Mr. Speaker, I have to beg your indulgence today. The allergies are getting the upper hand on me. I am hearing things in this place that throw me for a loop, but I am comforted by the words of an amateur politician from many years ago who said, “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half what you see”. That amateur politician was Abraham Lincoln.
In this debate and for the last number of years, we have seen the abuse of the word “terrorist”. The justifications for sacrificing of the rights of Canadians on the altar of terrorism, and fighting the war on terror, are reprehensible. Recently, I was sitting in my home, watching a ship full of Tamils coming to our west coast seeking refuge. I remember the government standing up and saying that terrorists were aboard that vessel. If that was true, the government should have stopped the ship long before it ever got to Canada. What evidence did it have?