Mr. Speaker, I talked earlier about how the government was doing such a huge disservice to those 1.5 million permanent residents who called Canada their home. For a wide variety of reasons, many of them are unable to obtain their citizenship. In many of those cases, it is in part because the government has been so negligent in terms of not processing the citizenship applications in a timely fashion.
However, the way in which this issue has been dealt with puts a wide tarnishing brush that makes all permanent residents look bad in the eyes of many, by classifications like “foreign criminals” and such. Many sentences actually incorporate the word “criminal”, for example drinking and driving for a first-time offender. There are many different examples and I suspect a vast majority of Canadians would not support the fact that everyone who becomes a criminal should be deported from Canada. Would the member share the same concern that I and other members of the Liberal Party have in regard to that fact?