44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 11, 2023 10:00AM
- May/11/23 10:32:37 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the Bloc leader a question about his motion.
He spoke a bit about the workers we need. I would like him to think on the following question. In Quebec and across Canada, we need skilled trades workers. The government's most recent numbers show that in 2019, we had to wait 12 months to bring in a skilled trade worker to work in Canada and Quebec.
In March 2023, the wait time for a worker to come to Canada was 73 months. We have desperate business owners who need these workers to be able to keep their businesses going. I would like the member to address this question about the number of workers we need in Canada. After eight years, the government is still completely incapable of providing our businesses with the skilled workers they need.
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- May/11/23 11:26:27 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one of the hardest parts of being in politics is having to speak right after the leader of the Conservative Party. He just delivered a powerful speech that was full of compassion for newcomers who choose to settle in Canada.
As many members know, I was myself a newcomer several years ago. I immigrated to Canada from Communist Poland. That country is no longer communist. That era is behind us. It is now a democratic country, and I am proud of my ethnic background.
My leader was right. Everything in Canada is broken. All federal government programs are broken, but immigration programs are even more broken.
As the immigration critic for the Conservative Party, I follow this file closely. I would also like to point out that one can become francophone as an immigrant. As I have often mentioned in the House, I am a child of Bill 101. It really is possible to learn how to be a francophone as an immigrant.
I know that the leader of the Bloc Québécois often mentions, with a hint of despair in his voice, that protecting Quebec culture is impossible. From my personal experience, I think culture can be preserved.
I am a Calgary MP, as my family is in Calgary now, and I am a proud Albertan. I still follow the day-to-day happenings in Quebec, but I also follow the work of great comedians. I want to mention one in particular who, to me, is one of the best in Quebec: Sugar Sammy. He is a great comedian. Many allophones and immigrants who have lived in Quebec, or who are still living there, follow Sugar Sammy.
I was in Quebec a few weeks ago, and I saw several announcements about an upcoming Sugar Sammy tour in Quebec. I know he may not be the comedian the Bloc would have preferred me to name, but I want to mention him, because I think he is a great Quebecker. He makes me laugh.
I want to come back to the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. There are backlogs in nearly every program. There are over 2,000 immigration applications from newcomers to Canada that are behind schedule. These people are waiting to come to Canada or to be allowed to stay in Canada.
I want to mention a few programs because I do like numbers. Let us talk about the government-assisted refugees program. I know that many Liberal members are going to talk about this program. One Liberal member already has. In 2019, it took 15 months to process applications. Today, it takes 33 months. That is a three-year wait.
There are also privately sponsored refugees. I am talking here about charities, churches, mosques or temples that decide they want to sponsor a refugee, usually from their community, and bring them to Canada. These refugees are desperate people who need help, and Canada gives them that opportunity. Private community groups cover all of the costs associated with that refugee coming to Canada. In 2019, it took 23 months for the federal government to process that type of application while today it takes 38 months. That is nearly a four-year wait.
Let us now talk about the federal skilled trades program. As another member mentioned, in 2019, it took 12 months to process applications under that program. Now it takes 20 months. For skilled workers in Quebec it used to take 22 months to process their applications and now it takes 73 months. As for business people in Quebec, it used to take 54 months to process applications, and now it takes 67 months.
I am not pulling these numbers out of thin air. These numbers can be found on the government's website. The Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship came to the House to tell us that these numbers were not up to date and that this would take only six months from now on. If it is a six-month wait time for people applying today, then that is great. However, those who submitted their application one, two, three or four years ago are waiting their turn and will continue to wait. They will wait four, five, six or seven years. Sometimes no one knows how long it will take.
What is more, 90 to 95% of the files that are sent to Conservative MPs at their riding offices have to do with immigration. An error was made, the wait times are too long, the questions are not clear, etc. No one answers the phone. No one answers the email. The responses provided by the employees at immigration are sometimes confusing and contradictory and no one knows where we are headed.
We should be focusing on what could be done to help newcomers and people in our communities in the next 75 days, not the next 75 years. The Liberals have caused the challenges people are facing today.
In 2015, there were no backlogs in processing applications. The Canadian immigration system was the best in the world, and countries everywhere were trying to copy it. It was based on a points system, which gave everyone the chance to come to Canada. I want to be clear that it was a neutral system. If the person was young and well educated, they had a better chance of coming to Canada as an economic immigrant. Our immigration system treated everyone equally. Other countries wanted to copy it, but no one wants to copy our current system, which was created by the Liberals eight years ago. The backlog in the current system is over two million applications. After the pandemic, the backlog reached 2.9 million.
The Liberals claim that the backlog was caused by the pandemic, but that is not true: it was caused by them. The backlog had reached two million files before the pandemic. The pandemic made matters worse.
As my leader said, the things that newcomers go through and the services they receive from the federal government do not meet our expectations.
I myself am an immigrant, and I know that the people in our communities have a hard time finding a job, a place to live or people who share their mother tongue. In Canada, we can learn French and English. I, for one, learned French from Passe-Partout; I know all Quebeckers are familiar with that show. English is my third language, and I learned it by watching Sesame Street.
This is a good opportunity for me to switch to English. There are a lot of opportunities for immigrants who come to this country, including those like me. I grew up in Montreal and am a child of the Bill 101 education system. It does work; I am proof, I think. There are many of us who are proof that it does work, that they can take up the language.
However, we have unrealistic plans. The false utopias that are being proposed by the Century Initiative are completely ridiculous. We have McKinsey executives, big business executives, including one from BlackRock and others, who do not spend the time visiting communities, smaller towns and rural regions, which are desperate for workers. Newcomers are coming to Canada, and there have been so many waves of immigration to Canada that have vitalized entire regions and communities. I know that, for example, in northern Alberta, there is a huge Ukrainian community, of Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox people, which is now accepting another wave of people fleeing the war in Ukraine. They are finding an opportunity to speak their mother tongue while also brushing up on their English or their French.
There are also communities in northern Alberta that are French communities and that have a historic French connection. I remember that, my first time in Alberta, when I first moved out there, I went into a rural area for, I think, a birthday party. There were two nuns there. They spoke to me in French. I could not believe it; it was immaculate, perfect French. They came from a French convent. We had a long discussion in that language, because that was their experience of being in Alberta: They had been brought up with both languages.
My leader was right. The Liberals have had eight years and have completely broken the immigration system. What we should be looking at is services. The newcomer experience to Canada is awful. That is why so many of them are talking about returning to their country of origin; it is because they cannot find the opportunities that they were promised here.
There is so much we can do to make sure foreign credentials are recognized. My father was not able to practise here as an engineer because he could not pass a language exam. He passed all of the technical exams. That is the experience of so many immigrants who come here and are discriminated against just because they have credentials from overseas. We have heard the numbers: 32,000 nurses and over 20,000 doctors. There are engineers in my riding who cannot practise here easily, because they are being discriminated against because of where they got their years of experience or where they got their credentials and education.
The provincial colleges need to be told to stop gatekeeping and allow people to practise their professions, to do the thing that they love here in Canada, to add to our communities, build a family and provide for themselves. That is the Canadian dream. That is what we have to restore.
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- May/11/23 11:37:35 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let us talk numbers. I remember it was a previous Liberal government that left behind a backlog of six to eight million applications for the Conservative government.
They did not shut down the program. They returned money to everybody and restarted the program from zero because they botched it so badly. There was no choice but to do that, and they are doing that again. The people who are going to suffer are newcomers and immigrants to Canada who are being given false hopes and dreams while they are processing these applications.
Let us talk numbers because the member raised them. I see here for the family class that every single one of the lines is longer than it used to be. Every single one now takes longer than they did in 2019. I am not even going back all the way to 2015, I am just talking 2019.
Every single one, parents or grandparents, spouses, partners and children, family relations, humanitarian and compassionate consideration, or H&C as we call it, is longer today than they used to be. The Liberals have a backlog that is two million applications, not the Conservatives. They created this problem.
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- May/11/23 11:39:47 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his question, which I think is very reasonable. Quebec has an agreement with Canada regarding the establishment of criteria for immigrants who want to settle in Quebec. My family settled in Quebec. In the 1980s, my father worked at the shipyard in Sorel, which no longer exists.
It is not the government that welcomes immigrants. It is the communities in the cities and regions. Cultural communities and groups are the ones that welcome them. I think that there is tremendous potential if we ask for help from existing community groups that can get money from the private sector and from various religious communities that would be willing to help newcomers settle in Quebec and Canada.
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- May/11/23 11:41:40 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I completely disagree with the member's characterization.
I read the motion, both in French and then in English, and it sounds exactly the same to me. This motion basically rejects the Century Initiative, which is big business executives with these pie-in-the-sky dreams, these utopias that were talking about 75 years from now.
I want to talk about the immigrant experience today, right now. What they are experiencing on the ground is long wait times, families broken up and people divorcing. Spousal sponsorships for Iran are completely blocked at the visa processing offices during a revolution led by women in Iran. Spousal sponsorships are not being processed. There are people who have waited years, sometimes up to five years. There are people getting divorced because they cannot even bring in their partner from a place like Iran, where there is an autocratic regime. They are persecuting women and men on the streets right now.
We should be doing so much more. I do not see any of that in this motion right here. This is simply rejecting a ridiculous pie-in-the-sky utopian dream that these big business executives put together for McKinsey.
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