Mr. Speaker, a lot of things have led to this moment, time and place where we have seen the American border thickening. I would point back to one of the most significant changing points. In 2002, I was at the Canadian embassy in Washington and the ambassador was there. We had just learned that the United States was going to bring in the NSEERS program, which was a registry process to fingerprint and photograph non-Canadian entries from Canada, but also Canadian entries from a series of countries that they considered not secure or not worthy of actual proper processing.
Ironically we have citizens from some of those countries who have been here in Canada for 30 years and in my community where doctors and nurses go into the United States every single day and save the lives of Americans and are part of their vibrant community.
Sadly enough, the prime minister at that time never objected to that. Since then, the US-VISIT program has been instituted and we have eroded those relationships. To me, it goes back as far as that. It hurts their society, but also, this country has to speak from one voice, that every single Canadian is vetted and they should be treated the same. Until we do that, we will still have problems.