Mr. Speaker, I am concerned about the changes being considered in Bill C-31 to the humanitarian and compassionate provisions of our refugee laws. It also concerns me that changes will be made to the designated country of origin provisions.
I would like to register my concern with the provision that suggests that the Canadian state will take the children of refugees from their families and take care of them.
We have heard a lot from the other side about the generosity of our refugee and immigration system but this was not always the case in Canada. I will talk a bit about that history in order to inform members of how that law developed and how that generosity developed.
I will now talk about the state taking children away from their families. Not long ago, in 2008, the government apologized to the first nations people because, in the past century, first nations children were separated from their parents and their culture in an attempt to force assimilation with the government complicit in the destruction of an entire generation. The repercussions of those decisions are still being felt. Its waves ripple out into society and are felt deeply. The misery of an entire generation carries a heavy burden upon the next and for many other generations to follow.
The government also apologized for the Chinese head tax, an amazing sum of money the Chinese people had to pay to come to our great country in a calculated bid to keep Chinese people from coming to our shores. When the act of 1885 did not work in the bid to keep Chinese people out, the government, in 1923, imposed the Chinese Immigration Act, known in the Chinese Canadian community as the Chinese exclusion act. The government only repealed that act 24 years later in 1947.
When we look at all the contributions that the Chinese Canadian community has made and how integral it is to our Canadian fabric, we need to scratch our heads in wonder about the discrimination and fear of our forefathers. It is clear that our predecessors, both the Liberals and the Conservatives, who sat in this chamber were wrong at that time. In his great wisdom, Mackenzie King ensured that the act was enforced on Dominion Day. The Chinese Canadian community at the time referred to that day as humiliation day. It is hardly something to be proud of.
When we think of that decision and the great length to which Canada actively discriminated against people of Chinese origin, we know now, with the distance of time, that we were wrong. In 2006, the Prime Minister apologized for that wrong.
Something else from the Mackenzie King-R.B. Bennett era that I would like to talk about today shows that we as legislators sometimes make bad judgments. It relates somewhat to the DCO provisions in Bill C-31.
During the second world war, only 5,000 people of the Jewish faith were admitted to Canada. Between 1930 and 1934, during the period of Bennett and King, nearly 17,000 immigrants were deported for having become a public charge, which was the term of the day. People were deported for union activities or membership in the Communist Party. By 1935, 20,000 people were deported. Some people were deported for something as minor as vagrancy. That is the dark history of previous legislators that we have in this chamber.
During the Great Depression, it was easier for a government to blame the other, to direct discrimination and hatred toward those who spoke too loud, said unpopular things, believed in the wrong God or in no God at all, and people with the wrong colour of skin or people who spoke different languages. It was the failure of Canada to take in the Jewish people after seeing the horror of the death camps that led to the foundations of our current refugee policy.
It was seeing the folly that we had made in the earlier part of the 20th century and our lack of compassion for the other that led us to liberalize, open up our refugee policy and be more accepting of refugees. We are so often wrong when it comes to judging the other and our history here is clear.
During the difficult period of the depression in the 1930s and during the period of World War II, anti-Semitism was rife all over the world. It was rife in Canada as well. During the 1930s, people did not believe that things in Germany were so bad. Germany's economy was being well managed by a capable leader who sometimes seemed intolerant and scary, but he essentially managed the country like a clock. However, we stood in horror when we saw that regime also killed people like clockwork in a systematized manner. It killed six million people. This accumulated discrimination, this rhetoric of discrimination that happened during hard economic times was turned into a killing machine with the state killing people.
Anti-Semitism was rife, but Canada only took 5,000 of those people who were being persecuted at that time. Anti-Semitism was rife then and it still lives today, as does Islamophobia. When I heard the Prime Minister say on national television that the greatest threat to our nation was Islamism, it gave me pause. As someone who firmly believes that history shows us where we have strayed so that we can do better in the present, forgive me for saying that I fear a government when it points the finger at the other and criminalizes the other, especially during economic hard times.
Would Oskar Schindler have been considered a human smuggler? How would the passport forgers of Europe have been considered during the Great War if this legislation had been in place? For the people who illegally made passports for Jewish people to get out of their country, how would they be considered? Would they be considered criminals? We have to ask these questions.
When I hear members opposite talk about people not going through proper channels and jumping the queue, it disturbs me. These are divisive politics so dangerous to the Canadian fabric. It foments fear of the other. They are the reactionary actions of a reactionary government. Let us think upon the dark history that I mentioned, and I have only touched on a couple of points.
I am very proud of my country and I do not want to be misinterpreted. I am a proud Canadian and proud of our great history, but I am also cognizant that we do have darker elements to our history. We have to think about the decisions, the rhetoric and terms that we use for other people coming to our shores. A person fleeing persecution being called a queue jumper disturbs me. We have to think of the dark history and of the decisions being made in this chamber. Let us think about that and ask this question. Who will apologize for the actions of the current government? Of the future legislators who sit in this chamber, who will have to stand to apologize to the victims of this present policy?