Mr. Speaker, I want to start by thanking my NDP colleague from Vancouver East for taking the initiative to bring this debate to the House. I also thank the Speaker for granting that request.
It is a timely issue. We are here to discuss the recent executive order by President Trump essentially banning the travel of individuals who come from seven particular countries explicitly based on their place of birth and implicitly because of their race or religion. This debate is an opportunity to stand up and say that we reject policies that target people based on their race, religion, and place of birth. It is a matter of principle. It is also a matter of pragmatism.
We are living in a challenging time. I was in my grade 12 year when the attack on the World Trade towers occurred. It has been a feature of my adult life that there is a sense of fear about terrorism in the world. There have been many debates over the last 15 or 16 years about how the west should respond to those threats. We are living in a time when people are fearful for their jobs and being able to feed their families. In times when there is that fear, we have certainly had political leaders who have played on and tried to ramp up those fears. As that has increased, what would otherwise be legitimate debates about immigration policy, such as how many people should we admit per year, how many refugees should we bring in, what kind of supports we need to provide for them, what are our economic goals, suddenly take on a different tone.
I think part of why we saw so many people show up in the gallery tonight for this debate, why we saw so many people show up for the women's marches on January 21, the day after President Trump's inauguration, and why we saw so many people come out for the vigils last night in response to the terrible shooting in Quebec on Sunday night, is that people are starting to feel that we are at a moment when we witness government or other political leaders playing on those fears and starting to adopt policies that manifest those fears and ruin lives, it is not enough to stand by and just say, as one of the government members said earlier today on the radio, to keep calm and carry on. People are feeling like that momentum has been building for a long time, as political leaders play on those fears for their own reasons, and we are at the point now where we need to stand up and say that enough is enough.
When it is getting to the point that the new President of the United States feels that he can tell people that they are not allowed in a country that has been a beacon of freedom for the world for a very long time based on where they are from explicitly and implicitly because of their religion or their race, it is not enough just to stand by anymore. We need to say no. We need to make it clear that we do not accept that. That is not the world we want to live in. That is not the world I want for my children. We are moving past the point where we say that this individual is a threat, and we have reasons and intelligence for thinking that we need to say no to this particular person coming across our border, to the point where we are starting to say that because these people are simply part of that class of people and come from a certain part of the world, we will not engage with them anymore. There is something wrong with that.
I am from Manitoba. We have had various waves of immigration. One was a Mennonite wave of immigration that came out of the Soviet Union. They were people who were fleeing that government. If we had had the same approach, because the Soviet Union was an enemy of Canada, those people would not have been allowed in because they were coming from the Soviet Union, yet they were people in that part of the world who were being oppressed and who came to Canada to escape that regime. They agreed with Canada that they did not want to see governments behaving in that way. They did not agree with their leadership and wanted to get out.
We have only to look at that and make the comparison to know that this is a terribly misguided policy. To say no to the very people who are fleeing the kind of leadership that we would want to criticize because it does not promote the kinds of freedoms and peaceful living that we believe are important is a terrible mistake. It is a mistake in principle, but it is also a mistake from the point of view of achieving real safety and security for people of the world. This is a bad policy because it inflames the very kinds of tensions that are leading people to want to make war on us, whether in Canada or the United States. That is the importance of this debate.
We have heard a number of people say that we need to resist having a kind of false debate about having totally open borders on the one hand and totally closed borders on the other hand, and that is true. If we put two straw men up against one another in an argument, we are not going to ever get at the truth, because that is not what straw men are designed to do.
We also need to be able to call out when the debate is going well beyond reasonable differences and is starting to inflame those tensions. I mean, we are living in a time when we have a President of the United States who is quite comfortable having his spokespeople go out and say that they have “alternative facts”. The truth does not really matter. I think that is what people are starting to respond to.
I think what we are seeing in these marches are people saying that they have been putting up with that degradation of public debate for a long time, but what is going on now is just wrong. The United States of America has crossed the line between saying that it is concerned about particular individuals and is profiling them and everything else and is taking action, to saying that if one comes from a certain country, forget it. The United States is saying that it does not care about what one believes or why one is trying to leave a country or would want to come to the United States.
That kind of insensitivity to the truth and to people who want to work with them to build a better world is a surefire way to get exactly the opposite of what the United States wants. That is why this kind of policy is wrong. I think it is why Canadians and people the world over have been so concerned and are saying no.
We have seen examples of this kind of attitude taking over in the past, and the results have never been good. We have a long list of embarrassments in Canada. We have succumbed to that attitude, whether it was when we interned Ukrainian Canadians during the First World War, when we interned Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, or when we said no to Jews after the Second World War who wanted to come and settle here in Canada because they did not feel safe at home. These are embarrassments in our history, and it is painful to watch the United States getting to a point where it is going to have a lot to apologize for.
We hope that one day, when Americans give their heads a shake and get a government that can look at what is happening now, they will say that this is not who or what we are and this is not how to build the kind of world we ultimately want.
In this debate, we have been looking to the government to stand up and join with Canadians in saying that enough is enough. We cannot tolerate this idea of alternative facts. They are starting to create policies that are going to lead to a far more dangerous world and are moving in the wrong direction.
One way the government can do that is by taking some concrete action. That is why we have said that if the Liberals want to show that they are on board with all those Canadians who are saying no to this, they could lift the cap on the private sponsorship of refugees. There are a lot of Canadians who want to sponsor refugees, whether they are coming from the United States, because they are no longer permitted, or from other parts of the world. Let Canadians open their arms and provide that generosity.
It is tough to say to our friends that they have crossed the line, but that is when it is most important to have friends who can say that. Suspending the safe third country agreement is the way to do that. That is the way to send that signal.
Another way we can do that is by fast-tracking some of those refugees who have already been cleared by the U.S. government to come to the United States, a country with the best intelligence in the world, and telling them that they are welcome here.