44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 31, 2023 10:00AM
- Oct/31/23 11:03:31 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are debating this motion about wraparound services for immigrants and newcomers coming to Canada. The minister was just in Calgary. He would know that the Centre for Newcomers in Calgary and the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society have had their funding cut. They need another $3 million to provide the key on-the-ground services for newcomers coming to Canada. They have estimated about 8,000 Ukrainians have come to Calgary on a CUAET visa and they are helping to resettle about 6,000 Afghans.
The situation has gotten so bad that the Calgary Police Service is dropping off government-assisted refugees, the responsibility of the federal government, in the lobby of its downtown locations because they have nowhere to go and this is the last place they can find refuge.
Winter is coming. Many of the service providers have had to let go 65 staff members between these two agencies and thousands more are expected to need that type of frontline help.
Why is the minister not providing that critical support? Why is he not there? When he was in Calgary, why did do nothing about this, knowing there would be a shortfall for this important frontline service to be provided in Calgary?
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- Oct/31/23 11:11:01 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be joining this debate. I will be sharing my time with the member for Edmonton Mill Woods, my colleague from up north, the deputy leader of the Conservative Party.
I would be remiss if I did not start by addressing an issue that is top of mind for many of my constituents and for Canadians coast to coast. I want to remind everybody about the carbon tax flip-flop of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has effectively created two classes of Canadians. One class of Canadians gets a carbon tax exemption on their home heating, while another much larger group of Canadians, including constituents of mine, will get nothing. They are not in that class of individuals.
This gimmick the Prime Minister has come up with has resulted in 97% of Canadians being excluded from getting any type of relief on their taxes. Any relief should apply to all regions of Canada, not to one region of Canada only for electoral purposes. There is only one answer to this, which is that home heating should have all carbon taxes removed from it. Common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax entirely on all home heating, gas, groceries and on farmers who grow the food, people who ship the food and people who process the food. Everybody deserves the same tax break.
We are debating a motion from the Bloc today. If the Bloc will indulge me, I am going to go over the different parts of the immigration system. I want to indict the former immigration minister, who is now the housing minister, on his performance. Having now heard the current immigration minister, we are basically repeating the same mistakes of the past.
It has come to a point where many Canadians are emailing me, calling me and direct messaging me. There are more articles being written about people's confidence in the integrity of the immigration system and whether it delivers on the expectations of Canadians. I think that is the substance of the motion the Bloc has put forward. Are we achieving our goals through the immigration system?
Many members know I am an immigrant; I came to Canada in 1985. All my kids have been born in Calgary. I have lived in different parts of Canada at different times. When I look at our immigration system today, it is not the fulfilling the promise to immigrants who are landing here like it did decades ago. I have had exchanges with the immigration minister about the immigration system as it functions right now.
There was a summer cabinet retreat about housing. It was telling that when the immigration minister was confronted, because we were trying to hold him accountable for those numbers, he could not even answer the basic question of how many construction workers had been brought in this year so far and how many were brought in last year, the year before and the year before that. He made a ridiculous claim like he was not the minister of NOC codes.
The number one way of tracking immigrants who come to Canada is by occupations they are in. An entire database system at Statistics Canada tracks exactly that one important statistic. It tracks their occupation and then, as they get more seniority, it tracks what type of occupation classification. The minister of immigration even alluded to the fact that the Minister of Immigration was also responsible for jobs, because a lot of immigrants who come here want to work. They want to make a contribution to the country that has greeted them and become their new home. Not to have that number is a real indictment. The previous immigration minister, when he became the housing minister, expressed a great deal of regret.
I want to talk about international students first and then I will go to the federal skilled trades program. On international students, an almost record number of international students are going to Canadian institutions. Some of them are going to U15 or to U21 to get post-graduate degrees. We are not so much concerned about their experience in Canada, although it is much more difficult finding a place to live, with the cost of living as it is today. What they are told by their country of origin about how much funds they will need annually to get by when they come to Canada is very different.
Then there are a lot of plaza colleges that are not providing an opportunity. First, many international students who come to Canada have a desire to seek a post-graduate work permit to continue making a contribution in the workplace. Now we hear story upon story of people living under bridges. We hear stories about people struggling and having to go to food banks. Some are Canadians, but they are also international students. I do not think these international students expected they would need to go to a food bank when they came to Canada.
During the summer, the now former immigration minister, now the current housing minister, said that it was not his fault. He said that it was an uncapped program and therefore a limitless amount of applications could be accepted. The minister was not responsible for two and a half years. We have reached this point today because he did not pay attention to his file when he was the immigration minister.
Now we can get to the federal skilled trades program. The primary way to bring in construction workers should be through this program, which even the OECD has criticized for not meeting its expectations. The correct number, the last time I checked in September, was 80. That is how many construction workers it has brought to Canada.
There are other programs to bring construction workers in. The present housing minister has said that we need construction workers from elsewhere, that we need to train them in Canada and find people who want to retrain. There is a zoning problem. There is a construction problem. We know we have the least amount of construction permits being issued. We need construction workers, people working in residential construction, who want to build homes, and we are not bringing those people in. In fact, when we look at the numbers generated for construction workers by the previous immigration minister over seven years, it is the same as the number of retail supervisors brought in over two years. Where were the priorities of the previous immigration minister? What were his priorities with respect to the immigration system? What was he focused on? Why did he not pay attention to this?
The previous immigration minister saw the numbers coming in and said that it was not his job. That is literally what the he told me when I asked him a very specific question about two immigrant service centres in Calgary that provide frontline services to government-assisted refugees. Unlike what the minister said, that is his responsibility. There are resettlement dollars being provided by the federal government expressly for this purpose, and they cannot be downloaded to the provinces.
I think this is a commonality. Hopefully, the Bloc will agree with me that we cannot download that service onto a province and expect it to just make it happen. The minister said it was not his job and not his responsibility. After they met with the then minister of immigration they came to see me because they were shocked by the answer they got, so I did get feedback on how that meeting went.
I find it galling that the current immigration minister would say that it was not his problem, not his fault, and the previous immigration minister is saying, after looking at the numbers, that he now has regrets. He then floated out a bunch of ideas, leaving it up to his replacement to try to figure out what is going on. We know how bad it is.
I have a document. The header is “International Students: Repatriation for sudden deaths”. That is how bad it is. It has been circulated by the World Sikh Organization, whose members I met with many months ago. They provided me with this document from a crematory and funeral home in Brampton. It had to create it specifically for international students because that is how bad it has become. The number of suicides in that community has risen greatly. This is just one such document, which goes on in quite a bit of detail, to help these families have their loved ones returned to their country of origin. That is the immigration system these immigration ministers, or housing ministers, as it is hard to follow which title they prefer now, have left us with to date.
I will come back to the motion moved by the Bloc Québécois.
Today, the backlog in the immigration system has reached 2.2 million applications. In September 2022, we were informed that an online portal would help reduce the number of applications in the backlog. That number has not gone down. We were talking about 2.2 million applications in September of last year. This year we are talking about 2.2 million applications. Just before the pandemic, we were talking about 1.9 million applications. During the pandemic that number reached 2.9 million applications. The backlog has been in the millions for years. For years, people have been waiting for an answer, for a yes or no, from the government.
Many people who are waiting for an answer are already working or studying here, and they are trying to change their temporary status to a permanent status. These people are in a precarious situation. It is hard for someone to see how life in Canada will unfold when they are constantly told they have to wait one more year.
These people are asking their MP for help, and all of our offices are flooded with requests from people who are having problems with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. That department has more than doubled; the number of employees has increased by 144% compared to 2013, and more than 200 people there are in management positions.
I am pleased to have had the opportunity to deliver this speech. I will support the Bloc Québécois motion, and it would be my pleasure to answer my colleagues' questions.
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- Oct/31/23 11:22:07 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member's question about residential, commercial and, of course, industrial infrastructure. Do we have enough highways, hospitals and clinics to provide the services people will need?
The province of Alberta has the second-highest rate of interprovincial migration. Many people who come to Canada settle first in another province and then choose Alberta. Even with all the information the federal government collects, it is hard for me to believe that anyone could ask immigrants which city they think they will live in now and which city they think they will be living in one, two, three, four or five years from now. It would be hard for immigrants to answer such a question, because they do not know. They sometimes receive very little information before coming to Canada.
I will give a personal example. When my father came to Canada, he did not know that there was a francophone province where people spoke only French. Before he began working at the Sorel-Tracy shipyard, he did not know that he would be working in French.
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- Oct/31/23 11:24:16 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the simple answer is no, that is not it.
Pre-2019, I did not have constituents coming to tell me that they were worried about being able to purchase a home or being able to pay rent. It was not a problem until the Liberal government, with its NDP allies, decided that it was a good idea to overspend $600 billion during the pandemic, $205 billion of which had nothing to do with addressing the pandemic losses to our economy, jobs, housing issues, and our health care systems across the provinces.
That overspending then led to a massive increase in the money supply. Does the House know who warned those two political parties not to do that? It was the member for Carleton. For two years, he kept warning that, if the government drastically increased the money supply without having new housing supply come on market, it would double the price of homes and rent. This was perfectly foreseeable, and they voted for it.
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- Oct/31/23 11:26:17 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my response will be about processing times. I actually do have a paper on that, and it is funny. The Auditor General's report found that, on average, privately sponsored refugees waited 30 months for a decision. Some of them waited two years before their file was even touched.
I have the 2015 numbers, so I would like to refresh the member's memory. In 2015, study permits took 31 days to process. They now take 88 days, as of just a few months ago. These are IRCC numbers. Work permits took 42 days in 2015. They now take 62 days to process. Temporary resident visas took 13 days to process back in 2015. Today, I have the number for April 2022, and it took 72 days. They have nothing to teach us on immigration processing times.
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- Oct/31/23 11:56:46 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I serve with the member on the immigration committee, and I want to bring it back to that particular issue, which is the substance of the Bloc motion.
There is an Auditor General's report that just came out about the immigration backlog and the eight immigration PR systems. The report mentions that there are two programs for permanent residency for privately sponsored refugees and government-assisted refugees that do not have service standards set for them. This is in violation of Treasury Board guidelines and directives to the department. Every single stream and service provided needs to have service standards.
I would like to hear the member's opinion on why the IRCC continues to violate Treasury Board guidelines.
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- Oct/31/23 12:26:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to ask the member to comment on the issue of online applications submitted to the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. Since September, the system has had a processing backlog of 2.2 million applications.
A year ago, we were told that the new system that was created forces all people, whether in Canada or outside, to apply to change their immigration status or to come to Canada as a visitor, worker or student. There are 2.2 million applications that have not been processed on time, and this figure has not changed in the last year. There are people waiting to be reunited with their spouses, children or parents.
I would like my colleague's comments on this.
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- Oct/31/23 12:53:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, to hear the parliamentary secretary tell it, Canada's immigration system has been working well for the past eight years. It is perfect and working exactly as the government intended. However, we know the application backlog is 2.2 million and growing. It seems to get a little bigger every month. Foreign students are turning to food banks every day, every month and every year. That was a rare phenomenon eight years ago, but it is very common now.
Is that the immigration system her government envisioned in 2015?
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- Oct/31/23 1:33:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to respond to the comments made by the leader of the Bloc Québécois. Behind all the numbers there are families, people who came to Canada or are waiting for permission to come to be reunited with their family, as was the case for members of my family.
However, the numbers also count for something. Since 2015, the number of departmental employees working on backlogged applications, which were already in the millions, has doubled. Just before the pandemic, there were 1.9 million backlogged applications from people who wanted to come to Canada or who were already in Canada but wanted to change their precarious temporary foreign worker status to permanent resident status and, of course, to one day become Canadian citizens.
The number of people working in the department has doubled. Today, it has 12,721 employees to do the work. The number of backlogged applications keeps going up. The number of directors at the department has risen from 135 to 237 and the applications are still backlogged. I think a basic principle needs to be followed here: If a person submits an application to a department, they should receive a service. People should not be left to wait for years with a precarious status.
I would like to hear the Bloc member's views on that.
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- Oct/31/23 4:50:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, after more than eight years, we have an immigration system with a backlog of over 2.2 million applications. It is shameful to make people wait to reunify their families. It is also shameful to make those with precarious status wait to find out whether they will be entitled to permanent resident status. Sometimes, they have to wait many years to find out if the answer is a yes or a no. The Auditor General found that approximately 99,000 people are waiting to be considered for refugee status and that they will have to wait an average of three years.
Does the member think that a good immigration system makes people wait three years to find out whether they have the right to stay in Canada?
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