Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for his comments.
He spoke at length about the detention of illegal immigrants under the bill. He suggested that it was a violation of rights to have immigration-related detentions. Having the option to detain illegal immigrants has always been an aspect of Canada's immigration law. I must say that the proposed measures in Bill C-4 are far more modest than the current practices, the real practices, applied in the vast majority of the western democracies.
I note for example the United Kingdom, France and other western European countries. The European Union requires almost all asylum seekers to be detained until the determination of their status. The same goes for Australia and the United States. All these countries are acting in accordance with international conventions on human rights that recognize that it is a right, a responsibility of the state, to regulate immigration in a legal and normal fashion.
In closing, I must point out that under the new asylum system, which will come into force next June, asylum seekers will be granted refugee status within three months, the same length of time as those who arrived as part of a human smuggling operation will be released from detention. It is not necessarily a one-year time frame for true refugees. They would be released from detention within three months.