Mr. Speaker, looking at this list of seven additional banned groups, the obvious question that jumps out is, why these? Why, for example, the three groups from Colombia and none of the paramilitary groups that have clearly been responsible for the torture and death of numerous labour leaders in that country?
There are more labour leaders killed in that country by those paramilitary groups that are closely attached to that government and to the military. Why are they not on the list? We have no reason to believe that these groups should be on the list because there is a lack of information. There is inherently a fault in the way this system works.
The resources that we have for the intelligent services are not adequate enough to tell us whether any of these groups should be on the list. There are not enough resources to go after all the other groups that might be terrorist groups. We do not have the ability to do that from a financial standpoint. Yet we go ahead and do this.
We are trying to convince the country that somehow this protects us from terrorism. It is a total falsehood. It is simply a situation where the government is building this smokescreen implying that it is trying to do something about terrorism. It is not moving our battle against terrorism whatsoever. When we look at it from a civil liberties standpoint, there is no basis on which we as parliamentarians can stand here and have any comfort that the civil liberties of this country are being protected. It is just the opposite. We must be very concerned that there may be many injustices coming out of this system.