Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to join in this debate.
Let me say that at the citizenship and immigration committee there has been a real lack of legislation coming to us from the government.
We recently dealt with Bill C-14, the international adoption bill. Even though the government made a lot of hay about recycling a bill that was before the House under the Liberal government, it has held it up for well over a year. We have very few bills coming before us in committee.The committee, nevertheless, has been spending a great deal of time dealing with very serious issues that need to be addressed.
The bill that is before us today is probably the least serious of something like over a dozen issues that we have identified as a priority. We are disappointed that we are essentially dealing with a bill, the political theatrics of which tries to delve into a problem that for the most part has been solved. We are also concerned about the moralistic tone it takes on.
If the government wants to speak in code to its supporters and say it is against strippers, I would suggest that it introduce a bill in the House to amend the Criminal Code and put forward that amendment. It should not try to be moralistic with back door bills to try to solve a problem which, for the most part, has been solved as far as it pertains to strippers being able to come into this country.
I want talk about some of the other issues that we have been dealing with. We have been dealing with undocumented workers. This has been raised in debate. It is a problem that has been before the government and the government has chosen to ignore it.
When we deal with the issue of undocumented workers, instead of 10 visas that might have been granted in 2005 for strippers, exotic dancers coming into the country, we are talking between 200,00 and 500,000 people who are working in the underground economy because of the dysfunctional nature of our current points system that determines who gets to come to Canada.
I say it is dysfunctional. We need people in the building trades. They cannot get in under the points system. There are many other occupations in which we have a shortage right across the country, and those people cannot come to Canada under the points system.
We heard talk about agricultural workers. It was not too long ago, up around Abbotsford, where the previous speaker comes from, where we heard about members of the Indo-Canadian community getting killed, not on the work site but getting to the work site. It shows us to the extent that agricultural foreign workers are not protected.
We heard about the challenges for live-in caregivers, their working conditions, and how they are virtually indentured to work for an employer. We do not have regulators. We do not have inspectors checking out their working conditions.
We hear about employers being charged every once in a while in very spectacular cases, but the reality is that we are not doing enough to ensure that those people are protected.
Getting back to this bill and getting back to my challenge in terms of talking about stopping strippers coming into this country and using the Criminal Code to outlaw stripping, if it is unacceptable for foreign workers, surely it would be unacceptable to Canadian workers. I do not think the government really has addressed that.
Luckily, I have checked the media and this bill received the kind of coverage that it deserved. For the most part, most major media have dealt with the bill as a political bill, a moralistic bill, and really quite a joke.
The Canadian Council for Refugees says the bill does not address the issue of dealing with trafficking in human beings. As a matter of fact, it falls far short. It essentially says:
The government’s focus on “strippers” betrays a moralistic approach. Instead of passing moral judgment, the government should work on ensuring that non-citizens’ rights are protected and that they have the freedom to make informed choices about their own lives.
The bill fails to address the root problem of the existence in Canada of jobs that humiliate and degrade workers. Work permits can only be issued by visa officers after the employer’s job offer has been validated by Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC). Why is such work available in Canada if it humiliates and degrades workers?
If Conservatives really believe what they are trying to do, I say to them to pick up my challenge and come in with a bill that addresses that particular industry.
I mentioned there are many issues we have been dealing with at committee and one of the issues was lost Canadians. I drew particular attention to what is happening to the Mennonites in terms of their derivative citizenship. I find it rather sad that a party opposite which has the member for Abbotsford, who is a Mennonite, the member for Edmonton—Sherwood Park as well as the President of the Treasury Board, that they have not brought the plight of the Mennonites to their caucus. They have not had their government make any changes that are so very necessary.
As I said before, the basis of denying derivative citizenship to Mennonites who move from Canada to Mexico is solely on the fact that these folks, with a church wedding, failed to have a civil wedding. Can members believe that? People get married in a church in Mexico and their marriages are not recognized by the government and we deem their offspring to be born out of wedlock.
That is a terrible smear to put on the Mennonites. I really hope that those members, who I have named, will speak up in their caucus and make this a priority issue because it is having an impact, not just on one, two, three or 10 families, but it is having an impact on thousands of people in this country as well as tens of thousands of people who are being denied their rightful derivative citizenship in Mexico. They have ties to Canada but they are told they were born out of wedlock and therefore, they are not entitled to Canadian citizenship.
The other group we dealt with, a group that is of great concern to me, particularly when the government talks about supporting our troops, was a group of war brides and their children. For those who do not know who they are, they are the wives our Canadian soldiers met overseas in Holland, England or someplace in Europe when they were fighting for this country in the second world war. We had just under 70,000 war brides and their children's citizenship is at risk, particularly if a child was born out of wedlock.
While the government promised that it would bring in amendments, those amendments do not apply to these folks. It is not going to apply to Canadian veterans of the second world war who we have been honouring as a nation because the government does not see it as a priority.
At the citizenship and immigration committee we listened to heart-wrenching stories about how people are fighting for their birthrights because they have found out, after living in this country for over 60 years, that they are not citizens and the government refuses to move on that and to change the legislation.
I spoke in the House about Joe Taylor, the son of a Canadian veteran who went to Europe to defend this country and help defend western civilization. He met his girlfriend in England. They were involved and she became pregnant. When Joe Taylor Senior went to his commanding officer to ask for permission to marry, his commanding officer said no because he was going to France to fight and that Canadians did not want to be responsible for widows.
Mr. Joe Taylor Senior went to France and fought but after the war, luckily, he went back to England, married his wife and brought her and their son to Canada. However, because Joe Taylor Junior was born out of wedlock, the government refuses to recognize his citizenship.
Joe Taylor Junior took the refusal of the government to court and, on September 1 of last year, Justice Luc Martineau ordered the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to give Mr. Joe Taylor his citizenship. The judge said that the ground cited by the government that he was born out of wedlock contravened section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The fact that there was an obscure regulation that a person had to apply to retain citizenship if born out of the country, violated section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is the section on fundamental rights.
What did the government do, the supposed defender of our soldiers? On September 26 the government withdrew the court intervenor program, which the House dealt with.