Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to engage in this particular debate.
I want to pay tribute, first of all, to all those members of Parliament who have already intervened. Some of them were critics of mine when I was the minister of immigration. I know that the current Minister of Immigrationwill relish the thought of having a former minister make some submissions. He will probably say that nothing has changed.
However, people have made some pretty insightful suggestions. The people who come to mind, of course, are the member for Laval—Les Îles, the member for Burnaby—Douglas, who just spoke, the member for Vaudreuil-Soulanges, who has yet to speak but who was an ardent critic of mine and of immigration, and of course, all other members of the Liberal Party who used to be the greatest critics of the system and the substance of the system, as we have gone through. I doubt that there is another topic, another department, that has more experts in this House than this one.
I am going to add my voice, humble though it may be, on this issue, simply because I agree with the member for Papineau, our critic on this matter, that the bill should go forward to committee, where it will get the appropriate scrutiny from all those people who have a wealth of experience and expertise. That will give the Canadian public a feeling of comfort that what they are getting is a bill that has really received the scrutiny of this House and Parliament.
I know that the Minister of Immigration has counted on the support of members of Parliament from the official opposition to get some of his issues through the House, and I know that he looks forward to continuing that kind of relationship. I am sure that other members on this side of the House will be only too happy to collaborate in a fashion that will produce a desired outcome.
Many of us here have a tendency to be academic or expert on some things, because that is the way we are in this House. We stand here and we pontificate on things.
I would like to give members a bit of a human element.
I have a young grandson. He is probably watching right now. If he is, I want to be able to point to him. I do not know if he is or not. That little boy, who is going to turn five tomorrow—his name is Stefano—had the good fortune of having, and still has, four grandparents who were born abroad. Each and every one of those four had the kind of difficulties we constantly debate in this House with respect to immigration. Their issues were, and continue to be for those who are like them, issues not of process but of substance. They want to know that the current government, the Government of Canada, actually seeks them out and wants them to come here.
Stefano and his brother--I think they are watching this right now; I hope they are, because I want to say happy birthday to Stefano--have the good fortune of having grandparents who had the good fortune of being able to come to this country to be part of the building of everybody's dream. That is what immigration is. It is not a process. It is about the realization of an ambition and a dream that individuals and their families have for fashioning a future not just for themselves but in co-operation with and in collaboration with a collective in another place, a place that they will turn into their home. Canada has become a home for so many people from so many other places.
I am one of them. I had the good fortune of having parents who had the wisdom to move. They wanted to move. It was a challenge for them. They had to deal with consultants. I did not know. They did not call them consultants then. It was just somebody who gave them a hand who said , “If you go to the Canadian Embassy, you might be able to go to Canada, because they want people. They want people who are going to build Canada. They want people who want to become part of a country that is going to be something more than what we have here, no matter where 'here' is.” Along the way, there were people who took advantage of their desire to have a better life for them and their kids.
We do not want people to take advantage of those who want to come and build this country. The reason we do not want that is not because we have compassion for people in need. It is not because we feel sorry for those who are victims of the unscrupulous. It is not because we think it is wrong for someone to take advantage of another. It is because we think that is inconsistent with those values that make us Canadian.
We do not want people's first experience with this country to be one where they come into contact with those who profess to be expert on how to enter this country and make those people pay dearly to come here.
We do not want our offices to turn into nothing more than processing centres for those who would sell expertise whether real or not as the one expression of Canada that they must then overcome when they come here.
I said a few moments ago that I agree with my colleagues that the bill should go forward and let the committee deal with this. I know that the minister will be happy to hear this.
However, I look at the bill and we have now had four and a half years of a government, some of whose members had become the same kind of experts that I talked about a moment ago. If there was a problem in the process, we have had this amount of time to actually deal with correcting the measures in process. This House cannot simply be one that is dedicated to process. This House has to be representative of the collective ambition of the Canadian public for its country.
For all those who were born here or who came here, we used to call them naturalized Canadians, we have evolved. We do not call them that any more. For all those who were born Canadians and those who have become Canadians, they are all part of that collective ambition that wants a place in the world in which all Canadians can feel they have a portion, a stake, a share in the country that everybody would like to emulate or be a part of.
We need to discuss in this House what that immigration plan is for Canada, how it fits in with the industrial strategy, the social strategy, the political strategy of a country that is evolving, that is developing, that is still becoming. It is not just being. It is not just there. Every day brings a new challenge. Every day brings a new goal. Every day brings a new struggle for people to identify with, to overcome and then to reap the satisfactions associated with saying that we have accomplished something for ourselves and with and for our neighbours.
The bill says that we are going to take care of those people who abuse the system by giving bad advice.
It seems to me that a former minister, the Hon. Elinor Caplan, used to be criticized a lot by her own caucus colleagues when we were on that side of the House some 12 years ago. She talked about this precise matter. She said, “We have to stop those snakeheads, those human smugglers from abusing people abroad and from abusing relatives of those people here in Canada. I am going to travel abroad. I am going to go to Beijing”. That was becoming a big source area for many of our immigrants. She said, “I am going to go to other places, like India and the Philippines, because that is where most of the people are coming from. I am going to see if I can get the co-operation of those governments in order to pursue those who are so unscrupulous that they would take advantage of their people”.
Keep in mind this is about taking advantage of people who would become part of Canada but who are not yet a part of Canada. This is about dealing with people who would try to abuse or take undue advantage of a Canadian system in order to abuse people who are outside our borders even more.
I noted that the minister agreed with that, in essence, in response to a question from my colleague from Laval—Les Îles. He said that we have to co-operate with foreign authorities in order to pursue and prosecute those who take undue advantage of others, even if it appears to be more acceptable in other places than it does here, because, of course, we have the rule of law. It is one of the values that draws people to this place. In other places that particular value is less ingrained and so people work within different parameters.
We say we are going to get rid of unscrupulous consultants. Some of my predecessors and some of the current minister's predecessors tried the same thing. One of the measures undertaken at the time was to provide educational material to those who would have become consultants, in other words, have them work with the department and the legal societies in order to come up with a body of expertise that would be acceptable to our functionaries abroad and in Canada.
We even went so far as to give them their own regulatory authority. Do you know what that means, Mr. Speaker? I know you relish this sort of thing. What happens is governments say that they have to put together an organization, but people are mature enough, educated enough and responsible enough to make the decisions to make that organization function properly, in other words, for their members but also for the people that they would serve.
Why do we say that? We say that because there is a basic principle of law in all western societies that is called caveat emptor, buyer beware. But we try to make sure that all the vendors adhere to a particular policy, a particular set of standards that make us proud but reinforce as well all of the values that we build as a society as we invite more and more people, like Stefano's grandparents, to come to this country and to build it. That is what we do.
We established a set of laws to make sure that nobody contravenes Canadian legislation, but we give them regulatory authority so that they can govern themselves. That is what they wanted and that is what we gave them. We worked with them.
The law societies, of course, were not completely sure that they wanted to have the consultants in place. However, there is a fine line between accepting the criticism as valid from one group against the other. It must be recognized there is a competitive spirit between the two of them. What they need to do is look at that market. I think last year some 230,000 people were given their permanent residency to this country and there were tens of thousands more who had to go to those people for the expertise to develop their applications for other types of visas. One can understand there is a commercial issue here.
I listened to the debate this morning on Bill C-17. I listened to it yesterday as well. There are those who are still following the debate. I see there are some very hardy folks in the gallery and my compliments to them for trying to fashion out what it is that parliamentarians do when they talk about building laws that fashion this country and give us a Canadian identity. My compliments to them for spending at least a few minutes to hear what it is that we have to say.
Bill C-17 talked about building a new regulatory framework in order to make sure that we could fight off the terrorists that we see everywhere. As one member of the NDP from Vancouver indicated, it was in essence beginning to limit the civil liberties in order to fight off the perceived evil that is out there. The Minister of Justice said yesterday that it was not all that bad because it is the law the Liberals had when they were in government after 9/11 and which lapsed in 2007.
If one wants to accept there was a crisis that created a need for legislation, that crisis must have lapsed by 2007 because there was a sunset clause built into the bill. It is now three years later. One is tempted to ask what the crisis is. The crisis is that the government needed to give an impression that notwithstanding all the other economic and social difficulties in this country, its priority would be the creation of a psychological environment that says we are under threat and these tough guys are going to put in legislation that lapsed some three years ago.
It might offend some people who think that civil liberties should be maintained, but after the $1.2 billion boondoggle at the G20 summit and the turning of Toronto into an armed fortress for the sake of a 72 hour photo op, the Canadian public is right to be skeptical about whether this is the message to have.
Some might ask what that has to do with this bill. For those people who are still watching, they should think about what the bill says. It is no longer about the process that I talked about a moment ago. This is Bill C-35, which means there has only been 34 other bills presented since the government got elected in 2008. Imagine that. For all of that time we have been dealing with legislation that did not come from the government. Where is the government's vision of Canada? However, the title of the bill is the cracking down on crooked consultants act.
What are we doing now? We are trying to consolidate all of the issues associated with process under the direction of the Minister of Immigration .
I know that the minister's heart is in the right place when he wants to talk about reforming the entire system, but please, this sort of thing makes it absolutely difficult to take the government's initiative all that seriously. It brings all of those functionaries who are outside the bureaucracy into an ambience where they are responsible to the Minister of Immigration for the kind of livelihood they earn. What is even worse is it tells everybody they represent that the ultimate person, the ultimate individual that controls what happens with their applications is actually the Minister of Immigration.
How can we have any kind of confidence in the independence of representation when everything they do is dependent upon the Minister of Immigration? That is like going to a different set of bureaucrats. That is a little like asking CRA officials to authorize who will fill out our income tax forms, and if we want to do it ourselves, we really cannot.
We need to make the process more fine tuned. But the biggest issue here, and I hope that my colleagues will keep this in mind, is what is it that the government of the day proposes for immigration other than nipping and tucking at some of the processes and procedures that have already been nipped and tucked to death?