Mr. Speaker, no one has argued that there is no need to check to see if there are terrorists or known terrorists who might be on a list coming in by air, rail, or however that may be. No one has argued that point. What we have argued is the fact that the police, in some cases, or the ministers want a blank cheque to find information about everyone who is on there. Then we are going to take that list and run it against a list of who might be wanted here, there and everywhere.
They are not using their list to identify terrorists but they are taking the list of passengers and trying to pick and choose who they want. There is also the problem that they want to keep this information for a period of time to see if there are any patterns out there. That is not going out there looking just for terrorists.
There is a real concern. Actually it hit me this morning how everyone finds it so important that we should know the country of birth because it would allow us to know that there are going to be problems with people coming from certain countries. That is the impression that is given, that somehow people coming from these countries are all going to be a problem.
I wonder if the authorities would have checked the country of birth of John Lindh, the American who was part of that terrorist group? Did they say people born in the U.S. are going to be part of the terrorist group? We do not hear a whole lot about that. The bottom line is, a terrorist can be anyone in any country. We cannot target specific groups of people and attack them and blame them for terrorism.
I thought we had gone beyond that. It just is not okay. We have gone beyond treating black people and aboriginals as if they were all crooks at one time. I thought we had gone beyond that. Now we are doing it again as a nation by targeting a specific group of people, and it is not acceptable. We obviously have not learned from our mistakes and it is time that we did.