Madam Speaker, there are too many misconceptions in that speech for me to respond to at this point but I do have two points to make.
First, the member is factually mistaken when she says that the government of Australia has changed its policy with respect to detention of asylum seekers. In fact, the Australian detention policy, under the Labor government, is far more robust than that which we propose in Bill C-49. In fact, it detains all asylum seekers, regardless of whether they were smuggled to Australia or not, or the means through which they arrived, until their claims are processed. We propose to do no such thing. The Australian practice in that regard, frankly, reflects the standard practice in most other democracies that are signatories to the United Nations convention on refugees.
Having said that, what I found most disturbing and, frankly, demagogic in her speech was to draw a completely specious parallel with the tragic and unjust experience of the rejection of the St. Louis and other second world war Jewish refugees. In that case, Canada had a deliberate policy of none is too many, where we deliberately excluded Jewish immigrants as refugees. We had no refugee resettlement program and no asylum system per se.
Under the regime we propose in Bill C-49, people arriving in those circumstances would be able to enter our waters, disembark and have an asylum claim. Under the new system that we adopted this spring, they would almost certainly have a positive protection decision and be out of detention within a matter of a couple of months. To suggest that we would return people to their deaths is irresponsible and demagogic. Canada--