Thierry St-Cyr

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I indicated in my speech that I thought it would be best to refer the bill to committee before second reading so as to have complete latitude to improve on it, not to change its nature or redesign it, but to make sure that improvements that could be agreed upon unanimously and would make it possible to move forward would not be rejected for somehow going beyond the intended scope of the bill.

I do not know what motivated the government to deny the request made to it to refer the bill to committee before second reading. It hope that was not done in an attempt to use procedure to avoid having to consider certain amendments. At any rate, it would not be a great strategic move on the part of a minority government looking to get its political agenda passed to refuse amendments about which there might be a consensus simply because it has procedure on its side.

The minister and hon. members who spoke today said they were prepared to negotiate, to look at improvements that might ultimately provide interesting results. Let us assume that everyone is acting in good faith and hope that, in committee, we will not get caught up in procedural wrangling and have to debate whether an amendment is in order or not. Amendments should be considered on merit, based on how useful they can be to claimants.

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, the minister can count on my help. The Bloc will be proposing amendments to improve this bill.

I would like to talk about inconsistent decisions. In my opinion, they are the source of the potential problems and abuse that the minister is so worried about. When I meet with immigration lawyers in Montreal, they always tell me the same thing. When their client asks if there is a possibility of being accepted, they say that they do not know, that it depends on which IRB member processes their request. Some members make very favourable decisions while others make unfavourable ones. It is the IRB lottery. It is the luck of the draw. If you get a certain member, you are lucky. If you get a different one, you may not be so lucky. It does not necessarily depend on your country of origin. I mentioned the two brothers who came from the same country with the same story but who got two completely different decisions.

This inconsistency might encourage people to take a chance. Then, if that does not work, they look at other alternatives. A refugee appeal division ensures that the decisions are consistent and that case law is built up. Lawyers could tell their clients from the outset whether or not they had a chance, either initially or on appeal. For it to truly work, everyone has to have access to the refugee appeal division, including those coming from what ministers consider to be safe countries.

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be here to speak to Bill C-11, which provides for equitable reforms with respect to refugees. It is about time we looked at this because the process for dealing with refugee claims submitted by people who show up at our border crossings has been a big problem for a long time now. These people come to Canada claiming to have been persecuted in their home countries. Because they get no protection there, they come here to ask Canada for protection.

The number of claims awaiting processing has skyrocketed over the past few years. Processing delays are far too long for all cases, particularly those based on the Geneva convention, which defines a refugee claimant. People who submit claims live in limbo for years, but they deserve a faster response.

This also happens to other persecuted individuals in extremely difficult circumstances around the world. These people submit their refugee claims in good faith because in many cases, they believe the legal definition applies to them, but their cases are dismissed after they have spent several years in Canada. They may have jobs, friends, families, houses. The wait times are also far too long for some unscrupulous opportunists who take advantage of the situation to try to stay in Canada as long as possible or even permanently.

This problem is due in large part to negligence on the part of the current and former governments, which hired too few members. This has been the norm at the Immigration and Refugee Board for a long time now. When there are not enough board members to process claims, when staffing levels are only two-thirds what they should be, fewer claims are processed and wait times go up.

I have a very hard time understanding this situation. Why did the government not take action sooner? Why did it not take steps to shorten wait times?

The committee often studies what is going on in immigration. I have become deeply convinced that, unfortunately, wait times are being used as a tool to manage the arrival of immigrants or, in this case, refugees. Allow me to explain.

Normally, in the health care system, wait times are due to an insufficient allocation of resources, which is involuntary because resources are scarce. Because more people need services than there are resources allocated, wait times increase over time. That is why only a certain number of people can be treated every year.

Where immigration is concerned, it is somewhat the reverse situation. Insufficient resources are voluntarily allocated to processing claims so as to not exceed the quotas and objectives that have been set. This is never acknowledged officially or publicly, but almost everyone agrees that only a certain number of people can be admitted to Canada every year.

Society has the ability to absorb a number of people from all over the world. Means are therefore sought to try and control the influx. For many years, it suited governments to have prolonged processing times. It helped slow down the influx of refugees, who figured it would be complicated to get into Canada and that it would take a few years. This acted as a disincentive.

It became a problem when the government lost control and found itself with long wait periods and a process so complicated that it almost acts as an incentive for people to come to Canada. They figure that their claims will take years to process and, during that time, they will be in a safe country and will not have to fear for their safety.

So previous governments and the current government are to blame for part of the problem, but at least we have a bill before us that is aimed at tackling the problem.

I recognize that there is a problem and that it is good to have a bill to deal with that problem. I believe that this bill contains some interesting principles. The Bloc Québécois will support it at second reading to send it to committee.

We asked that this bill be sent to committee even before second reading so that we would have complete latitude to study it and suggest constructive improvements. But the government did not opt to go that route. I hope that if we work together in committee to make the bill better, we will not get bogged down in “proceduritis”.

Let us look at the main elements of the bill. No one will be surprised that I am going to start with the refugee appeal division. This bill finally provides for implementing this division, even though it has been in the act for quite some time. In fact, the 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act provided for an appeal division. At the time, two board members considered a refugee claim at the same time, and all it took was for one member to approve the claim for the claimant to be accepted. In 2001, the previous Liberal government told Parliament that it would reduce the number of board members from two to one, but that it would create a refugee appeal division to make up for the change and avoid arbitrary decisions. This Parliament voted for that. But the Liberal government unfortunately never implemented its own act and the refugee appeal division, and the Conservatives have not done so either.

That is why the Bloc Québécois has repeatedly tried to force the government to implement the division, the last time being when it introduced Bill C-291, which was passed at second reading but unfortunately defeated by a single vote at third reading because of a rather pathetic Liberal tactic.

I do not agree with the Conservatives' positions, but at least they were honest about the fact that they were opposed to the refugee appeal division and would vote against it. The NDP and the Bloc said they were in favour of the refugee appeal division and said they would vote to support it. The Liberals, on the other hand, said they supported it, but curiously, during the vote, 12 members were absent, that is, double the number of absent members of all the other parties combined.

The vote before and the vote after the vote in question were won by the three opposition parties by three votes, but when the time came to vote on Bill C-291, four Liberal members mysteriously remained seated and coincidentally, the bill was defeated by a single vote. That is a lot of coincidences at once. As we all know, that was the Liberals' strategy to try to appease their electoral base while still defeating the bill in the House.

I do not mean to dwell on the past, but I thought it was important to remind the House of what happened.

Let us now look forward. Why is the refugee appeal division necessary? Contrary to what is indicated in the bill before us, why should it apply to everyone?

All of our legal systems include the opportunity to appeal. The reason is very simple: because justice is administered by humans and humans can make mistakes, the system recognizes that the justice system can make mistakes.

Opportunities for appeal will therefore be included everywhere to correct potential errors.

The bill also proposes appeal mechanisms in our legal systems to ensure uniformity. The goal is to ensure a reasonable expectation that a certain type of case, say x, will produce a certain outcome and that every case like case x will produce that same outcome. That is not how it works at the moment.

Here is an example of how similar claims were treated differently by IRB members. This happened to twins, brothers from the same country. Their claims were reviewed by two different board members, and each one made a completely different decision. The cases were alike, they were brothers who had been through the same thing together, yet the board members did not make the same decision. Clearly, there is a lack of coherence. An appeal division would have made it possible to determine which board member was wrong or mistaken.

Appeal mechanisms seek to eliminate arbitrary treatment by giving our legal systems oversight over lower-level rulings. Some board members have rejected as many as 98% of the claims they have dealt with, while others have allowed nearly every claim that has gone before them.

If I were in court one day and someone told me before the hearing that the judge convicted in 98% of his or her cases, I would know that justice was not being served and that it was a farce. I would know the dice were loaded. But in a typical legal system with an appeal division, if every decision made by a board member or judge was overturned on appeal, the chief justice would eventually tell the judge that his or her rulings were a problem.

The same applies to the IRB. An appeal process ensures that those making the decisions in the first place really think them through. Decision makers have to remember that their decisions can be appealed. They have to really think about their decisions and consider whether they are likely to be upheld or systematically appealed.

That is not in the legislation. I know that there have been some intense discussions with the minister about the current potential for appeals in the legislation. There is none. I have been saying it all along, and I will say it again today. There are ways of getting around it, such as the judicial review process at the Federal Court. Very few applications are accepted. In all cases, only the procedural aspect of the application is examined. No one can request a judicial review on the basis of the facts. For example, if a member says that he does not believe a person's story and does not think he is credible, the Federal Court would never say that his story was credible and approve his application.

There is the issue of pre-removal risk assessments. This procedure is very rarely applied. In fact, only 2% of the applications involving new facts since the initial hearing are accepted. It is not truly an appeal mechanism. Neither is a permanent resident application on humanitarian grounds. Some people use it as a second attempt if they think there was an error with their case at the initial hearing. It does not fall under the definition of refugee status as adopted by the conventions supported by Canada.

I have spent a lot of time talking about the appeal division. I think that natural justice is something really fundamental, and we cannot ignore it. The problem with the bill before us is the exemption for so-called safe countries. The minister said that he would create a list, but we have no details about that yet, and people who come from these so-called safe countries will not have access to the refugee appeal division.

Finally, the bill takes a positive step by implementing the refugee appeal division and—let us be frank—by improving it in certain ways, for instance, with the possibility of presenting new evidence and testifying again. Nevertheless, a certain proportion of asylum seekers will not have this opportunity. In my opinion, that is a mistake. When it comes to equality of the most basic rights, we must not treat people differently based on their country of origin. That seems obvious to me.

When a person appears before a tribunal that will make a decision far less significant than one where the person could potentially be sent back to be tortured, killed or persecuted, the tribunal does not take the person's country of origin into account. When neighbours are in a dispute over a fence, neither party would ever be denied the right to appeal based on their country of origin. Everyone is treated equally, regardless of where they are from.

I do not see why this distinction would be made in the case of refugees. It is not necessary. The bill already provides for an expedited process, namely by suspending for one year the possibility of applying for a pre-removal risk assessment, a temporary resident permit or permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. These options that were once available to refugees no longer appear in the legislation. We do not think it is necessary to go so far as to prevent people from safe countries from using the appeal division.

I will now say a few words on the issue of deadlines, which are of particular concern to me. Deadlines do not figure in the bill, but I imagine they will be included in the regulations. It seems that the minister intends to give refugees eight days from the time refugee status is claimed to the time they meet with an IRB officer for help with the application. As I was saying earlier, although generally speaking it is a good idea to expedite the process, in some cases this can be problematic.

When a refugee from another country who has been persecuted and perhaps raped several times arrives in Canada, they are told that they have one week to tell their whole story. Many psychologists would say that you can work with a rape victim, for example, for months before they start talking about their experience. Perhaps we should include mechanisms to correct this. In addition, the interview will be used later, during the hearing and possibly the appeal, to discredit the person. They will be asked why they did not report certain things during the initial interview. We must ensure that the person's psychological state during the interview makes it possible to truly tell their story.

I also have concerns about the timeframe for the hearing, which is 60 days. It is a good thing if applicants who are ready do not have a long wait for their hearing. In some cases, however, it may be extremely difficult to obtain the evidence and documents that might be very far away. In some parts of the world, it can take two weeks for a document to arrive and another two weeks to send it back. That adds up to a month, leaving only 30 days for the lawyer to prepare the case.

Finally, I am very worried by the fact that, by and large, these reforms will be made by regulation, thus sidestepping Parliament. In addition, there is the matter of the timeframes I spoke about, the designation of safe countries, the assisted voluntary returns program that I did not have time to talk about, and so forth.

Yesterday's news reported on the case of a sick, pregnant woman, locked in prison and waiting to be deported. The government sometimes lacks compassion. Therefore, we are very reluctant to give it carte blanche. For that reason, we are asking the minister to submit the regulations in full before proceeding with a clause-by-clause analysis in committee. Thus, when we vote on the bill, we will at least be familiar with the proposed regulations.

I will be pleased to answer my colleagues' questions.

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 26th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for her speech. It was not so long ago that she sat with us on the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. We miss her.

She is familiar with Bill C-291 that I introduced. The purpose of the bill was to implement a refugee appeal division, which is being partially presented in the bill before us today. My colleague worked on promoting this appeal division. Unfortunately, this bill was defeated in the House because of the Liberals. During the vote, 12 MPs were absent. They had won the previous vote by three votes and then had the nerve to keep four members seated and have them abstain from voting. The bill was defeated by only one vote.

Considering all the effort she made in promoting this bill, is she not a little disappointed in the behaviour of her colleagues who have abandoned refugees?

[Citizenship and Immigration, April 23rd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, that is simply not plausible. Quebec's Minister of immigration and cultural communities says that the federal government is at fault for the delays. She said that there have been operational problems at the federal level with health and security checks. Quebec and Ottawa need to stop passing the buck.

When will the minister really start working to help Haitian families?

[Citizenship and Immigration, April 23rd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative government promised to fast-track family reunification applications from Haiti. However, according to the department's latest numbers, only 311 people on file in the Canadian system have been given permanent resident visas.

How can the minister explain his inability to deliver on his promises?

[Keeping Canadians Safe (International Transfer of Offenders) Act, April 22nd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I would like to show just how absurd this kind of title is. The opposition is saying that it is a bad bill. What would happen if the title of the bill were amended in committee to “not keeping Canadians safe”? We would end up in a completely senseless debate on semantics that would be a disgrace to the political class.

What is clear is that the Conservatives are trying to derail the debate. They are trying to distract everyone. They are taking a simplistic approach to try to make people believe that Bloc members are against keeping Canadians safe, and that they are the bad guys, while the Conservatives want to keep Canadians safe and are the good guys.

In the long run, the Conservatives are taking a risk by underestimating the public's intelligence. At some point, people will realize that the Conservatives are taking them for fools. Voters do not like that. Even though it is difficult, the Bloc Québécois believes that people are intelligent, and we believe we can explain to them that even though the title of this bill says it will keep Canadians safe, that is not the case.

[Keeping Canadians Safe (International Transfer of Offenders) Act, April 22nd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I do not want to offer an opinion as to which of the two governments is worse. Neither of them is without fault. I gave the examples of Maher Arar and Omar Khadr. These two cases represent a problem for the current Conservative government, which has refused to act, but we cannot forget that both of these cases began under the Liberal government, which also failed to take responsibility.

The purpose of my speech is not to talk about Bill C-5 in detail because many in the House have already done that. I am more interested in trying to focus on the bill from a different angle. Bill C-5 is not the end of the world and democracy is not falling apart. It is simply another step backwards. We are moving in the wrong direction towards an increasingly arbitrary system and further from our fundamental values, with more political influence at the expense of justice. That is what is happening and that is what I wanted to talk about.

Those before us fought for justice, for rule of law and for important principles that are difficult to defend. They are difficult to defend, for one, because those sitting across the way are rather backward-thinking and each time we defend these principles, they claim we are defending criminals. I am not going to take the simplistic approach of the Conservatives. I believe that people are intelligent. I know that those listening to us realize that a judicial error, such as being falsely accused, can happen to anyone, including the hon. Conservative members across the way. It can happen to anyone. That is why we need a solid legal system and why we need to stop attacking and weakening it, which is what is happening with Bill C-5. We must be strong in our convictions and accept that justice can sometimes be frustrating, because it takes longer and is expensive. That, however, is the price we pay to live in a society where justice prevails.

[Keeping Canadians Safe (International Transfer of Offenders) Act, April 22nd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I agree with what my colleague said. My speech was focused on the principle of equal rights.

In Canada, we believe that we must invest money and put these types of wings in our prisons. That is the least we can do to properly treat people with mental illness. We want to adopt universal principles, but why, when we cross the U.S. border, is this no longer necessary? The United States is perhaps not the best example, since they have a rehabilitation system, and in some cases, a support system for prisoners. However, in some parts of the world, they do not care about mental illness. Some countries even believe that homosexuality is a mental illness. That is not something that is taken into account in some places.

If we want to do something sensible, reasonable and in line with our values, we must look after and repatriate the individuals who have sometimes committed atrocious crimes. We must give them the treatment they need, and make them participate in appropriate rehabilitation programs. They will then be better able to reintegrate into society once their sentence is over than if they had been left in prisons abroad, where they would have no access to services or treatment. In many cases, they would return to Canada even more deranged and unbalanced than they were before they committed the crime.

That is the right thing to do. We must not shut our eyes because we find the crimes shocking. We must be rational and let our values dictate our actions.

[Keeping Canadians Safe (International Transfer of Offenders) Act, April 22nd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be here today and debating Bill C-5, to which the Bloc Québécois objects.

Before continuing, I would like to mention a practice to which this government increasingly resorts, even though it verges on the grotesque. The Conservatives have developed a habit of giving ridiculous names to bills instead of focusing on the legal nature of the bills. Our parliamentary tradition is to identify the real purpose of a bill, but the Conservatives are increasingly giving them subjective names in order to sway people's opinion.

People watching us on television can see what we are discussing today at the bottom of the screen. It is the Keeping Canadians Safe Act. The government is trying to imply that people who oppose Bill C-5 are also opposed to keeping Canadians safe. It is totally ridiculous.

There are more examples of this increasingly common practice in other items on today’s agenda, for instance Bill C-13, the Fairness for Military Families Act. I do not want to go into this bill right now but there is obviously already a very subjective twist in the title. We also have Bill C-4, Sébastien's Law. It is even more pathetic because they are trying to take advantage of our horror at the type of tragedy that befell young Sébastien, who was killed in battle. The title implies that anyone who honours Sébastien’s memory should support the bill and anyone who dares to oppose it is against honouring his memory. It is totally absurd.

We saw it as well in the budget. They talked about an act to stimulate economic activity in Canada, or some other aberration of the kind. Another Conservative bill was called the trafficking of minors act, even though the word trafficking did not appear anywhere in the bill. Honestly.

This practice must stop. I do not know whether the bill before us today will go to committee, or if the others will, but I hope the committees that study them will be more objective and will give them names that reflect the legal reality. Today, for example, we are discussing the International Transfer of Offenders Act. That is the real name of the act. People can agree or not agree, but that is what this bill is really about.

If this practice continues, things will get absolutely absurd. There will be a bill to make Canadians happy or put them in good shape and good health or some fine bill to make things better. This does not make sense and should stop. I find this practice, which comes to us from the United States, particularly detestable.

Members may well remember George W. Bush introducing the Patriot Act after the attacks of September 11. It was anti-terrorist legislation and the purpose was to imply to the senators and representatives voting on it that if they were opposed, they were not patriots.

This completely subverts the debate and, most of all, insults our intelligence. It implies that people are not smart enough to discuss the heart of the issue. They think they are going to simplify things by calling it the Keeping Canadians Safe Act and everybody will be in favour because it is about the safety of Canadians.

This is a dangerous gamble on the part of the Conservative government. I would rather appeal to the intelligence of people. I think we can discuss bills just fine without giving them grotesque names.

It starts as the Keeping Canadians Safe Act.

In future, if Parliament wanted to amend this legislation it would have to call it an act to keep Canadians even safer than the Keeping Canadians Safe Act currently does. You can see where this is going. It is utterly ridiculous.

I want to come back to Bill C-5, An Act to amend the International Transfer of Offenders Act. The issue before us is the following. Under the current International Transfer of Offenders Act, what factors does the minister have to consider in determining whether to transfer a Canadian sentenced abroad to Canada or to transfer an American sentenced in Canada to the United States? I am giving the United States as an example, but obviously this applies to all countries.

The current legislation has a certain number of factors that the minister must take into account. He must, for example, take into account the person's health. He must ask himself whether the foreign prison system satisfies recognized principles of basic justice and rights for all. Has this system violated the basic rights of an individual and does it represent a risk to the individual's health and safety? For instance, has the individual been handed over for torture?

This is already in the act, but the government wants to make a change. The act would say that the minister, instead of having to consider all these factors, could consider them, but is not required to. Just imagine. He can look into whether the person incarcerated abroad is being tortured. He might like to know that, but then again he might not. Are the basic rights of the person incarcerated abroad being violated? The Conservatives may or may not be interested. They want the minister to have more discretionary power.

The Bloc Québécois obviously has serious reservations about this. We are already aware of the government's contempt for the rule of law and its contempt for our basic principles of natural justice. Leaving aside the government currently in power, what about a future government? We have to stick to the rule of law in place.

I will digress for a moment. This debate might seem a bit technical for many people at home, but there is something even more fundamental, which is our sense of justice. Do we want to continue to defend the rule of law and the system of natural justice? It is not easy; it is an ongoing battle, and it is intellectually challenging, since it is not necessarily what comes naturally for people.

Do we want to go back in time, to systems that slowly but surely become more and more arbitrary, subjective and inconsistent? Today's legal systems are sometimes complex. The public often believes that the system is costly and complicated and does not always work well. But if we look at the evolution of humanity, we have made incredible progress compared to what was done during medieval times.

People may tell me that is quite a stretch, but I think it is important to keep that perspective. In medieval times, people were tortured and imprisoned for no reason. The king made the decisions, and it was summary justice. Later, people realized that this did not help control crime, that human beings were too intelligent for it, and that we should develop systems to ensure independent justice with effective results.

At the time when certain countries first banned torture, it was not even on humanitarian grounds. They believed that if someone was tortured in order to get them to admit something, that person would always end up saying what the torturer wanted to hear. That is clear. If we want to convict someone, we can torture them and they will incriminate themselves. Does that really serve justice? Of course not.

Our western societies and those elsewhere in the world have developed a rule of law based on numerous principles. I will not list them all, but I will talk about those that I believe to be important.

First, there is the presumption of innocence. According to this principle, we assume that a person is innocent. It is too easy to accuse someone without any proof, to tarnish his reputation and interfere with his rights. We believe a person to be innocent until proven guilty, which is not easy. It tends to go against human nature. When a reprehensible and sordid murder has been committed and the police arrest someone, we want that person to go to jail and suffer. We say that we can sense that he is guilty.

A system has been put in place to curb that tendency and consider a person to be innocent until proven guilty.

The Canadian system also provides for the possibility of rehabilitation, which is important, and even fundamental. If we did not believe that a person can be rehabilitated, why would we hand out sentences other than life in prison? If we believe that someone will be a criminal their entire life, why release them? Our laws allow for different prison terms because we believe that a person can be rehabilitated at some point. We try to gauge that.

We believe that everyone has the same rights. The Conservative government often attacks this principle with an extremely unhealthy populism by saying that the opposition members—the Bloc Québécois, the Liberals and the NDP—are defending criminals. We are not defending criminals but defending fundamental rights and the fact that everyone should have the same rights. If they are not the same for everyone, then they are no longer fundamental rights. Defending the fundamental rights of a murderer is never very popular. However, fundamental and universal rights apply to everyone, even murderers and people who commit the most horrific crimes.

Under the rule of law, everyone is entitled to a fair trial before an unbiased judge or jury, in which the various parties have an equal opportunity to prove the guilt or innocence of the individual in question. These principles seem rather basic, but the government is undermining them more and more by meddling with the rule of law.

We believe that the powers of the executive branch and the judiciary should be kept separate. It is not up to us as elected officials, and especially not to ministers who are biased and have their own convictions, to determine who should be convicted or acquitted based on the law. Parliamentarians pass laws, but it is the judges and the judicial system that, separately, must enforce legislation and determine who has obeyed and who has disobeyed. Lastly, there must be a mechanism to correct cases of wrongful conviction.

Bill C-5 has only a few clauses. It might seem insignificant, but it could attack the principles I just talked about and could represent a considerable step back.

I have three examples.

Let us consider the case of Maher Arar. Hon. members will recall that this Canadian was deported on the strength of false information obtained by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada's secret service. He was tortured abroad and finally returned home. A commission on the Arar affair completely exonerated Mr. Arar, proving that he had no connection with terrorism. The Canadian government did not apply the principle of the presumption of innocence in Mr. Arar's case. He did not get a fair trial. The separation of the judiciary and the executive was not maintained in his case. In fact, it was the executive that authorized his deportation, first to the United States and then to Syria. Today, the government is asking us to give it even more power. Is it so that the government can attack our system of natural justice even more?

Let us consider the case of Allen Smith, who was convicted of a series of murders in the United States. Admittedly, Mr. Smith is no choirboy, and defending him is not a very popular thing to do. But even without defending Allen Smith, we can defend people's basic rights. In Canada, we believe, or at least it is the position of this Parliament, that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment that goes against our belief in the right to life. If this is true in Canada, then it is also true in the United States. It would therefore be fair to ask the Americans to give this Canadian citizen the same treatment he would receive here, which would mean commuting his death sentence to life in prison. But the Conservative government could not care less about the principle of the rule of law, where everyone enjoys the same rights, or the principle of separation of the executive and the judiciary.

When questioned in the House of Commons, the government answered that, in its opinion, the crimes committed were very serious and that, therefore, it would not intervene. Since when is it up to the minister to assess the seriousness of the crime? That is something new in our system and it is deplorable. It is not up to the minister to make that assessment, but up to the courts, which must establish whether or not the person is guilty and decide on the seriousness of the crime and the appropriate punishment. Furthermore, it is the House that passes the laws to punish various crimes. It is not the minister who decides whether or not to apply them.

In the case of Omar Khadr, it is even worse. Without exception, all the principles I mentioned previously have been violated. Omar Khadr is a child soldier who was arrested seven years ago and is still imprisoned by the Americans. He has not yet been put on trial. He is accused of killing American soldiers and, despite a Supreme Court decision, the government refuses to ask for his return to Canada.

There is obviously no presumption of innocence in his case. Nor does he have equal rights. His cruel treatment, bordering on torture, has been contracted out to the United States. He has not had a fair trial after seven years of imprisonment. There is no separation between the executive and the judiciary. The government has told the House that, in its opinion, the crimes are serious and therefore it has decided not to intervene, as though it was up to the minister to decide. The possibility of judicial error was not examined in the least. The government absolutely does not want to hear about the possibility of rehabilitation if—I did say if—Omar Khadr is found guilty.

Since I mentioned the possibility of rehabilitation, I would like to close by saying that we have to keep in mind one thing about this bill: if this bill is passed, the number of Canadians serving sentences abroad will increase. These Canadians, once they have served their sentences, will return here and will not be ready to be reintegrated into society. In many cases, it would be better to return them to Canada and have them serve their sentences here so that they are in a better position to be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society.