Mr. Speaker, I recently had the opportunity to visit Lacolle and to speak to the men and women who serve in the Canada Border Services Agency, in immigration, and with the RCMP. They do a remarkable job every single day not only keeping our borders safe but making sure that we are fair and that we uphold Canadian values. I had an opportunity to speak with the people who live on the border and to local officials, either municipal or local leaders, about their experience of what is happening in Lacolle, how we can do better, and what we are doing right.
First let us be very clear about the process. Canada is a signatory to the UN convention that guarantees that when people land on our soil, we will ensure the veracity of their refugee claims. That is something that should be baked into the DNA of our country because of the experience globally of people arriving in another country's land when their lives are in peril, when they are the most vulnerable people in the world. We have an obligation to ensure the veracity of those claims. If those claims are not valid, if they are economic migrants or their lives will not be in peril as a result of being sent back to their countries of origin, then obviously they are going to be turned away. There are no free tickets.
The idea that we not attest to the veracity of a claim is abhorrent and frankly is an aberration of all-party consensus that has existed on this issue for a great length of time, because while Canada has done great and proud things when it comes to refugees and people who have landed on our shores, so too have we made mistakes. While we have done well dealing with situations like the Vietnamese boat people, or the Congo, or Sri Lanka, or most recently Syria, there have been other examples, such as Jewish individuals who were sent away.
We have to separate those two things. It seems that the picture being painted by the Conservatives is that people walk onto Canadian soil and somehow evade the rest of the system. There is even talk that it is going to slow down the rest of the system, when across the board, as the immigration minister was just saying, we have reduced wait times. The result of the investments we have made to make sure that we are able to process those volumes were seen first-hand in Lacolle.
We can go in and target the communities that are coming in large numbers. Last year we saw a huge number of Haitians. This year it is a large number of individuals from Nigeria. We are looking at the specific reasons that large migrations of people from those communities are happening and specifically target them, because frankly, it is an enormous waste of their time and our resources to just send them back.
When we look at some of the proposals from the Conservatives as alternatives to how we are dealing with this issue, they makes no sense.
The number of migrants who come across our border, the number of refugee and asylum claimants in any given year, varies greatly from year to year. We have fluctuations. In different periods in the 2000s, it was very high. At some points it was even higher than it is now, and we have had years that were lighter.
The MP for Beauce suggested that we militarize the border. It makes no sense, and I do not see how it would in any way improve the situation. Cutting transit funding for municipalities to try to help asylum seekers makes absolutely no sense. Maybe the one that makes the least sense of all of them is the MP for Calgary Nose Hill's suggestion to declare the entire border a port of entry. The only way that could be effective is if across thousand and thousands of kilometres of our border, we had border agents standing shoulder to shoulder effectively turning people back. The effect of that would be that some of the most vulnerable people would be pushed into even more vulnerable, dangerous circumstances.
If we have any doubt about that, we only need to look at the actions taken on the American border. When the Americans created a situation where it was harder and harder to cross, we saw a spike in deaths. There were perhaps 10,000 deaths. They have an enormous problem.
The solution is not pushing people deep into forests and crossing lakes in the middle of the night with children. If that is the suggestion of the Conservatives, it is one I wholeheartedly reject.
When they talk about a hole in our system, the hole that was cut into the Canadian fabric was the $390 million the Conservative cut from the Canada Border Services Agency. It was the cut they made to the IRB and the cuts they made to immigration. The hole the Conservatives talk about was when they said that they were going to deny refugees health care. The hole cut in our fabric was when we all watched the crisis unfolding in Syria and we saw absolutely no action from the previous government, a complete departure from the historical norms of what our country would do.
We have more than doubled the number of refugees we have taken into this country. We have more than quadrupled the number of private sponsorships. That is because we understand that we have an obligation to protect the most vulnerable people. When people think of Canada, they see us as a nation that ensures that we protect and assist those people who are most in need. The reality is that most of those people crossing at Lacolle do not fit into that category, and where they do not, they are turned back.
What we need to be doing is dispensing information, collaboratively, in a bipartisan way, to help folks understand that the futile journey is not going to work for them and that there is a process that exists to make an application. That is something we should be doing together.
While there is no magic solution, we know that the answer lies in working within the context of the existing process. Personally, I think this is an issue that deserves a lot more than talking points. There is no question that when people see people crossing the border, they become concerned about the abuse of process and how it might work. Distorting the facts and trying to propagate false information about what that system is, how it works, and how different categories of refugees or different categories of immigrants are moved through different processes creates confusion that can be exploited politically. This is far too important for that. Making sure that we do the right thing to protect the world's most vulnerable people, making sure that we do the right thing to uphold the international conventions we have signed, and making sure that we turn back those individuals who do not have legitimate claims should be goals we all share.
Solutions that are fantastical and that members absolutely must know would not work in any practical sense must be rejected. On that basis, I find it unfortunate that this motion is in front of us, but I also find it fortunate, because it gives us a chance to illuminate the facts.