Mr. Speaker, as a country we should celebrate the fact that we have so many families and so many groups across the country that privately raise money to sponsor people to this country, to start new lives and to contribute to the Canadian economy, people who are fleeing areas of persecution. That is something we should be promoting, encouraging more of, and be supporting more robustly.
Let us think about the hundreds of millions of dollars the government is spending to accommodate illegal migrants into this country. That money could go to ESL programs in small communities or to processing privately sponsored refugees. I know there are 45,000 cases where people have raised money to bring people into the country legally, and what the government has been doing is redirecting and processing resources from those streams to Montreal to process illegal border crossers.
What kind of a message does that send to people who are trying to support this wonderful process that we have in our country? What kind of a message does it send to somebody who is trying to reunite with one of their family members?
The priorities of the government are backward. We are arguing semantics. We are arguing about spending hundreds of millions of dollars when there are very easy legal fixes that could restore order to our immigration system, and yet the government does not even want to talk about them. The government does not even acknowledge that they exist. To me, that is divisive. That is what is going to cause a loss of social licence in this country for immigration. That is what is really irresponsible.
The government should table a plan. It should be concrete. It should have legal actions to stop the flow, not just accommodate people coming here. That is what our focus should be. Certainly, that is what a Conservative government did and would do in the future.