Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to hear my hon. colleague, a member of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, mention this $975 fee. This reform did not pop out of a hat. It emerged from a caucus I created around 1997. With a number of my Liberal colleagues on this side of the House, we worked as members of an immigration caucus. We were busy looking, studying and making recommendations to the Minister of Immigration—a Liberal minister at the time—to get this fee that immigrants had to pay if they wanted to come to Canada reduced. So the idea was ours, and if we did not succeed in implementing it, here too it was because the axe fell and we were cut off.
This reform did not come out of thin air or fall from the sky. It emerged because we were going in that direction in the immigration caucus that I created and chaired for several years. I would like to thank the Conservative government, therefore, for doing this. It was about time. I say thanks. But I think too that the Conservative government should thank us for having the idea in the first place.
In regard to what is called the head tax, I have met many descendants of Chinese immigrants from the last century and the beginning of this century. Heaven knows how these immigrants suffered, not just because of the tax they had to pay but also because of the consequences of that tax, namely that there were unable to bring their families here to Canada. These were mostly single men who lived here for decades.
Once again, we were working on this head tax issue. I myself was deeply and very personally involved. We saw how divided the Chinese community was—not about the merits of the case because everybody agreed on that, and we did too, but about how this head tax should be paid. I would like to point out to my hon. colleague across the aisle that the head tax still has not been paid and the Chinese communities across Canada still do not agree on how the Conservative government should compensate them for this tragedy. So despite what my colleague says, their system still has not reimbursed the descendants of these Chinese immigrants.