Mr. Speaker, there is a well-known cartoon that is not very funny. It depicts four people getting off a boat and the person who is second in line says to the person who is third in line while pointing to the person still on the boat, “Watch it, that guy is going to steal your job”. Unfortunately, that seems to be some of the history of immigration in this country.
Many of us are children and grandchildren of immigrants. My grandmother was a mining widow who came over from the old country. My grandfather came over here on short-term work contracts. Why did he come to Canada? He said he was not going to die in a rich man's war. Immigrants were hired in those days because they took the hardest and most dangerous jobs. However, if they spoke out, they often were deported.
When the reunification of families was started back then, that is what built communities. It turned mining camps into towns, which turned into cities. The children of those immigrants ended up as doctors and lawyers. We can look across northern Ontario at the incredible wealth that came out of those immigrant communities because the first generation, in the case of the gold mines, pretty much laid down their lives for the next generation to succeed.
Yet today we are talking about immigration and families in which one spouse is Canadian, a child is born in Canada and there are arbitrary deportations. In a sense these people are being treated as guilty unless they go back to a country of origin, spend thousands of dollars and are dislocated from their families for years on end. That is how they prove their innocence. I would suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong in a system when people can be treated in such a cavalier and arbitrary fashion.
My colleague spoke earlier about the excellent work of the civil service. I certainly agree with him. The immigration teams in northern Ontario are underfunded and we need more of them. They do excellent work, but it is not an issue of civil servants. It is an issue of a government's attitude toward how it deals with one of our greatest resources, which is the immigrants who built this country. Does the member think the government's attitude toward immigration is failing and hurting Canadian families?