Mr. Speaker, I too would like to wish you and all my hon. colleagues a happy new year and a productive session of Parliament. I would also like to extend best wishes to my fellow citizens in Vaudreuil-Soulanges
I have been working for three years on this bill and the need for the refugee appeal division. This is very close to my heart because I have seen the number of people who come to our offices.
Like my colleague for Laval, I have one or two people in my riding who work full time on immigrant and refugee matters.
I feel very upset every time we have to submit files to the minister and ask her to review a decision because it is unfair or contains first-instance factual errors that cannot be corrected anywhere in the system.
People currently have a right to go to the Federal Court and ask to be heard. Not many cases are actually heard here, though, and none of them can look into the facts. They can discuss errors in law or whether undue attention was paid to certain matters. However, the court cannot be asked to correct factual mistakes. This legislation is necessary, therefore, because the consequences are very serious. Human tragedies occur because of this weakness in the law.
What is even more ironic is that these legal sections were already passed here in the House and should have taken effect the year following the implementation of the act. There was an announcement back when the Liberals were in power that these legal sections would come into effect one year later, in other words in 2002-03. There would just be a little delay because of a major backlog. However, once the backlog was cleared and these sections came into effect, we would have the appeal division.
The chair of the IRB also did a lot of work. Peter Showler, who was the chair at the time, and the current chair told us that it was a purely political decision. “Purely political” means that someone somewhere is accountable to Canadians and the House for not having established the appeal division.
I would also like to remind the House that there have been several requests for amendments to the Immigration Act in recent years. Since 1978, it has undergone two major overhauls with a view to making it easier to understand. For most of my colleagues in the House, the Immigration Act is very complex. From meeting with citizens who have been through the system, we realize that this act is quite inflexible. Furthermore, we do not have the means to react efficiently.
There is one of a number of reasons why this act carried, and that is the spirit underlying it. It has to do with all the considerations related to security. So instead of talking about integration and the way we want to welcome immigrants and refugees, we have a bill focused on border control and security issues. From this stems a series of processes and forms of recourse that affect a part of the population that to my mind is disproportional. Refugees are people who arrive at our borders from countries in which there are conflicts. These are people seeking our help.
We may have the best of systems in place. I think that the IRB’s intention is to process these files quickly in order to administer justice. But we have to look at the substance of things. It is possible to appeal a parking ticket, for example. Quite unreasonably however in my opinion, it is not possible to appeal a decision affecting the life of a human being. That is what we are talking about today. We are talking about provisions. We are talking about sections of the act that are not implemented and are harming people whose only wish is to make a positive contribution to our society.
I think it is regrettable that the Conservatives are doing an about-face. There were lots of signs allowing us to think that we could be optimistic about the implementation of this appeal division. One need only reread the discussions that were held in 2001. The way in which the appeal division is being proposed now was indeed supported by a Conservative colleague. Last year there was also a political document drafted by the Conservatives that supported implementation of the appeal division.
When the Bloc Québécois introduced a proposal in committee to establish the appeal division, we had the unanimous support of the Conservatives. I hope that by the next time we debate this bill in the House in March, we will have seen a positive turnaround for refugees, for the people who are currently being denied this right.
In the past five years, not one of the ministers of Immigration has kept that promise. Mounting evidence lays the blame squarely at the feet of the government, which shamelessly accepts that fundamental errors can come up anytime and that there is no way to fix them.
Considering that human beings are at risk of being deported to countries that allow torture, and that these errors can cause them great harm, it makes sense for the Canadian Parliament to demand greater care in the application of principles of justice and equality.
As such, today we are asking all of our colleagues to support bringing into force all provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. I believe that the federal government has a moral responsibility to do this. Furthermore, it has the means and resources to do it.
Such a court, made up of experts in protection, would make it possible to correct errors of fact and errors of law at the very beginning of the refugee claims process. This means hiring, at most, 20 people. I think this is important because we are talking about the lives of human beings, about refugees, and we know that our country, Canada and Quebec, was built by and continues to grow because of the contribution of several communities that were welcomed here as refugees. In my opinion, the appeal division must be established immediately.