Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good afternoon, and thank you for having me back when I've already appeared before.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As you can see from my notes, I want to talk only about one provision of the bill, clause 24. The first point I would make is that the change proposed in clause 24 is anomalous in that it treats a foreign act where there is no conviction more seriously than a conviction in Canad

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, like Barbara and Robin, I've been around this system for a long time and I've seen a lot of changes. My experience is that the changes never quite work out exactly the way that Parliament intended. There is a lot of litigation where you get individual hardship cases. The sy

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's even worse than that, because you can be barred for misrepresentation even if you didn't know what you were saying was false. For instance, you could father a child and not disclose the child, and you might not even know you have a child, because you haven't been in touch wi

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As I mentioned, for people who come here before 18 and who've been here at least 10 years before the crime, those cases all go to headquarters now if there is no appeal. You're not going to be saving any time by cutting those people out of appeals. Headquarters processing takes a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would say that the charter plays into how the law is interpreted and applied, and the government has to apply the law in a way that is consistent with the charter. Of course, Barbara Jackman is right. If you remove humanitarian discretion, it violates the charter, as a result o

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Barb, I think you were speaking.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There's one thing I wanted to raise from what I've heard. There's this assumption that this legislation actually leads to greater protection against criminality, but that assumption is based on the fact that somebody is reported, detected, tried, sentenced, and convicted. Many vi

Citizenship and Immigration committee  First of all, I stand behind what I said originally, that clause 24 should be dropped. I don't want to take a contrary position, but I would say in the alternative I think one of the things that could be done is to remove this foreign conviction or the foreign crime where there's

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I wonder if I could interject here. The immigration threshold has an impact on sentencing. I've seen it with the two years. Now you get two years less a day, because the consequence of two years would be no appeal. In fact, if you don't know the immigration process and you don'

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In further answer to that question, there's also private member's legislation in France by Valérie Boyer, as there is now in New South Wales, Australia, by David Shoebridge. Also, Patrik Vankrunkelsven was one of the senators in Belgium, so we have a number of precedents to look

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In terms of that congressional record, there are a few things I would say. One is that you have a situation whereby, given the very nature of the facts, the victim is dead and the body is cremated. Nobody is going to come up and say, “I was organ-harvested.” We're dealing with s

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Maybe I can follow up on that. I approached this issue as all of you did. When it first came to me, I didn't know what Falun Gong was or whether this was true or not and I slowly worked my way into it. One of the things I realized is that the Chinese government, the Communist Pa

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Our research didn't stop in 2006. We did a second report in 2007. We did a third report in book form, Bloody Harvest, in 2009. We've done a fourth version last year. As we travel, we meet new witnesses and we hear new evidence; everything is reinforcing, nothing is contradicting.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  What you're asking is a strategic question to a certain extent, which this committee might be better placed to answer than we could, but I've tried to grapple with that myself. How do we deal with this particular issue, the killing of Falun Gong for their organs? There are differ