Gary Anandasangaree

[Business of Supply, May 24th, 2018]

Just to pick up on the last comment, Madam Chair, can the minister elaborate on the engagements he has had with the diaspora groups with respect to potential arrivals?

[Business of Supply, May 24th, 2018]

Madam Chair, it is expected that more people will likely arrive through places that are not ports of entry. What provisions does Canada have in place to support and mitigate the effects of those who seek asylum?

[Business of Supply, May 24th, 2018]

Madam Chair, Canada has international legal obligations. We have obligations under the refugee convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and many other international obligations.

Given Canada's agreement with the U.S. on the safe third country, can Canada actually designate the entire Canada-U.S. 9,000-kilometre border as an official crossing?

[Business of Supply, May 24th, 2018]

Mr. Chair, it is appropriate that I begin today by acknowledging that we are gathered here on the traditional lands of the Algonquin people, and also by thanking the minister and his team for the remarkable work he has done as minister since he took office in January 2016.

This is a very difficult conversation for me to listen to. It is very difficult because I have heard this debate before, and in fact I have carried the brunt of it for several years. I would even argue that I am here because I wanted to respond to this debate.

I want to put this in context. On August 31, 1983, my family took a plane from Ireland and landed here at Montreal's Mirabel Airport because we were unable to go to Sri Lanka, where my family is originally from. Based on the discussion we are hearing today, I would assume that this, too, would be irregular, illegal, and so on. I reflect on this because people do not do things or take extraordinary risks as refugees just because they want to. They do it because they have to.

As I hear the minister speak and respond to what are frankly some ridiculous questions, it should be shameful because, as members of Parliament, we have an obligation to understand what the law is, what our process is, and how our government works. If we are simply unable to understand the difference between IRCC and IRB, we should take some lessons or the party needs to do some extra classes so that members actually understand how our process works.

As I sat here, I heard heckling. I heard a number of members across the aisle say that these people are jumping the queue, that they are illegals. I do not know if they said “terrorists” today, but I know they did at one point.

I will take members back to 2009-10 in Canada. In October 2009, the Ocean Lady arrived in Vancouver with 76 Tamil refugees. The initial outrage from the Harper government at that time was that these were terrorists, queue jumpers, illegals. Again, a year later, in Esquimalt, Victoria, British Columbia, we saw a boatload of asylum seekers, refugees, who braved the Pacific, took extraordinary risks, and came ashore. In the weeks leading up to it, we saw the outrageous attacks on refugees, outrageous attacks on people who were fleeing persecution. They set the stage so that as people got off the boat they were immediately deemed to be illegals.

I invite my colleagues to look at the pictures that initially came out as a six-year-old and a baby and families got off the boat and were essentially targeted and named as terrorists. That is the type of conversation we are having here today. Let us have an adult conversation about this.

There are two systems in place. There is a system that looks at immigration. That is the IRCC. It is a system that ensures that people who are coming to Canada sponsored by family members, or as investors, or under student visas and so on are administered. They are vetted and screened, and their applications are processed. That is one stream.

The other stream is a refugee stream comprised of asylum seekers. They go to what is called the Immigration and Refugee Board. The IRB is an independent body that is charged with adjudicating actual decisions on whether someone meets the criteria of a refugee.

That is the system we have. It is two independent systems. There is a bit of overlap, but for the most part they are two independent systems. For us to stand here and complicate the two, look at one over the other and say that they are the same, is ridiculous.

It is even richer when members say that we are creating a queue. Many people may recall that in 2011 one of the knee-jerk responses of the Harper government to the boats that were coming was to essentially create a new law that set new timelines. People in the actual queue who were to be heard by the Immigration and Refugee Board went to the back of the line. There were close to 7,000 applicants, in fact. These are called legacy cases, and they are one of the legacies of the Harper government. Thankfully, since taking office, our government has addressed that, to the point where all those backlogged applications will be processed by the end of this year. They will be heard and they will be adjudicated.

We have a very strong, independent body called the Immigration and Refugee Board, which is the envy of the world. It was constantly underfunded by the previous government, and it lacked credible adjudicators. Now it stands as a beacon of hope around the world for refugee protection and adjudication. We should be very proud of that.

I have been working with people on the MV Sun Sea and the Ocean Lady for a number of years. I still monitor many of the cases that are going through the system. One thing that is very clear to me is the Harper government's complete failure to look at things in context, and that is the history we are hearing today. That is the history the questions point to. Do we want to choose refugees? Do we want to choose queue jumpers over family sponsorship, over family members of live-in caregivers, or over Ukrainian refugees? We cannot have this dichotomy. We can do both.

In Canada, what is very important for us as a government and as a people in 2018 is to understand what is happening around the world. There are 65 million displaced persons around the world, and 22.5 million of them are refugees. A country like Bangladesh took in 680,000 people in the last nine months alone. There is a grander context of refugees. As a country, Canada has done its part and continues to do its part, but, like other countries, we too need to do more.

With that, I would like to ask several questions of my colleagues here from IRCC.

First, I would like to ask the minister to clarify whether migration through non-ports of entry has had any impact on wait times in other immigration categories. Are asylum seekers jumping the refugee queue, as some members on the other side are suggesting?

[Distinguished Olympian and Scholar, May 24th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to honour Professor Bruce Kidd, an accomplished Olympian, scholar, administrator, Officer of the Order of Canada, and vital member of my community.

As an athlete, he won 18 national championships in men's long-distance running and was a member of Team Canada to the 1962 Commonwealth Games and the 1964 Olympic Games.

He has had a distinguished academic career at the University of Toronto as professor, dean, warden of Hart House, and, most recently, as principal at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus. During his tenure as principal, he brought forward a strategic vision for the campus, encouraged sports, and championed reconciliation with indigenous peoples.

He was recently appointed to the federal working group to advance gender equity in sports. I wish to thank Professor Kidd for his leadership, vision, and friendship. I wish him and his partner Phyllis a well-deserved retirement, and I thank them for their service to our community and country.

I am proud to welcome Professor Wisdom Tettey as the incoming principal at UTSC.

[LGBTQ Community, April 26th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to remember Skandaraj Navaratnam, Selim Esen, Abdulbasir Faizi, Majeed Kayhan, Andrew Kinsman, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi, and Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam. These men were murdered by a brutal serial killer. Many of these men were racialized members of the LGBTQ community, and they represent some of the most vulnerable in our society with multiple intersectionalities. Kirushnakumar was a refugee who came on the MV Sun Sea. He was forced to go underground by the fear of being deported to Sri Lanka. As a society, we have failed all of these men.

I would like to recognize the tireless advocacy of groups like the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention, or ASAAP, and its executive director, Haran Vijayanathan; the 519 community centre; and others who have been working day and night to seek justice and accountability.

My heart grieves with the families and loved ones of these men, and with the LGBTQ community.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I have been grappling with the issue of reconciliation. One of the things I am increasingly coming to conclude is that reconciliation is very difficult for an individual who is the subject of this experience, someone who has gone through residential schools. It will be virtually impossible for those people to ever forget what happened to them in their lifetime. If they were victims of a war or war crimes, they will never forget. We cannot forcefully have people reconcile just for the sake of the term reconciliation.

Reconciliation needs to be genuine. It needs to be backed up by an actual acceptance of what happened by the perpetrator. In this case, it is really an acknowledgement. It is to say that this happened. There is overwhelming evidence, and I do not think it is really an evidentiary issue, to suggest that what happened is true. It is about taking ownership of it and saying that we are sorry for what happened. It allows the institution to move on and it allows all of us to look at other ways we can elaborate and work on this journey toward reconciliation.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, again, I want to reiterate my admiration for my friend from Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I have represented individuals in international inquiries who were victims of war crimes. One of the assurances they were given was that the documents provided to the UN would be protected for a period of 80 years I believe. As well, if information needed to be obtained, then individual consent had to that.

I understand the complexity of where we are with respect to documents. I know ultimately that the people who own the documents are the people who gave them in as evidence. Without their consent, I personally do not think they should be released. There is an important element of protecting the integrity of the process and ensuring that in future investigations and undertakings people are freely giving documents based on a set of assumptions they had when first gave the documents .

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by acknowledging that we are gathered here on the unceded lands of the Algonquin people.

I am very pleased to speak today on such an important topic. There are three issues that are outlined in the opposition motion brought to us by the NDP. I will focus on the one that relates to the apology from the Pope and the Catholic Church. Before I address that, I want to outline why this is important to me.

As a practising Hindu, I believe it is important that I acknowledge that I was raised in many ways in the Catholic school system. My first four years of schooling, both in Sri Lanka and Ireland, were in the Catholic school system. That is very important to me, because that faith taught me a great deal about life, about values, and about important rights and wrongs. I have nothing but good things to say about my education.

Unfortunately, that has not been the case in the history of Canada. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives us the right to believe what we believe in and the right not to believe. As such, I think it is important to say that the conversation today is really to focus on the issue of residential schools and to look at how we, as a country, can move forward with the issue of reconciliation.

Reconciliation is very difficult to talk about. It has been attempted by many countries. South Africa stands as one example, and I know other countries in Africa have undertaken it. Canada has also undertaken this process, and I think the Truth and Reconciliation Commission serves as a foundation for that discussion, that journey, as my friend said earlier.

That journey begins on a number of fronts. There are calls to action that require governments and different institutions to do their part in addressing and advancing the issue of reconciliation. I think we have made a number of different achievements on that front, one of them obviously being the current discussion and debate we had with respect to UNDRIP, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and Bill C-262, the private member's bill that was brought forward by the member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou. That is also very important to the concept of reconciliation.

With respect to institutions, there are a number that play a very important role, most notably the Catholic Church. Before I talk about what is being asked of the church, when I was preparing for this debate, I really took to heart that I have two young girls who are seven and nine. We live in a home where we speak Tamil, or broken Tamil to some extent because my kids and my wife are not fluent. However, we try to impart a sense of language, culture, and faith to our children. It is fundamental to me, my family, and my children. It is what grounds me on a day-to-day basis.

I really thought about what happened with the residential schools. Oftentimes, at the age my children are, or maybe even younger than that, the kids were taken away, placed in a residential school setting, and were prevented from speaking their language. As we know, language is so important to us. Our mother tongue is essential to us. Tamil people in my community lost over 100,000 lives defending their language, the right to speak their language, and the right to advocate and go to school in their language. It is very important. When those children went into the residential schools, they lost their mother tongue.

Then we have culture. Again, this valuable, important thing defines each and everyone of us. All of us in the chamber come from different backgrounds, many from very different backgrounds. That really takes away from our practices, our understanding of the world, the baseline concepts we take for granted because we are grounded in that culture. When kids are taken away, when that culture is taken away from them, it really does take away the heart of that child.

All religions, all indigenous communities have very rich traditions of spirituality that are so important. We try to do it oftentimes in a symbolic way. We try to do it in Parliament. We try to do it when we have events in our ridings or national events. We try to incorporate some of the spiritual practices of religions, but it is in many ways symbolism. We have lost the core of that spirituality, and young people who went into residential schools lost that.

I do not want to talk about the abuse, but imagine bringing that child back into the community eight to 12 years later. See if that child can have a relationship with their parents, their grandparents or their community or they with that child. It is disturbing and fundamentally wrong to do that, yet we did it with government sanction, with government-run programs to support residential schools. This did not happen because of a choice. It happened because of decisions that were made in the House and religious institutions were tasked to carry out those duties.

We now see 150,000 people who have gone through this and many generations of indigenous people have been affected by it, have been broken by it. We are here today to correct that.

A number of institutions have been involved and implicated in this, most notably the churches. I want to point out that a number of different churches have addressed this issue over the past several years. For example, in 1993, the Anglican Church made that apology. The Presbyterian Church made that apology in 1994. The United Church made two apologies, one in 1986 and one in 1998. The Missionary Oblates apologized in 2001. In 2008, the Government of Canada formally apologized.

In the indigenous affairs committee one of the studies that made me understand the effects of residential schools was the study on suicide, which was tabled in here about a year ago. That study essentially looked at some of the contributing factors. Well over 100 people talked about the effects of residential schools on their lives and on their relationship with families and communities.

Today we are here because all of these have contributed to the socio-economic factors about which we often talk, about the continuance of colonialism in our society. Standing here I always look at my friend across, the member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, someone who I have the utmost respect for and look at as a teacher more than as a colleague. We have travelled together on a couple of occasions. At times, he would share his experiences, the effects on him, his family, and community. It always comes back to that.

Today, I would respectfully ask the church and the Pope to do the right thing. I hope the Pope visits Canada soon. At that time, I hope he gets to meet a number of the people who have been affected by this directly, including my friend from Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou. To me, the Catholic faith is about doing the right thing. I have no doubt this will happen. I call upon them, as do my colleagues across the way, to do the right thing.