Mr. Speaker, I think the opposition misses the entire point.
The whole point is that parents should not be packing children onto a rusty boat that has been commandeered by a bunch of criminals to drag them across the Pacific Ocean at extreme risk in a smuggling operation, when we know that smuggling operations result in the death of thousands of people around the world every year.
The whole point is to send a message to such clients that they should not sign on the dotted line with the smuggling syndicate. If they want to come to Canada, they should make an application for immigration and come like everyone else. They should not come illegally. They should not come through the dangerous profiteering of a smuggling syndicate.
That is exactly the message that this bill seeks to send. I hope it is received for precisely that reason. If people are in a region of the world where they need refugee protection, they should go within their region to seek protection from the UN or another country. They should not pass through three transit countries and then bypass forty others in order to come to Canada in the most dangerous and illegal way possible.
Yes, this is designed to crack down on the clients of human smuggling, and that is the point of the bill. We have not heard a single alternative from the opposition about how to effectively do that.