Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Kitchener—Waterloo for his intervention in this debate. I want to note my respect for his work in protecting the freedoms that are granted to us through the charter. I know that has been a feature of his career in this place. I pay tribute to him for his work on that.
I also want to pay tribute to him for something that he taught me when we were members of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, when we were dealing with the proposals around the revocation of citizenship. One thing I learned was that this was an attempt to use a lesser process, a change using the Citizenship Act to go after significant criminal activity. The example that kept coming up was how we needed the possibility of revoking citizenship to get at people who were war criminals, who had misrepresented themselves when they came to Canada and who had committed terrible war crimes, that we needed this option to be able to remove them from Canada.
The hon. member showed me how using that kind of lesser process to get at an incredibly serious criminal issue such as war crimes was inappropriate. If we were going to seriously address the problems created by war criminals, we needed to have war crimes legislation that was effective and could be used to prosecute those people here in Canada, not a lesser possibility under the Citizenship Act. That is exactly what the bill we are currently talking about does. It uses a lesser deportation immigration process to go after the significant criminal issues of terrorism, threats to national security and espionage.
I wonder if the hon. member might comment on that. Does he agree that in Bill C-3 we are using a lesser process to go after a very serious criminal matter?