond that is basically scrabbled from the earth and then sold on the international markets, both legally and illegally.
Bill C-14 gives me an opportunity that I will take advantage of to tell a story of refugees and something that happened in my riding. It pertains very closely to the issue, although it may take a little time before members appreciate where I am coming from with this story.
In October 2000 in my constituency office I was approached by a gentleman who has a longstanding reputation of bringing refugees into Canada. He operated through an organization called Operation Lifeline. This person wanted me to intercede on behalf of two young men from Angola who had apparently been denied their refugee status. This is a common occurrence in an MP's constituency office. We try to cut through the red tape or try to intercede in compassionate circumstances because all MPs have this direct line to the immigration and refugee authorities to help out in situations like this.
I take this business of writing directly to the minister and asking for her intervention very seriously. I always do due diligence. I sought and obtained the file of the refugee hearing on these two young men before I actually interviewed them.
There was no question in my mind that the Immigration and Refugee Board was absolutely proper in its decision to reject the application of these two young men who had come in and sought refugee status at Niagara Falls. The description that they gave at the board hearing was full of contradictions. Basically their story was that they were two young men whose father worked as a chauffeur for the government in Angola. According to them, their father had fallen out of favour and had disappeared and been mysteriously shot. Suddenly, a few days afterwards, some unknown person, a benefactor, arranged for the two young men to be smuggled out of Angola and flown to Zimbabwe, from there to Rome, from Rome to Switzerland, from Switzerland to New York, from New York to Buffalo. This is quite a trip.
As the refugee board members queried them, it turned out that the young men could provide no detail. In fact, most of their information was very contradictory. Apparently, they said that when their father disappeared their mother contacted government officials. Of course that did not make sense if the government was supposed to be responsible for killing the father, and so the story went on. I had serious reservations about these two young men right at the outset.
Subsequently, just at about the time the election was called, these two young men came in with their sponsor. Their sponsor explained that they had been in the country for some nine months and they were in a local high school in grade 11 where they had, somewhat miraculously in my mind, acquired fluency in English. Angola of course is Portuguese speaking. These two young men were suddenly so fluent in English that they could obtain very high marks in grade 11, which is certainly very impressive.
He explained that various schools and organizations were very much in support of my interceding on behalf of these two young men with the minister, and so I talked with them. I had the same experience as the refugee board. They spoke but there were all kinds of inconsistencies in their story. One of the biggest inconsistencies was they could not tell me who financed their trip from Angola to Zimbabwe to Rome to Switzerland to New York and to Buffalo. They had no idea. They could not name the people who were their benefactors.
There are two problems of which we have to be aware. One is the fact that it costs a lot of money to go on the kind of particular trip we are talking about. These two young men were supposed to be the sons of a lowly chauffeur for the government of Angola. Second, is the fact that Angola is notorious for the exportation of conflict diamonds. Sierra Leone and Angola share two things in common: they are failed states with perpetual civil wars and those ugly civil wars are fueled by conflict diamonds. What is basically happening is the illicit scrabbling of diamonds out of the soil and those diamonds are usually smuggled around the world where they wind up in the hands of legitimate companies.
As has been referred to here several times, Zimbabwe of all countries is another state that very obviously is actively engaged in black market and contraband trades. These two young men went first to Zimbabwe then to Rome and then to Switzerland, the centre of the world trade in diamonds, and then on to New York and Buffalo. In my view, it was reasonable to suspect that these two young men were likely either couriers for conflict diamonds or their passage had been financed by conflict diamonds. I could hardly ask the minister to give them a minister's certificate allowing them to stay in the country and bypass the decision of the refugee board.
Where the story gets really awkward is the fact that this occurred at the beginning of the last election. One cannot imagine what happened. First, the people sponsoring these two boys made it very clear to me. They said that if I wrote to the minister and asked that these boys be allowed to stay, the minister would grant that request. Second, they indicated they would work against me in an election campaign if I did not write the minister.
What subsequently happened, and I have it here and I am sorry I cannot display it, but these individuals were good to their word. I was flooded with about 300 letters and e-mails as they went to every church and school in my riding. They went everywhere. When I campaigned door to door, people asked me what I was doing about these two young men. They asked me why I would not agree to let them stay in the country.
I want Canadians to know that MPs can resist that kind of pressure. I do not know how many votes I lost in the last election, but in the end those two young men were deported. I do not know what happened to them subsequently. All I know is that there was a genuine, reasonable doubt of the bona fides of these two young men. It would have been totally irresponsible for me, to merely guarantee my re-election, to have written the minister and ask that they stay in the country.
What does this all have to do with conflict diamonds? It has to do with the fact that these diamonds are not only used to finance conflicts abroad. They are also used to finance the movement of all kinds of illicit peoples around the world. This is the kind of payment that people smugglers take. This is the kind of payment that terrorists receive.
The member for Nepean--Carleton is very right to have zeroed in on this problem, not just because of the conflicts in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola, but also because conflict diamonds are financing terrorism around the world. They are financing people smuggling. It has to be stopped.
Bill C-14 is a very good bill because it basically requires legitimate diamond traders to issue or receive diamonds by means of a certificate of authenticity or source which says that the diamonds have been bought and purchased through legitimate channels and are not ultimately diamonds that have been obtained in countries like Angola or Sierra Leone illicitly.
I will not go through the bill in detail but I would like to draw attention to one small aspect of the bill just in case the people watching have not noticed it. That is subclause 9(2)(c) which says in effect that any diamonds which are possibly conflict diamonds and which are in the country now are exempt from this bill provided that the person who possesses them at the time this bill comes into force can show documentation on how they obtained them. In other words, if a legitimate diamond trader has diamonds that he or she knows are probably originally conflict diamonds which have been brought into the country illegally, he or she can declare this and be exempt from the impact of the bill. In other words, he or she will be able to keep the diamonds and trade them.
Here is the kicker. If, on the other hand, any trader in the country has received smuggled conflict diamonds, then he or she will not be able to present the evidence that these diamonds are indeed legitimately acquired. In other words, the beautiful trap that this bill sets is that all conflict diamonds that are in the country by way of smuggling will be trapped in the country and the only way they can be used is by smuggling them out of the country into another country. Of course I do not need to tell members that smuggling has a whole other series of penalties under the laws of Canada, with all kinds of delightful fines and terms of imprisonment. Of course this is what we want because in the end what this whole question of conflict diamonds really amounts to is the financing of death. It has to stop.
This bill takes a huge step forward. It is going forward in concert with many countries around the world. I regret to say that Canada is not actually leading this; it is among many others. However one thing that no one can take away from anyone in this place is the fact that the member for Nepean—Carleton initiated this move in the House with his private member's bill, which has now become a very fine piece of government legislation.
