Mr. Speaker, in Windsor West there is a significant immigration element and a number of terrible situations have taken place. People have been exploited quite significantly, and what is sad is that sometimes it is the first experience people have getting assistance when they come to Canada. Unfortunately, sometimes they have gone to these consultants or even lawyers who have charged significant fees, and the lawyers and consultants sometimes contact my office to get assistance in doing the work. It is unacceptable.
I would like to know from my colleague, is he looking at this in terms of creating a penalty system? I hope there are going to be some strong incentives to crack down. In fact, in Windsor the consultants have billboards and different types of advertisements around the immigration centres so that people are attracted to them immediately. I am hoping we are going to look at issues such as that in terms of advertising and the ethics surrounding that.
This is an important opportunity to fix it. A lot of women and children get taken advantage of in the system, as well as men. With English as a second language, people sometimes do not know all the ins and outs of it or about the services they can get from constituency offices. I am lucky to have Karen Boyce, who works pretty well full time for me on immigration matters and can solve some of the problems that some of these consultants are getting away with charging hundreds of dollars for, which unnecessarily sets immigrants back when they first come to Canada, especially when their incomes are very modest, to say the least.
I would like to ask my friend what he would like to do with regard to penalties or having some enforcement mechanism. It needs to be sent as a message to some of the worst of the offenders.