Madam Speaker, I am dismayed with the member as well. If he is dismayed with me, I can be dismayed right back to him.
I wonder if he engaged any of those constituents in a discussion of what the actual refugee process is in Canada and what has happened in previous occasions when boats have landed on Canadian shores of people who risked their lives to escape persecution, who went through the refugee determination process and who have largely been found to be refugees.
I do not think people in my riding want me to turn my back or us in this place to turn our back on legitimate refugees, on people who have had their lives at risk in their country of origin. No one in my riding wants us to do that. They want us to find a process that tests those cases. They do not want us to have bogus refugees in Canada. I do not want bogus refugees here either. I said that if a person is a bogus refugee then we should have a removal process that works. I said that we have had governments that did not have that process working in the past.
This is not a question about lack of respect for our immigration law. This is a question about respecting the immigration law that we have and respecting the refugee process that we have as well.
We have a good process and we should let it work. We have a process that if the government had appointed the people to do the work, and had not let the refugee system fall into disrepute because of its own partisan considerations, we would have a system that was functioning effectively.
When the Conservatives came to power, the Immigration and Refugee Board had almost eliminated its backlog. That took a lot of hard work and determination by the folks who were involved in that organization. When the Conservatives came to power and refused to reappoint members of the board, it dramatically increased the backlog. That was irresponsible.