Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to speak today to this bill at second reading.
The concerns of Canadians have been well expressed by members of the Conservative government. They have echoed the concerns that I have heard from many people in my riding and across the country as people have raised concerns about people arriving on Canada's shores in very vulnerable conditions.
Obviously the arrival this summer of the Sun Sea, carrying almost 500 Tamil refugee claimants from Sri Lanka, raised concerns. It raised concerns across the political spectrum. Those on the more left side of spectrum felt that someone was taking advantage of refugee claimants by charging exorbitant amounts of money and placing their very lives in danger for a second or third time as they were placed on vessels that were not seaworthy. They were designed to actually travel between Sri Lanka and India but made an across-the-ocean voyage to Canada.
There was also a concern that this was the second ship. The previous ship, the Ocean Lady, also came to the shores of Canada with refugee claimants on it. That began to raise concerns in Canada that something was going wrong, that something was out of control.
I congratulate the government for resisting some of the urges that some Canadians had to actually stop the ships mid-course in the ocean. The government made a wise decision, actually followed the law on this and exercised great concern for the administration of justice and for the law.
However, that began a discussion around the sort of law that Canadians wanted. Canadians were expressing concern, even outrage and, at times, misunderstanding about what was going on. There was a misunderstanding about immigration versus refugee law. I know that all hon. members in this chamber know that there is a difference between immigrants and refugees and that there is a further difference between refugee claimants and refugees themselves, or convention refugees as declared. That discussion has been sort of muddied by government ministers who have taken the opportunities, perhaps unwittingly, to muddy the waters for Canadians. I wanted to spend a few minutes clarifying what we are talking about here.
First, we are talking about people who are not immigrants, who have not stood in queues up to six or seven years, as people who have come to Canada often have, and who are not coming for economic reasons or as part of family sponsorship or family reunification programs. These are also not convention refugees who have been sponsored by the government, by the church or by other groups into Canada. We know that.
These are vulnerable individuals whose lives may have been at risk and who are seeking asylum in a country that has honoured asylum seekers with fair and just processes for decades. That is who these people are.
We all know that Sri Lanka has come through over two decades of civil war that has had atrocities on all sides. After every war, there are people whose lives continue to be at risk and some of them take desperate measures. That is what has happened with the two most recent vessels. They have been loaded with people who have claimed that their lives are in danger and they are seeking asylum in Canada.
Canada has a long history of having signed onto international conventions and treaties that dictate how we will deal with those asylum seekers. They are given fair and transparent judicial processes. They are allowed to be heard on a case-by-case refugee determination process.
As the hon. member from the New Democrat caucus said earlier, we have a process whereby the refugee determination has been too slow in the past but we were able to reach an accord in this House called Bill C-11 which changes some of those refugee determination processes and are meant to speed them up.
My fear is that we already have the Minister of Public Safety expressing a lack of confidence in the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism and his fine work on Bill C-11. We on this side of the House were kind of confused when we listened to the discussions on what sort of a law would deal with this problem of smugglers.
Let there be no doubt that no one on this side of the House, nor, I believe, on the other side of the House, condones human smuggling. I will give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I do not believe anyone wants to put a vulnerable person at a greater vulnerable level. We do not want people making money off this exercise. We do not want to risk lives a second or third time. We want to ensure a fair and just immigration system, including a refugee determination system, that works. Everyone in the House agrees on that.
However, the Minister of Public Safety, who presented this legislation that does not seem to honour those things which we as Canadians have stood up for decades for, has started to shift the language on this. We hear members, although I think they are making an honest mistake, talking about queue-jumping. There are no quotas and no queues when it comes to refugee determination. We have no standards that we follow.
As a western country and as a democracy, we believe in the rule of law. Every person who comes to this country, whether by car, by foot, by canoe, by sea vessel, by airplane, by helicopter, no matter how they arrive or in what numbers they arrive, one, two or three people, whether they are children, youth, adults or seniors, every person is allowed a fair refugee determination process.
Is that system working? Obviously it is not. We introduced Bill C-11 because there were problems and it was taking too long. However, I believe some of those problems came from the fact that the government strangled the system by starving it of resources. The previous Liberal government left 15,000 people in that system and that number has now gone up to 60,000 people. This is a problem. We are hoping that Bill C-11 and the attendant resources that are required will streamline the process to ensure fairness and transparency and ensure those who are not bona fide refugees are sent home in a timely manner. We agree with that.
On this side of the House, we do not believe there are two kinds of Canadians: new Canadians and old Canadians. We are not surprised, as I keep hearing from my hon. colleagues across the aisle, that new Canadians have this concern too. We are all Canadians, whether we have been here one generation, two generations or three generations. We want to ensure that the system of justice, the system of refugee determination and the immigration system are fair, transparent and just, and we will work for that.
This particular legislation does raise some concerns for me in very specific ways. We absolutely want to tackle the problem of human smuggling. Would this bill actually do that or are there already, as previous members have said, pieces of legislation in place with life sentences if someone is actually caught doing this? Is there anything new in this legislation that would actually ensure that those who are committing the heinous act of smuggling human beings for profit into this country will be caught and punished? It is simply not in this legislation. There are too many problems.
Bill C-49 is not an effective piece of legislation nor is it a good piece of legislation. The government will need to find ways to improve this legislation to ensure that it actually addresses the real problem of human smuggling.
This bill would actually punish refugee claimants even after they have gone through a process of determination. It would create two kinds of refugees by splitting them into two classes, which is simply not right. We do not do that in Canada.
The government thinks that by somehow deterring refugees from seeking a safe way out of their country, they will not try to do this. Every piece of research has said that the laws of the land that people are going to do not determine whether or not they will try to get there. They are simply trying to get away from the threat against their life. That is the problem with this legislation. It is as though the government thinks, for example, that the Tamils living in Sri Lanka will look at this and decide not to get on the ship because of the things that could possibly happen to them.
Whatever can happen in Canada will never be as bad as what goes on for them in camps, in bushes, on beaches and in places where they try to eke out their very survival. Nothing that we can do will stop them from trying to get to safety. That is the human instinct. That is what is in the core of our bodies, our spirits. It is in our DNA. We want to survive.
That means for this to be effective, we have to do two or three different things. We have to look at truly effective ways to stop the smugglers. Yes, we want strong deterrents against the smugglers. Yes, we want to be assured that smugglers will face at least mandatory minimum sentences, with which I do not normally agree. However, this is such a horrible crime that we should look at that. Let us open our door to dealing with smugglers that way.
However, we have to go to the source of the problem. Once we have dealt with that, we have to look at human beings as human beings. The reality is these vulnerable human beings are vulnerable because of the failures of a particular national government or because of the international community's misunderstanding or failure to act to protect them.
The war has ended in Sri Lanka, but the violence and danger continues. The lives of people continue to be at risk. Canada is failing, the government is failing to ensure that we are in Sri Lanka, offering a democratic, institutional way of responding to how to live with a linguistic and religious minority in their midst and how to build civil society to protect minorities. Canada has not done that. We have abdicated our responsibility internationally.
We have also failed to work with the United Nations and other countries in refugee determination in Sri Lanka, in Thailand and in places where Tamils have sought refuge. We have to ensure that the United Nations has the resources, the staff, the personnel and the ability to get into a country and ensure that refugees are determined there.
Therefore, we have to stop the problem at the source. We have to stop it by building international human rights, by working co-operatively with other countries, by engaging internationally, by restoring our reputation, which has been so greatly damaged in the last four years by the government. We have to find a way to involve ourselves in these countries in real and meaningful ways and stop our tokenism.
The second thing we have to do is beef up the United Nations to ensure that we work in a partnership to do refugee determination there.
There are 43 million forcibly displaced persons in the world, and it is a horrible life. People seeking asylum are potential victims. They are not worthy of being further victimized in any way, as I believe the legislation may be doing. We have to find a way to fix this. We have to take out some of the basic problems in the legislation.
The question I continue to have is on these so-called irregular events. On some kind of an irregular immigration of inter-migration event, the minister seems to have too much power to designate. It seems to be far too open and far too flexible. This is one of the things at which the House has to look. We have to understand where we are then from that point on discriminating and causing two classes of refugee claimants and then, further, once determined, two classes of refugees. This law cannot discriminate against people because of where they have come from or how they have come to Canada. We have to absolutely take a step back and take a second look at the legislation.
Arbitrary detention, as the hon. member had said earlier, has not worked in Australia. Not only has civil society risen up against it, but every group that looks at this problem says that it is not working. It is not a deterrent. It is simply an infringement upon human rights.
Bill C-49 makes no exceptions for women who may be pregnant or children who arrive on the shores of our land. We have to look at this as a protection for the most vulnerable, including women and children.
The Supreme Court of Canada said that we would have to review lengthy periods of detention under the charter. Bill C-49 has to deal exactly with that. Arbitrary detention is already prohibited under international law, notably by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Bill C-49 is dangerously close to denying any right of equal access to justice. It is blocking a sense of integration as well. That is where I really want to go in these last few minutes.
Once refugees have been determined to be refugees, they then become part of Canadian society. They are landed here and they begin to integrate into our society. They begin to learn the language and seek employment. They build families, they are part of neighbourhoods and they are part of communities. They are our friends. They are part of the structure and the very fabric of Canada.
Bill C-49 breaks that down. It blocks family reunification. It denies the right to travel. It does not look at the fact that the world changes. Someone may be determined a refugee, but that country's regime may change drastically and the conditions in that country may change.The legislation does not give the required flexibility to ensure that the people who integrate into our society are part of who we are, part of where we need to go, part of what we need to do.
The mere suspicion that something is wrong is not good enough for a minister to deny human rights. A fair and just country is what we are building. It is what we continue to work on and all legislation needs to be examined from that vantage point. Who is being hurt? Who is being helped? How is our country being built?
This legislation seems shy on actually dealing with the problem of human smuggling and heavy-handed when it comes to the victims of those smugglers. This is no time for Canada to re-victimize vulnerable people. This is no time for Canada to create two classes of refugees. This is no time for Canada to break Canada apart into different kinds of people. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. A refugee is a refugee is a refugee. A claimant is a claimant is a claimant. Canada is built on that. It is built on the rule of law that ensures that justice and transparency are built into the fabric of every piece of law that we pass in the House.
Canada has made mistakes when boats have landed on our shores before. I hope I do not need to remind a single person in the House of 1939 when the Government of Canada made a mistake. We turned back the S.S. St. Louis and we let hundreds of people go back to a country where their lives were very much at risk and their safety was at stake. This was not the first time it had happened.
In 1939 the S.S. St. Louis, filled with hundreds of refugees fleeing from the Nazis, sought asylum in Canada. At that time, the government sought to discredit them as well and warned that if the S.S. St. Louis were permitted to dock, more Jews in Europe might follow. Would that they had. Would that we had opened up our eyes, our minds and our hearts because we could have saved more lives.
We had not learned the lesson in 1914 from the Komagata Maru. We did not learn it in 1939. We are learning slowly. This legislation dangerously turns back the clock on these issues.
Canada needs to remember that we are a place of justice and fairness. We will punish the smugglers strongly. We will learn to accept the refugee claimants and give them justice.
