Mr. Speaker, this will probably be one of the last times I rise to speak in this building, as we are moving to West Block in the new year. Like many fellow members, I have been reflecting on this place, its beauty and history. I do not know the route the Usher of the Black Rod will take from the new chamber to the Senate, but it will be interesting to see how the logistics and details are worked out.
That said, I am here today to talk about Bill C-21. I will start by explaining, for those who are not aware, what this bill would do. Essentially, it would allow for the exchange of biographical information between the U.S. and Canada. This will be important for a number of reasons.
When the bill was tabled in June 2016, we were co-operating with the United States in trying to make it easier for goods, services and people to flow across the border. One of the problems is that we often only have information about when Canadians leave the country, not on when they return. It is important to know how many days Canadians spend outside the country, because a lot of the benefits people qualify for are dependent on that time and a lot of the immigration requirements for residency depend on being in Canada for a required amount of time and not outside the country for too long.
With that in mind, Bill C-21 would allow the kind of data exchange that would be useful to keep track of these kinds of things. Some people will embrace that, but of course there are always those who may not be as enthusiastic. A lot of Canadians like to spend their winters in the south, in Florida, etc. They go for six months. People in my town, which is a border town, also go to the U.S. for the day to shop or have a meal or whatever, so all of those days would count as days away from Canada.
We are concerned that some of those people may find themselves losing the benefits they have, or having difficulty receiving them. There are also people who accidentally spend too much time out of the country for their residency requirements for their immigration and permanent resident cards. That may be of some concern as well.
Most stakeholders are very supportive of sharing the information and having a closer relationship with the United States of America, but an amendment to the bill was proposed by the Privacy Commissioner. Canadians are always concerned about the privacy of their information, and in this case the amendment stipulates that the data not be retained for more than 15 years. I am supportive of the bill and of that amendment.
I will look to some of the issues the government has not addressed. When it comes to the border, there are a number of really critical issues, and this bill addresses just a small portion of them. This is a bit disappointing, because there are a couple of larger issues the government has dropped the ball on, to be frank.
The first one has to do with the border and the legalization of marijuana. Liberals ran on a platform of legalizing it. They know it is still illegal at the federal level in the United States, so it should not have been a surprise to them that there were confrontations about that. Although many of the states along the border between the U.S. and Canada are either in the process of legalizing it or have already legalized it, the borders are controlled federally, so there should have been some negotiation between the United States and Canada for some kind of understanding.
That was not done, and there have been incidents across the country where travelling Canadians are being turned back at the border and not being allowed to go into the U.S. In one case, a gentleman was given a lifetime ban. He was a worker in the cannabis industry on his way to a cannabis convention in Las Vegas. He was given a lifetime ban, and the people travelling with him were turned back and delayed.
Therefore, there is something still to be done there, and that is a critical issue for everyone who lives in a border town and for people who would be crossing back and forth.
The other subject that comes to mind has been touched on quite often during the debate today. That is the illegal immigration that we are seeing in Manitoba and Quebec, mainly at Roxham Road. We have had 38,000 individuals come over from upper-state New York and cross into our country. The problem with this is not just the huge cost that is related to feeding and housing them and providing medical services and their legal services. In most cases they are crossing into those provinces because they will provide those services. This is a huge cost. We are hearing it is a $1.1-billion cost to taxpayers for people whom Canadians did not choose to have come to the country.
Even more alarming than that are the statistics associated with the people who are coming, where 60% of them already have legal status in the U.S. so they are actually not eligible to claim asylum. For those who have had their claims processed, 70% to 80% of them are having their claims rejected but only a handful have been deported from the country. Therefore, people who do not have a valid claim and have already been processed are still here in Canada and we are continuing to have to pay to support them. I do not think that is right.
Even more alarming is that the queue is now supposedly so long that it will take three to four years to finish processing the people who have already come across, so that will escalate those costs again and again. It is not just the federal costs we are talking about. There are costs to the provinces: $200 million in Ontario; $300 million in Quebec. There are costs for the municipalities. From Toronto to London in my province, all of the social services and shelters for the homeless are being taken up by illegal asylum seekers.
This is an issue that needs to be dealt with, and it is a lack of leadership on the part of the Prime Minister that he has not dealt with it. It would not take much more than for him to say that if people do not use our fair legal immigration process and cross at a point of entry that is designated, we are not going to process their claims and pay for their food, shelter, legal aid and all those different things. If that were said, not many people would come. There is an opportunity for the current government to address that but I do not think there is political will because the sentiment in the government is toward open migration.
My colleague who spoke before me talked about the global compact for migration. When it was first discussed that the Prime Minister was going to sign on to this UN agreement, immediately I had a flurry of emails and phone calls to my office from people who were opposed. The things they objected to in this global compact were, first, that they felt Canada would be giving up its sovereignty, our ability to determine who is able to immigrate here.
We want to choose immigrants who are going to fill economic skills gaps that we have. We want people who are going to be reunited with their families. Canadians are a compassionate bunch. We are going to see places in the world where people are experiencing war and torture and genocide and rape, and we want to rescue those kinds of people. We have people coming from upper-state New York where there is no war and no hardship. Those people are not under persecution and they are not being tortured. That is definitely a different situation.
The other concerning thing in the global compact for migration is the freedom of the press. There is language in there that talks about training the media to correctly speak about immigration. That does not sound like freedom of the press and I am a bit concerned. With the current government and the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, when people criticized spending by the government on illegal asylum seekers, they were called un-Canadian. There was a whole sentiment that we should not be able to criticize and talk about these things. That is not the country I grew up in. We have a democracy where we have the right to our opinion, the right to express our beliefs and our views; we have freedom of the press and we do not want anything to come against that.
It has been said that this agreement is non-binding, but I have conferred with our former justice minister who was a former attorney general. He told me that the Supreme Court uses these agreements that Canada has signed with the UN to interpret the law, to hold up the standard that Canada should be behaving to. These things do become binding and that is very concerning as well.
In terms of the border and the exchange of information, I said there were a number of issues and I have talked about a couple of them. There is one issue that is probably specific to my riding that I am really disappointed the government did not address and that has to do with the border crossing at Sombra. For those who do not remember the circumstances surrounding this, the situation is this. In January of this year, the Coast Guard did not shut down the channel when the ice became thick. That is normally what happens, but they allowed several icebreakers to go through at quite a speed and as a result, the ice was pushed and crushed the crossing to the Sombra Ferry. That border crossing is relied on by my constituents, by people on the U.S. side and we called out to the government for help.
The Minister of Public Safety's department CBSA collects $3 million a year of duties off this crossing, but it refused to provide the dollars that were needed to repair, even though the amount needed was less than what they would make in a year off the crossing. The minister of Fisheries and Oceans at the time, whom the Coast Guard reports to, would do nothing as well, even though it was its icebreakers that pushed the ice and caused the situation.
I was told by the former minister of transport that there was a contingency fund just for this sort of thing and if I approached the Minister of Transport, he would be able to apply that contingency fund to restore the border crossing. This was at a time when we were in the middle of the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations and we heard outcries from the mayor, senators, congressmen in the U.S., up through the ambassador from the U.S. to Canada, calling for restoration of this border crossing, which is the contingency border crossing for the Bluewater Bridge, another border crossing within my riding. This is the only other crossing where trucks of an industrial nature can be diverted to. I was disappointed in the extreme that the Minister of Transport claimed there was not such a contingency fund, which the former transport minister said there was.
Combat engineers in my riding told me that the Minister of National Defence, if he decided it was in the public interest, could tell them to repair the border crossing, as they fix bridges all over the place. They had just finished one in Laval and another one in Guelph, certainly they would be happy to see this restored because time was marching on and there is only a certain season where construction can take place. In the St. Clair River there is fish spawning season, so there are regulations about when construction can be done. The Minister of National Defence decided to do nothing as well.
We then escalated to the Prime Minister's Office, which received calls from the ambassador from the U.S. to Canada, calls from the Marine City mayor, calls from me, and nothing was done. Again, we talk about border crossing and we talk about the relationship with our neighbours in the U.S. and here is an example where the Prime Minister and five of his cabinet ministers totally let down the United States as well as my riding. The Minister of Infrastructure was equally unwilling to help, so all the way around it is a border issue that I would have liked to have seen addressed under the government that was an absolute failure.
When we talk about Bill C-21, I notice that the Liberal Party, the NDP and the Conservatives are all standing up to say that we support the legislation and we support the amendments. I am all about efficiency. There is something I find very frustrating as an engineer. There is nothing more concerning than having a limited amount of time to talk about things in this House. There are all kinds of issues that need to be addressed, and we start at the beginning of a debate with Liberals, Conservatives and NDP agreeing but things will continue to press on. Things go to committee even if we agree, and they then come back from committee, and so that is a concern to me in terms of efficiency. I would prefer to see us change the Standing Orders, and perhaps when we move to the new place we will have an opportunity to do that.
The other issue I have here on my list to talk about is the amount of time this bill has taken to get here. It was introduced in June of 2016 and is just coming now. That also highlights one of the difficulties the Liberal government has had with managing the legislation in the House. There have not been that many bills passed compared to previous governments, and again, we see bills that are less meaningful.
I was speaking yesterday about a justice bill. Again it was one of these situations where, if we look at all the things that need to happen in Canada from a justice point of view, we are not too sure why the bills coming forward are the ones that have been selected. There was a bill on solitary confinement and not allowing people to be kept in solitary confinement. It only impacts about 340 Canadians, but quite a number of days were spent on that.
I am coming to the summary about this bill. It is important we continue to have good relations with the U.S. I am a bit concerned about the state of our relations with the U.S. There are a number of things exacerbating the situation. With the free trade agreement that just came through, although I am happy to have a deal, it was a terrible one and could have been negotiated much better if it had been done quickly. As well, I am extremely concerned about the remaining tariffs we have on steel, aluminum and softwood lumber. This is not good. We are claiming that these are illegal tariffs and pursuing action on that, which makes the relationship more fractious.
Now we have this Huawei situation, where the Liberal government has been warned that many countries are not willing to do business with Huawei because of the nature of the way it spies for the Chinese government. The government has been warned not to let it into our 5G network and knows this is a significant issue with the U.S. It has a very confrontational relationship with China, and the U.S. is not going to see our forays with China as improving our national security in any way.
I am concerned all of the actions the Prime Minister is taking, the things he calls out when goes abroad at the G20, as well as the virtue signals, are all things he knows will inflame the President of the United States and cause those kinds of fractious relationships.
It is important we build on the goodwill in this bill. We are starting to exchange data. We should work with the U.S. to find a resolution to border crossing and the marijuana issue. We should protect our borders and be vigilant to make sure we are controlling who comes into the country, and ensure the security of Canadians. If we do that, then we will be moving in the right direction. We know we need to have those borders processing goods and services in an expedient way. Many of our jobs and much of our economy depend on the U.S., so it behooves us to keep moving in the direction of good.
Being that it is the holiday season, I want to wish all the residents of Sarnia—Lambton a very merry Christmas, a happy holiday and a happy new year. To everyone in this House as well, I thank them. It has been an honour to serve with them in this building, and I look forward to serving with them in the new one.