Madam Speaker, before answering my NDP colleague's question, I would like to say a couple of things.
First, I just realized that I told my Liberal colleague I was going to express the Bloc Québécois' intention with respect to this bill. I do not think I said we would vote against it. Just to be clear, we will vote against it.
Second, I am a little disappointed because, unlike my Liberal colleague, I did not even get an attempt at a question from the minister. I do not know if I should be flattered or annoyed. We will probably have an opportunity to talk about this again.
As written, the bill has a very broad scope. It is not limited to those submitting genuine applications for refugee status. Does this suggest that the government was in such a hurry to draft the bill that it forgot a few things? Did it do this deliberately to make the bill so unacceptable that the opposition would vote against it? Is this a trap? I do not know.
We have before us a bill that does not deserve our support as parliamentarians. It does not tackle the human trafficking problem. It is easy to give a bill a title saying that it will tackle human trafficking, but if the 36 clauses in the bill have nothing to do with the title, it will not work. Moreover, if most of the clauses do nothing more than suspend individual freedoms and discriminate against certain individuals, the title should actually be “bill to discriminate against refugee claimants arriving by boat”, “bill to suspend certain individual freedoms for certain applicants”, or “bill to circumvent international laws and conventions”.
I would like to read a clause from the bill:
Refugee Travel Document—For the purposes of Article 28 of the Refugee Convention, a designated foreign national [the person discriminated against] whose claim for refugee protection or application for protection is accepted [a refugee under the Geneva convention] is lawfully staying in Canada only if they become a permanent resident [which means waiting five years]...
In other words, instead of dumping clause 28, this bill claims to respect it but then pretends that these people are not residents of Canada. That makes no sense.