Jinny Sims

[Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act, June 12th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I would like to say it is a pleasure to rise and speak today. However, I am rising here today with a great deal of trepidation and concern, concern that my constituents are feeling as well, because I have discussed this matter with them over the last little while.

I just want to hold up Bill C-38 as a lesson aid, and being a teacher, I appreciate lesson aids. This is how thick it is. It is actually thicker than the telephone directory for the town I have spent many years in, Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island.

I want to assure the House that it is double-sided. Not only is it double-sided, but the writing is so tiny that I would need a microscope to read it. Even putting on my reading glasses, I have to struggle and hold it away from me a little.

It shows the density, in more ways than one, of the legislation that is being debated here at report stage before this House. It is not only the density and the number of pages and the number of clauses, but the fact is that this is not a budget bill. This is masquerading. That is what the government has done, masquerading this as the budget bill.

What it has really done in here is put in changes to more than 70-plus laws and regulations that go way beyond, and have very little to do with a budget document.

[Petitions, June 11th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition from dozens of people in the Vancouver area calling on the Government of Canada to withdraw Bill C-31, a bill that punishes legitimate refugees and does nothing to stop human smuggling.

The petitioners point out many troubling aspects of Bill C-31, including: giving the minister the power to hand-pick which countries he thinks are safe without advice; creating two tiers of refugees based on how they arrived in Canada; a five-year mandatory wait for bona fide refugees to become permanent residents and reunite with their families, again based on how they arrive in the country; and treating 16-year-old refugee claimants as adults, including detaining them.

The petitioners call on the government to scrap Bill C-31 and implement Bill C-11, Balanced Refugee Reform Act, legislation that passed just last year with the support of all parties in this House.

With the third reading vote scheduled for tonight, it is the last chance for the Conservative government to do the right thing.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, June 11th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for the comments he just made. I sit on a committee with him and really appreciate his thoughtful approach. The fact is that he does come across as one who wants to find solutions. I heard that in his speech today. This is not about not wanting to sit until midnight or 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. We have done that in the past. I have an incredible capacity to stay up, day in and day out, for quite a number of days and still sound semi-coherent. However, that is beside the point.

The question I have for my colleague who just spoke is: What are some of the key concerns he has with this Trojan Horse bill? What are the key elements that give him cause for concern that have not been debated in as fulsome a way as they should be? We feel that this new process that the government is suggesting is just another attempt at ramming things through rather than a thoughtful debate.

[Citizenship and Immigration, June 11th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, as the Conservatives' punishing refugees act goes to the other place, the opposition to Conservative attacks on refugee health care is growing. The Canadian Medical Association and seven other national medical organizations have warned the minister that these changes could be catastrophic.

I want to ask the minister the same question that doctors who treat refugees are asking. Are we, as a country, willing to risk the health of a pregnant mother? Is this the kind of Canada the minister and the Conservatives really want?

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, June 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am puzzled by some of the comments made by my colleague, so I have a couple of questions which I hope he can answer.

Is he aware of Bill C-11? Not only was it passed by this House but it was actually praised by the minister. Its actually known as the Balanced Refugee Reform Act. That act actually has all of the needed elements for the safety and security of Canadians. All of the features that would be required are in there.

Also, the member talked about people jumping the line. We are not talking about people arriving here on a holiday. We are talking about people who are escaping life and death situations. They are asylum seekers under the UN conventions. They are coming here in a legitimate way to escape persecution.

Is the member aware of Bill C-11 and what is in it, a bill that has not even been acted upon yet?

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, June 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP did support the designation of safe countries in Bill C-11, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, because at that time there was an independent panel of experts making the decision.

I want to put it on the record that there are countries the government could designate as safe, Hungary being one, and yet the government accepted over 160 refugees from there and we know that both the Jews and the Roma communities are being targeted in Hungary right now.

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, June 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, in my previous life I often had the privilege of working with children who had come from camps in which there were terrible circumstances and I saw the kind of psychologically damage that has on young people. What we are talking about here are families or parts of families arriving on our shores from some very devastating situations. What we will be telling them is that we will keep them in prison for up to a year. We need to think about the psychological impact that will have on people who are looking for a place to provide them with a safe haven and the first thing they will face is prison. Even after their identity has been made and Canadian authorities know they are not terrorist threats, they and their children will still be kept in prison.

We need to look at the social impact of this, the health care costs and the long-term social costs that we will pay well into the future. The cost of incarceration, as we all know, is going up every year. The last time I looked there was a shortage of prison cells in some provinces.

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, June 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Saint-Lambert for working tirelessly on this bill. Since we finished the committee stage, she has been doing stellar work in her community and in other areas because this is a topic she feels very passionate about and is very concerned that the compassionate face of Canada is being changed so dramatically.

As I said earlier, arbitrary detention is a violation and I am absolutely convinced that there will be legal challenges.

I also want to talk about learning from the mistakes made by others. When we looked at the omnibus crime bill motion, the United States was telling us over and over again that mandatory detentions did not work in the United States but we still passed a bill that is basically a prison building agenda.

Now we are dealing with the world's most vulnerable people. When they land on our shores, they could be identified as legitimate asylum seekers, but they will be incarcerated in provincial jails.

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, June 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to make it very clear that we supported a couple of amendments that were brought forward by the government side because they mitigated the extensive damage that we see in the bill.

One of them was an unintended consequence, as the minister said. I felt good that once he realized there was an unintended consequence whereby people could be deported after many years of living in Canada because the country they had fled from would become considered safe, the government side actually addressed that unintended consequence. I acknowledge that there was some movement.

However, I want to get back to the detention issue. I absolutely cannot, as a mother, a parliamentarian and a teacher, stand here and say that being kept in detention would be okay and would not have a devastating impact on young children, no matter whether they were 3 or 9 or 16 or 17 years old.

Once again, these are the reasons we are so adamant that the bill goes way beyond. It is not only we who see the bill as draconian; expert witnesses agree. It is actually a “punishing refugees bill”, because there is nothing more in it that would punish smugglers than there already is in Bill C-11.

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, June 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I finished off by talking about the mandatory detention of bona fide refugees just because of the way they arrived here in Canada and the impact that would have on children. I want to expand on that a little bit.

I talked earlier about the emotional and the social costs, but we also have to look at the financial burden that the Canadian public would have to pay, because to keep people, legitimate refugees once they arrive and have gone through identification and security checks, in a provincial prison will be a costly matter. The last time I looked at those numbers, we were looking at anywhere from $60,000 to $80,000 a year to keep somebody in a provincial jail.

Besides that, we have to look at the human cost. Here we would not only be fiscally irresponsible and break UN conventions, conventions to which we are signatories, but we would also be fiscally irresponsible at a time of restraint, and it would be a cruel way to treat some of the world's most vulnerable people when they arrive on our shores.

I have heard a lot about how the bill will punish smugglers. I look on the bill as the “punishing refugees bill”, because that is what it does. Under the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, we already have $1 million in fines and life imprisonment for smugglers. If we really want to go after smugglers, we have to work with the international community and get to the source. It is my belief that all these smugglers we are supposedly going to catch will not be on the ship or boat when it arrives.

The current detention and security check system that we already have actually led to charges being laid against some of the people on the boat that arrived from Sri Lanka, but over 90% of the people who arrived on that boat were accepted by Canada as legitimate asylum seekers. However, under this legislation, we would be putting them in prison, and that just makes no sense to me.

There is another aspect we have to look at. We all know the importance of family. All of us like to have our family around us. We can imagine refugees arriving here after running away and putting their lives at risk to get to this new country where they will seek protection. Their number one goal will be to have their family members join them also . Sometimes it will be a mother who might have been able to run away with only two of her kids and might have had to leave a kid behind. Sometimes the whole family remains behind, and only one person escapes.

In those cases, under this legislation, once again we have a two-tiered system that would prohibit legitimate asylum seekers from applying to have their families join them here. They would not have any travel documents. That again goes against the UN convention.

We are not talking about going away on cruises and things like that. For example, if somebody gets here, they might have some family just over the border in the U.S. and they might be able to go there and meet them. If they have arrived here from Mexico, maybe they cannot go back to Mexico but some of their family can get into Guatemala, and they could meet with them there. In these cases, we would once again be limiting and denying some very fundamental rights to people.

This five years of forced separation, by the way, is before they can apply. We know, given the way processing goes in this country right now, two or three or four years could be added to that. We can imagine the impact that kind of separation would have on families.

Once again it would not just be the mental torture that the families would suffer in knowing that their children and other family members were in danger; it would also be the social impact.

There would also be health care costs. Just imagine the impacts it will have on health care. Not only do we keep people in prison for up to a year, but now we will keep them separated from their families.

The impacts cannot be underestimated. We had witness after witness tell us about the impacts of incarceration on children and on adults. Every one of them said that it interferes with the settlement of families and becoming productive, and we heard as well about the costs to health care that I just raised.

Also, we are concerned about biometrics. We are not concerned that biometrics will be used in two areas, fingerprinting and digital photos. Rather, what we are absolutely concerned about is that the committee has not had a chance to study the privacy impact assessment. That is very important for all of us. Obviously, these reforms are not clearly consistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

At this time I have an amendment.

I move, seconded by the member for Saint-Lambert:

That the motion be amended by deleting all of the words after the word “That” and substituting the following: this House decline to give third reading to Bill C-31, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, the Marine Transportation Security Act and the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Act, because it:

(a) gives significant powers to the Minister that could be exercised in an arbitrary manner, including the power to designate so-called “safe” countries without independent advice;

(b) violates international conventions to which Canada is signatory by providing mechanisms for the Government to indiscriminately designate and subsequently imprison bone fide refugees—including children—for up to one year;

(c) undermines best practices in refugee settlement by imposing, on some refugees, five years of forced separation from families;

(d) adopts a biometrics programme for temporary resident visas without adequate parliamentary scrutiny of the privacy risks; and

(e) is not clearly consistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.