Kevin Lamoureux

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, March 12th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the member could comment on the component where the minister can say that someone is an irregular arrival. He is referring more to arrivals by boat, but it also applies to individuals who would land at any of our airports.

Someone who is labelled as an irregular arrival could be detained for up to a year. After that detention there would be a five-year waiting period before the person would be able to sponsor someone. A 26-year-old man who has left a country where his life was threatened and has managed to escape that country would be waiting years. It would be five or six years before he could even put in an application to sponsor someone, his child, for example, which could then take another five or six years. His six-year-old child would be 17 or 18 years old by the time the child arrived here.

I wonder if the member could comment in terms of the fairness of that aspect of the legislation.

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, March 12th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, let us be perfectly clear on this: The minister under this legislation is taking the responsibility upon himself to say that he as minister will determine henceforth who is going to be on the safe country list. Before that, it was going to be an advisory group that would provide the recommendation. The advisory group would be made up of professionals, individuals and different stakeholders, to ensure that the right countries would be on the safe country list.

Why does the government need to have the sole discretion to determine who should be going on the safe country list and who should not when the advisory panel, which at one time the minister favoured, has now been thrown out the window?

[Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act, March 12th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the government is trying to say it does not want any more members of Parliament to debate Bill C-31. It will allow for two or three or whatever number works, but there is a limit. It is trying to prevent members of Parliament from debating the bill.

The minister tries to justify it by saying we have had endless debate on human smuggling over the last year. The minister is fully aware that Bill C-4 is non-existent now. Bill C-31 not only replaces it, but it adds a whole new aspect to the bill.

It is an issue of affording MPs the opportunity to debate. This is something this new Conservative majority government has refused to do 18 times. This is but one example. The government killed the Canadian Wheat Board, with which I know the minister is familiar, using time allocation.

My question is why is the government, time and time again, resorts to time allocation as a way to prevent legitimate, honest debate inside the House of Commons, thereby stealing the voices of Canadians--

[Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act, March 12th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, that is quite a shameful answer for the minister to provide.

The minister tries to give the impression that because the Conservatives received a majority government mandate, they have the authority to look and reflect on every brochure that was published during that election and say that because it was in a brochure they have the authority to limit debate and prevent members of the opposition or any member of this chamber from being able to participate in debate.

That is something truly unique. That is not democratic. That is a majority government that has gone awry. It believes it can use time allocation as a tool to get what it wants. That is anti-democratic.

My question is for the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. I would rather have the House leader answer the question but I do not think he is available or able to answer the question. What is the hurry that he cannot even allow for 15 to 20 hours of healthy debate on such a major piece of legislation that would impact tens of thousands of people?

[Air Service Operations Legislation, March 12th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the government seems to be overlooking that many Air Canada employees have families too. The government needs to be sensitive to that fact. Those employees believe in the free collective bargaining process, something in which the government obviously does not believe.

Where was the Government of Canada when Air Canada was turning to Aveos and getting rid of the overall maintenance base in Winnipeg? When the Government of Canada should have been standing up for those Air Canada employees, it threw its hands up in the air and did nothing. Why did the government ignore Air Canada workers when it came to farming out certain aspects of its responsibilities that were set when Air Canada was privatized in 1988? Where was the Conservative government then?

[Air Service Operations Legislation, March 12th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring forward on a personal note an issue involving the city of Winnipeg in Manitoba.

We need to understand that the government has never been a friend of Air Canada workers, whether they work in Winnipeg, Mississauga or Montreal. We could talk about the flight attendants base or the pilots base in Winnipeg or the overhaul centre that was in Winnipeg. These are all important and valuable jobs to the province of Manitoba and yet Air Canada literally shafted the workers by not standing up for them. In the case of the overhaul maintenance workers, Air Canada allowed a form of privatization into a different area even though it had a legal obligation to maintain those jobs.

For the last couple of years, the Government of Canada has not stood up for those workers and now we see labour legislation being brought in once again to not allow free collective bargaining in an important industry.

Does my colleague understand and appreciate why many of the workers at Air Canada feel that the Conservative government just does not care about the worker, that it seems to support Air Canada over the worker? Does he not think that is unfair in terms of the free collective bargaining process?

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2012]

Not you, Mr. Speaker.

--where the Conservative Party ultimately had to pay, I think, two hundred and some thousand dollars as an admission of guilt.

Why should Canadians believe that the Conservatives are treating this issue seriously when their past record clearly demonstrates that they want to drag things out and confuse the matter?

The point is that there was some form of a conspiracy. Will you not acknowledge that fact? Thirty thousand Canadians is not a small number of Canadians to call Elections Canada.

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the minister's comments are interesting. On the one hand, there is only one political party that has actually been charged and has now had to pay. Does the member remember the in and out campaign and how long his party had to fight that and how it tried to marginalize that as an issue?

Elections Canada had to take you to the Supreme Court of Canada where you--

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, can the member give us his complete assurance that under no circumstances whatsoever did the Conservative Party or any of its operatives actually authorize the phoning of citizens to identify them so that if they were identified as not Conservative, they would be called at a later date and told to vote at another location?

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, member after member of the Conservative government are trying to confuse the issue. This particular member has made reference to the fact that the Liberals and New Democrats have spent millions of dollars on robocalls. That is nothing new in the sense that a great deal of money is spent on robocalls, teleconferencing, voice blasts and so forth. They even occurred in Winnipeg North, the area I represent.

The issue before us is that serious allegations have been levelled about there being some sort of campaign or orchestrated approach to suppress voters from voting, to mislead them, to tell them to vote at a different poll from where they should actually vote. I am wondering if the member can address that specific issue and the 30,000 people who have seen fit to actually contact Elections Canada and express their concerns, just as we have expressed here.