The Hon. the Speaker: Honourable senators, we welcome today the Honourable Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, to ask questions relating to his ministerial responsibilities.

Pursuant to the order adopted by the Senate on December 7, 2021, senators do not need to stand. Questions are limited to one minute and responses to one and a half minutes. The reading clerk will stand 10 seconds before the expiry of these times. Question Period will last one hour.

On behalf of all senators, minister, welcome to the Senate of Canada.

The Hon. the Speaker: Honourable senators, the time for Question Period has expired. I’m certain all colleagues will want to join me in thanking Minister Fraser for being with us today.

Thank you, minister. We look forward to seeing you again in the future.

(Pursuant to the order adopted by the Senate on December 7, 2021, to receive a Minister of the Crown, the Honourable Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, appeared before honourable senators during Question Period.)

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you very much. Once again, if we’re going to identify the solution, I think we have to understand where the problem comes from. There are a couple of things going on that have created record demand in Canada’s immigration system at a time when our ability to supply services has been reduced primarily by the pandemic, but also by competing priorities, including the responses to both Afghanistan and Ukraine.

The numbers that we’re seeing now actually far exceed some of the numbers in your question, and when you seek to add thousands of staff over the last couple of years, it is still not enough to keep up with this short-term spike as a result of challenges related to the factors that I have just laid out.

Now, it’s not all negative news because, of course, we’re doing things to address these problems. I laid out some of the investments we have made that I won’t repeat. The big secret here is going to be to transform Canada’s immigration system into a digital one. We have a heavily paper-based system today. You can imagine somebody who has reached out to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and made a phone call will figure out that their paper is on the other side of the world. They call their MP, who reaches out to my office, who reaches out to a local office where somebody might actually have to pull out a physical piece of paper and then call everyone back in that chain to have the client receive an update on their case.

That’s unacceptable to me. I’m changing it. We have an $827‑million digital renovation of Canada’s immigration system under way. I mentioned the permanent residence case tracker available to family reunification previously. That’s going to give real-time information about a person’s case to them, so they not only will get good information, they won’t call Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which will free up the resources so we can deal with other challenging situations where a person is seeking something more than just an update.

We will have 17 lines of business with the ability to take digital applications as soon as this summer. We are already seeing some of the results of the investments in citizenship pay dividends with increased processing and results.

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Hon. Kim Pate: Thank you, Minister Fraser, for joining us. As you know, too many children who come to Canada as immigrants and refugees can end up in the care of the state through no fault of their own. That means the state becomes their parent, and it can be a very quick slide from child welfare into the criminal legal system, which is where they often find out for the first time that they are not citizens. Only unrelenting advocacy and last-minute interventions by the government have currently been accessible to prevent such deportations.

Minister, what does your government intend to do to stop these children from falling through the cracks? Will you commit to the solutions found in Senator Jaffer’s Bill S-235 that could help protect these vulnerable people?

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you very much to one of my Senate colleagues for the question.

Let me be quite clear: I’m actually very grateful for my colleague Mr. Seeback’s work. I sent him a note in the House of Commons to that effect because I think he’s done something important by putting some ideas down in the private member’s bill. I don’t think that the private member’s bill, as it was crafted, had accomplished things in exactly the correct way.

For those of you who might not be completely familiar with the program, the super visa provides an opportunity for family reunification for people who may not have qualified under a permanent residency program —

Hon. Tony Loffreda: Minister Fraser, thank you for joining us today. I want to discuss infrastructure. I strongly support your government’s intention to welcome over 1.3 million new Canadians in the next three years. Our economy actually depends on that, and hopefully it will contribute to correcting our labour shortages. But it’s one thing to welcome thousands of new citizens to our country, and it’s a whole other thing to properly integrate them by ensuring we have the infrastructure to adequately support and address their needs.

What discussions are you having with your cabinet colleagues and provincial counterparts to ensure that Canada is best positioned to meet the infrastructure needs of its immigrants? I’m talking about community centres, schools and hospitals. A population of 1.3 million Canadians is bigger than Ottawa — it’s the size of Calgary. If we are going to welcome 1.3 million new immigrants, we need infrastructure.

Hon. Colin Deacon: Thank you, Minister Fraser, for being with us today.

Following on from Senator Gerba, you know that there is a major labour and talent shortage right across our economy. As a result, I want to ask about attracting and fast-tracking more skilled talent for our innovation sector.

Last week, the United Kingdom launched its High Potential Individual visa stream for global top talent to come to the U.K. Distinct from Canada’s Global Talent Stream, individuals do not require a job offer, and eligible individuals would have the flexibility to work or switch jobs or employers. Additionally, they could extend their stay and obtain permanent residency within the visa category.

I have two questions. Have you looked into the possibility of developing a similar high-potential tech talent visa program in Canada, as suggested by organizations like the Council of Canadian Innovators? And in what ways might the start-up visa program be modified to more successfully attract entrepreneurial tech talent to Canada? Thank you.

(Pursuant to the order adopted by the Senate on December 7, 2021, to receive a Minister of the Crown, the Honourable Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, appeared before honourable senators during Question Period.)

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: First, thank you very much for the question. I really do appreciate when people draw into focus the importance of helping those who have helped Canada in our time of need.

As I mentioned in response to the previous answer, a significant number of people have been arriving in Canada from Afghanistan as part of our special program. We are currently in excess of 15,500. There is another charter scheduled to arrive this Thursday with more than 300 people on board.

Despite some of the challenges and the very serious uptick in the pace of arrivals that we’ve seen since the end of March and the beginning of April, there remain certain challenges. Some of those have to do with safe passage on the ground. We also have an extraordinary number of people — in excess of 1 million — who have reached out to the department I’m responsible for in the hopes that they can be a part of the program.

We’re going to continue to move forward until we achieve our goal of 40,000, but, with respect to your particular question, for those who are not yet enrolled in the program who have made an actual application or submitted some sort of expression of interest that we have a touch point with, we will be letting them know very soon — I don’t have a specific date for you, but I expect it will be in a very short period of time — that those who qualify for the program will be certain. Also, those who, unfortunately, won’t be part of the program will be made aware.

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you very much.

To put this into perspective, the volumes we’re seeing are immense. If we are going to solve the problem, we have to understand where they came from. Certainly there are challenges with the short-term response to different humanitarian crises, but we saw during the pandemic that a decision was taken to resettle people who are already in Canada on a temporary basis, in some ways to the exclusion of people who couldn’t travel when the borders were closed. At the same time, our operational capacity as a department was hamstrung by public health orders all over the world that shut down offices, reducing our capacity.

We’ve seen an uptick in calls to IRCC in fiscal year 2020-21, from 5.9 million calls to 10.41 million the following year, and we’re increasing from there. What we’re doing right now to address the problem is putting more resources into the system, adopting policies to make more spaces and also adopting new technology. In a perfect world, we won’t be in the business of reaching back out to the millions of people who have come with us but proactively giving them information in their pocket so they can catch it themselves on their own schedule. We’ve already introduced that feature, a case tracker, in February of this year for family reunification. Because we’re transitioning from a paper-based system towards a digital one, it will take a little bit of time for all other lines of business to have access to the same feature. We are doing what we can and, frankly, we are starting to see immense progress.

I’ll wrap up by saying that we expect to be back to standard processing times across almost all lines of business by the end of this calendar year, pending further COVID shutdowns or humanitarian crises, with citizenship probably spilling a bit into next year before we’re fully caught up.

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: I have many ideas about how to address the labour shortage and increase the number of permanent and temporary workers in Canada.

[English]

On the specific issue that you raise around the need to have a job offer before you can come, I think you have to remember that we’re designing a program to meet the needs of the Canadian economy. There will inevitably be many people who would like to come to Canada that exceeds the capacity of Canada to resettle on a permanent basis.

One of the things we do to monitor the ability to welcome people here in a way that our communities can manage is having our temporary programs be driven by employers. One of the enormous changes I have seen in my own community is extending supports to small- and medium-sized employers who may not have a significant human resources department focused on recruitment and the hiring of foreign nationals to fill gaps if the labour force. It actually teaches them that immigration doesn’t have to be a scary thing. Most of them are so focused on manufacturing the thing that they sell or working on their core line of business that growing their workforce through immigration is a secondary thing that they would like to take on but may not be able to.

In addition, I think we need to continue to look for opportunities to make it easier for people to get here and think about changes to make it easier for spouses of people who are already here so we can promote both family reunification and drive the economy. We are in a really unique moment in time, with the economy running as hot as it is yet still having hundreds of thousands of job vacancies. Anything we can do to pull the levers to actually get workers here more quickly and meet the needs of the Canadian workforce and economy without taking advantage of those workers is essential. I would extend an open invitation, or perhaps a dedicated session would be appropriate, to actually solicit ideas from members of the Senate on how we can more effectively and quickly get workers into Canada to meet the gaps in the labour force.

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you for the question.

It is often said that immigration is essential to combat labour shortages.

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Just for the sake of specificity and wanting to make sure I give good detail, I’ll answer in my first language, if that’s okay. One of the things that is really important that we understand is that the numbers you’re citing would include everyone who has applied, including those who have applied as recently as yesterday. When we recently introduced a program to welcome large numbers of Ukrainians, for example, we have seen a significant number of applications. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

What we need to continue to focus on is whether we are seeing the processing times come down so the individual applicant can actually have a reliable period in which they can predict and plan their lives accordingly in terms of how they are going to get to Canada.

What we are actually doing to address these challenges is really monumental, and it’s really starting to have a positive impact. In the Economic and Fiscal Update 2021, we invested $85 million to reduce the processing times for work permits, study permits, temporary residence visas, permanent residence cards and proof of citizenship, followed by a $385-million investment in the system to improve client service for people who are seeking to come to Canada. We have hired 500 new staff.

Regarding work permits, we have now processed more than 216,000 this year before the end of last month, compared to only 88,000 the year before. As I mentioned in a previous answer, we are now at 200,000 permanent residents, as of last week, who have landed in Canada, with 100,000 more in the landing inventory, which has never been achieved this early in the year. It was a month and a half later in 2016 when we hit that record previously.

The other things we need to do are continue to adopt policies that allow people to get here quickly, allow more people in a year to get here through the immigration levels planned and, of course, continue to advance the digital transformation of our department.

To sum it all up, it’s resources, policy and technology adoption. We will continue to promote all three. Canada has a world-class immigration system. It has been hit hard by the pandemic, but when I look at the numbers internally, the resources we are putting into the system are having the desired effect by boosting the processing times, getting workers here more quickly and reuniting families at a pace much faster than last year.

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: I want to make clear that we have to do whatever we can to bring workers into Canada as quickly as possible. To make that happen, we need to continue to put resources into the system in the short term and adopt policies that make it easier for people to work — some of whom are already in Canada and some of whom are in another country.

In terms of resources, we simply need to put more people to work to ensure we’re processing the files. We need to digitize the application process and ensure that we’re identifying bottlenecks.

To answer your question on the service standard that we are trying to get back to, we’re typically looking at 60 days. I believe we can get there as soon as the end of this calendar year. If we continue to see the uptick in processing that I’m witnessing when I look behind the curtain at the processing numbers, some of which I shared, I anticipate that we’ll be able to get back there.

There are certain challenges in the province of Quebec because there is sometimes a two-stage process — some of which the provincial government is responsible for and some of which the federal government is responsible for.

To answer your question, the service standard is 60 days. I have faith that with the resources we have already put into the system, we could get back there as soon as the end of this year.

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Minister Gould is a dear friend of mine and one of the most competent members of any party in the House of Commons. I don’t take her comments as a personal criticism.

We work together to advance policies that can simplify the process for passport renewal. We also work together to ensure that one another’s departments — and, in fact, this is true across cabinet — have the necessary resources to provide the kind of service that Canadians quite rightly expect.

I think you’ll appreciate, senator, that we are living through exceptional times. As the world opens up more or less simultaneously and there is a pent-up demand for travel, there are challenges in predicting with certainty the exact number of people who will be seeking to renew their passports at a given point in time.

More than 500 new staff have been added. The wickets are now all open. For what it’s worth, I had to renew my children’s passports — one new issuance and one renewal — and I did this the same way that everyone else does. It was a bit frustrating, but at the end of the day, we were served professionally by competent civil servants who are working to ensure that as many passports as possible can be issued. As we see demand stabilize now that capacity has been ramped up, I expect that over time you will see an improved quality of service — like you’re seeing across different sectors of the economy as the world opens up from COVID-19 restrictions.

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: I want to be careful here because I have personal knowledge about some of the things we discussed today. For some of them, I came in after the fact. Nevertheless, I am responsible for the department.

This is a huge opportunity for me to say thank you to all of those who were involved with the evacuation. As a result of the efforts on the ground, thousands of people have been given a second lease on life in Canada. In the middle of a war zone, as you can appreciate, there is absolute chaos. When you’re dealing with a list of terrorist entities seizing control of Kabul at a time when hundreds of thousands of people were seeking to leave, potentially millions, having a rigid process with referral partners and proper screening — as we would through essentially a managed UNHCR initiative — was not possible. Decisions were taken at the time to try to identify anyone who had a connection to Canada to get them on board planes that had limited access to the strip in Kabul to get them out.

Since then, of course, we have been able to put in a more reliable process than you can implement in response to an emergency of that nature to ensure that we continue to see people arrive. We are seeing more people arrive now, with more than 15,500 in Canada and more arriving every week.

The job that the members of my team have done — some of whom are still working with me; some of whom have moved on to other things, the previous minister as well as the department — was nothing short of heroic despite some imperfections along the way. There are no perfect responses in a war zone. However, as a result of the actions of a few Canadians who tried hard to evacuate some of the world’s most vulnerable people in those moments, there are thousands of people who made it to Canada.

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