House Hansard - 67

44th Parl. 1st Sess.

May 9, 2022 11:00AM

May/9/22 5:42:55 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill C-19

Madam Speaker, I absolutely agree. In this budget, there is over $2 billion going to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to be able to deal with the backlogs. The idea is that by the end of this year, with these investments, we will get back to a normal service standard, as well as introducing new programs, such as an expedited temporary foreign worker program, which I know would be a game-changer for some of the hardest-hit sectors where there are major labour shortages, such as tourism in my riding. There is a lot here on immigration. Because of the backlogs related to COVID, we have a lot we need to do. With these investments and some of the changes that are being made to expedite the processes, we are going to be able to deal with some of the backlogs that are causing major issues.

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Context: House Hansard - 67 - May/9/22

Mr. Larry Brock (Brantford—Brant, CPC)

May/9/22 7:07:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, earlier this year I asked the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship about the unprecedented backlog of immigration applications. The system is struggling to recover from two years of the pandemic due to a lack of planning and crisis management, as well as poor leadership. If the approach is not changed, it will take years to catch up on the millions of applications in the queue. Shockingly, according to data from the IRCC, the backlogs have increased to more than two million applications across all categories. For over two years, the department has closed almost all in-person interviews. Interviews, tests, citizenship ceremonies and other appointments have been cancelled and offices shifted to working on a rotating basis. While most Canadians transitioned to online work with minimal trouble, that is not the case with the IRCC and the government. Instead of identifying the problem that we, as Conservatives, have been flagging along the way and fixing it at the very beginning, the government ignored it. It had more than a year to do so, but then the first crisis hit. In September 2021, the Afghan government collapsed. Canada introduced special programs to resettle the refugees, but with the government's broken immigration system, during the most pressuring six months, the government was able to help only 4,000 Afghans, or 10% of its campaign commitment. Then the second crisis hit. In February of this year, the Russian Federation launched an unprovoked attack and genocide against the Ukrainian people. Instead of implementing visa-free travel from Ukraine to Canada, which Conservatives called for from day one, the government introduced the authorization for emergency travel, allowing Ukrainians to arrive in Canada on temporary resident visas. Ukrainian passport holders can travel visa-free to the European Union, the U.K., Switzerland, Israel and many other countries. None of them have any concerns about the made-up excuses by the Liberal minister. The Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration voted in favour of visa-free travel for Ukrainians; the Liberals voted against it. The members of this House also voted and passed a similar motion, but again, the members voted against it. To give colleagues a perspective on why this is important, the minister of immigration claimed that that sort of change would require 12 to 14 weeks of work to implement, because the department's IT systems would need certain renovations. Here we are, almost 11 weeks since the beginning of the war, and the system could have been already working, but the government failed to listen and act accordingly. To date, we have heard that more than 140,000 applications have been submitted by Ukrainians. That is how many fewer applications there might have been in the queue if the Liberals had followed our advice and eliminated all visa requirements. If that was not enough, we now have a third crisis across this country. Canadians are desperately trying to renew their passports, and while improvements were supposed to have come in to alleviate the backlog, little change has occurred. Nearly 500,000 applications were received in March and April of this year. Streams of constituents are calling, writing to me and coming into my office about the issue. The government had years to plan ahead to tackle the passport issue before it began. The government should have had that in mind before the pandemic hit, that the 10th anniversary of the 10-year passport was coming. We literally have a trifecta of burning issues in our immigration and citizenship systems, all of which were avoidable and all of which were preventable.

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House Hansard - 67