Mr. Speaker, I have been sitting here for a good chunk of today listening to the debate on this legislation that will affect so many individuals who look to Canada as a safe refuge in times of severe and immediate difficulty. I have a number of questions which arise in the context of having listened for a few years to people who work in the refugee effort across Canada. They try to help those people who show up on our shores having left their homes under serious duress. They are looking for a place to be safe and hopefully, in their minds, to ultimately call home for themselves and their families.
As I listen to the discussion in the House on this legislation it seems that as a country we are becoming narrower and, if I dare use the word, meaner in terms of how many people we will accept. Given the great mass of land that we occupy as a country and the resources that we have at our disposal, and the wealth that we generate every year, we should be willing and able to share that with the rest of the world. After all, we do live in a global society these days in many ways. People say that to me and as previous governments and the current government have moved to change the refugee system, it has not been to be more open or welcoming and helpful, but to be narrower and more judicious and specific in terms of the way that we allow people into the country and then how we treat them once they are in.
I am wondering if this is in keeping with the history and the values of Canada where accepting people who are in need of a safe haven into our country has been the case. I am concerned that in this bill we are delegating safe countries that we will not allow people to establish refugee status in Canada and countries that we will. We will pick and choose who, having experienced great trouble in their lives, can arrive on our shores at any time .
I am also concerned that we are turning over a lot of the decision making to the discretion of the minister. It is no reflection on any one minister. I am saying that when we turn the decision making on matters of this import to people, particularly people who are at great risk and are vulnerable, we set ourselves up for very difficult realities that could unfold.
I look back to the Irish diaspora. The minister will understand this because he has a great appreciation for and knowledge of our past where refugees are concerned. Many people from Ireland arrived on the shores of Canada many years ago because of the potato famine in that wonderful country. People had to leave by the hundreds of thousands and wound up in Canada in huge numbers. I have visited Grosse-Île, the place where the Irish first set foot in Canada.
I am told that one person was given total discretion as to whether someone was well enough to move on to Montreal or Quebec. Many were not allowed for no real scientific reason, no real health reason. People were checked over. They were asked to open their mouths and the man in charge would determine based on his limited knowledge whether they were suffering from some disease. Literally, because of that thousands and thousands of people died on that island. They were not allowed the opportunity to move further inland, to establish themselves and to make a life for themselves.
A couple of years I was in Toronto, when they unveiled the wonderful work at Ireland Park on the waterfront. Back in the 1800s literally 50,000, 60,000 people showed up in boats to a small community of maybe 25,000 people. Those 25,000 people, knowing that those people were sick and bringing with them all kinds of disease, welcomed them into their community. In welcoming and doing the work that was required to make them feel at home, some lost their lives as well.
That is the story of this country. How many of us could ever forget the effort that happened not long ago with the boat people from Vietnam, when churches particularly, including the church I belonged to at that time, opened their doors and welcomed those people in, found ways to integrate them into our communities, found jobs for them, and got their children into schools?
The minister might have a comment for me at some point, but perhaps not today because we are closing in on 6:30 p.m. here. Is this bill going to take us away from that value system, that history, that story that is and was Canada's where refugees are concerned?