Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Your Honour, with respect to the honourable senator’s question, I expect that members of the Senate will appreciate that when it comes to specific visa applications, I’m not at liberty to comment.

That said, the families of the victims of PS752 have suffered an egregious injustice. We’ve advanced certain measures, including from an immigration perspective but not exclusively so, to see if we can better support those families. I do agree with the Prime Minister that it was a mistake to invite the Iranian soccer team to take part in that match.

Thankfully, better judgment prevailed, and at the end of the day, the game did not happen. There was a request for an additional soccer team to come and fill the space. That game didn’t happen either, not as a result of anything to do with immigration but, I understand, labour negotiations between the athletes and the organization.

With respect, there was no special effort made on my part regarding the particular soccer match that the honourable senator has referred to.

Hon. Amina Gerba: Minister, the immigrant entrepreneur program requires investments — for example, purchasing a business — before applicants even know whether their work permit application has been approved. However, investing in Canada does not guarantee that your immigration application will be approved. Minister, your website states that immigrants are selected on the basis of their potential contribution to the country’s economy. Can you tell us what measures your department is putting in place to increase the number of immigrant entrepreneurs who could contribute to our country’s prosperity?

[English]

Hon. Clément Gignac: Thank you, minister, for being here with us. Under the terms of the Canada-Quebec Accord signed in 1991, Quebec has more authority over immigration than any other province and is responsible for selecting skilled workers. Still, given the decline of French in the Montreal area, where nearly 85% of immigrants choose to settle when they come to Quebec, the province recently asked to fully repatriate all immigration powers. The Premier of Quebec even spoke of the risk of Quebec becoming another Louisiana in North America. I won’t ask you to comment on those remarks. However, I would like you to explain the reasons and motives behind your reluctance to grant more powers to Quebec so that it can control all the tools needed to protect the French language.

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.

[Translation]

Hon. Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu: Minister, I asked your colleague, the Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, a question on June 2 about the troubling issue of the labour shortage, particularly in Quebec, where this problem seems to be having a serious impact on the economy. One reason for this shortage is the basically unacceptable amount of time it is taking your department to process visa applications, as well as the equally unacceptable wait times. It can take more than a year to get a work visa from Immigration Canada.

Minister, we know that the backlog of applications at the department is in the millions. According to some media reports, we are talking about 2 million pending applications across all categories. Can you tell us how many work permit applications are pending and what you plan to do to fix these unacceptable delays, which are having a negative impact on the Quebec economy?

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. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: That is a question that involves specific details of an individual going through a process. Realistically, we have processes in place to ensure we can do a proper screening when a person makes an asylum claim.

It’s not lost on me — nor is it lost on the government — that we need to continue to advance negotiations with the United States to modernize the Safe Third Country Agreement. The challenge of irregular migration is one that impacts countries all over the world. Canada is unique in the fact that we’re surrounded by three oceans and have the United States to our south. It is not as great a problem for us as it is for many others. But when we have an individual who seeks to enter Canada contrary to the rules, makes what could potentially be an asylum claim without having the grounds to justify one, particularly when fleeing the laws of another jurisdiction, that’s why we have extradition treaties. When we find someone who is trying to escape justice and makes a false claim for asylum, they will be subject to those extradition treaties.

This is a particularly egregious example that you have just raised. Again, without all of the facts before me, it serves as a justification for me to continue my work to help modernize the Safe Third Country Agreement so we have a better understanding with the United States about how to manage the longest undefended border anywhere in the world.

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: Let me share a personal experience from my own community that sort of flips your question on its head to some degree. My belief is that if we don’t continue to welcome people to our communities we will actually lose that infrastructure, but we should be planning on it in the way you’ve suggested.

When I was first running for office, the biggest controversies in my community were the closure of the River John Consolidated School and the loss of the mental health unit at the Aberdeen Hospital in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. We’ve embraced immigration. We have seen a lot of people coming back to our community and a lot of people like me, who spent time in Western Canada and came back home. The biggest challenge we have now is whether we can build enough houses to welcome all the people who want to move here instead of losing schools and hospitals because so many people are leaving. I know which problem I would rather have.

We have conversations constantly. In the House of Commons, I sit beside the Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion to talk about how we can expand housing stock to make sure that we can provide homes, not just for newcomers but for people who are here now. He quickly tells me that we need a workforce through immigration to actually bring the workers here to build out that housing stock.

When we seek to table the immigration levels plan in Parliament, I have conversations with my provincial counterparts to understand the absorptive capacity that they are dealing with. We are trying to develop strategies right now to ensure that, as we welcome more newcomers, we push them to communities that have the absorptive capacity to welcome people so that they don’t just get here but they actually succeed after they arrive.

[Translation]

Hon. Amina Gerba: Minister, welcome to the Senate. Nearly every one of Canada’s immigration programs requires a job offer, which workers need to have prior to applying for a work visa. It is extremely difficult for foreign workers to get a job offer if they are outside the country. As an employer, I have had to deal with these difficulties myself when trying to recruit qualified foreign employees. However, as you know, minister, there is a major labour shortage in Canada, and immigration is now seen as a solution to this problem.

Minister, what can you do to ensure that the job offer requirement is no longer a barrier to addressing labour shortages in our country?

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 very much for the question, senator. For everyone who is seeking to come into Canada who is not subject to visa-free travel, there is a requirement that you complete the biometrics analysis in order to come into Canada. In addition, we typically do a biographic screening.

It sounds, in the case that the senator has laid out, that there was an absolutely horrible fate that befell the individual. Not being familiar with the personal circumstances, I hesitate to go further, but it’s essential that we continue to apply a rigorous analysis to understand that the people who are coming here meet a very high threshold for people we would like to come to Canada and who will make a contribution and not be a detriment to our society.

To the extent that there are shortcomings in the system that anyone would like to raise for us to continue to improve the process, please know that I’m not rigid in my defence of the status quo. We seek to continually look for ways to improve the system and strengthen the integrity so that Canadians continue to believe that immigration is a good thing for our communities. I believe this is essential to our social and economic well-being.

[Translation]

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.

[English]

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: Thank you so much for the question. The Welcoming Francophone Communities initiative, in my view, was a big success. I don’t want to pre-empt some very important consultations I need to have. You will have likely seen in my mandate letter a requirement that I develop an “ambitious national strategy” to boost francophone immigration. We’re seeing some of the numbers come up but, to answer your question, if it’s not simply repeated, the lessons we learn from it will be reimplemented.

I would also like to draw your attention to an enormous tool we are going to have that will help both boost francophone immigration and regionalize our immigration system, and that’s in Bill C-19, which the House of Commons recently adopted. There are new flexibilities proposed to the Express Entry system that will allow the Minister of Immigration — me today, but whoever my successor may be — certain flexibilities in targeting people who are going to a particular region, filling a particular need in the labour force or meeting certain criteria.

[Translation]

I think that is a better opportunity to welcome francophone newcomers and people who want to live in very small communities like the ones in my riding. I encourage all senators in this chamber to support the bill.

[English]

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you so much for your question, and to you and Senator Jaffer for the advocacy on this particular issue. Frankly, though I don’t have notes in front of me, I would push them aside dramatically if I did and speak as a human being. It is an injustice to see someone who has had the state placed in charge of their care, who believes they are a citizen, who has grown up in our country and who has no ability as a child in care to have pursued citizenship themselves to face the kind of circumstance that you have outlined.

Frankly, I think we have some policy work to do to fully understand the proposed outcomes that are in the Senate public bill that you have identified. There is also a suite of other measures that are outside of my mandate letter commitment that I would like to consider for reforms when it comes to the rules around citizenship in Canada.

I do think I have more work to do to satisfy myself that a change to the rules will achieve their intended outcome.

I would like to address this because, at the end of the day, you are responsible not only for your own actions but, in my view, the instances where you witness an injustice and choose to stand by. I look forward to continuing our work on this. However, we have a bit of policy work left to do before we can identify the best path forward to ensure this kind of consequence doesn’t harm innocent children who are raised by the state in Canada.

[Translation]

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.

[Translation]

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you for the inspiring question. Congratulations to all the students involved.

It reminds me of when I was an undergraduate student signing up in my first year to volunteer for the World University Service of Canada, or WUSC, an organization that seeks to bring refugees to Canada for the purpose of studying.

Are there lessons we can learn? Yes, absolutely. No one has a monopoly on good ideas, the government included. To the extent that we can understand how to support some of the world’s most vulnerable who also form part of the cohort of international students who make some of the greatest social and economic contributions to our communities, I think we can continue to do this.

One of the things I’m reluctant to do, though, is to find a good idea and have the government take it over. When it comes to refugee resettlement, private resettlement in Canada is actually the envy of many countries around the world when I engage with them on a bilateral basis. When people have a built-in network of supporters who have put energy, time and, sometimes, funds into welcoming people into their communities, it actually results in them being supported well after they arrive.

To the extent that the students at one of your alma maters want to see what we can do to help spread this kind of generosity, please note this is right up my alley. Supporting some of the world’s most vulnerable and leveraging our education system to do it seems like a positive initiative to me, and I want to reiterate my congratulations for this innovation. The positive social development space is deeply encouraging.

[Translation]