- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
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Madam Speaker, I do not think it is really worth my time to respond to anything that the member for Winnipeg North said, but I do want to respond to some of the comments about conscription.
A couple of members asked an interesting question about how the listing of the IRGC impacts those who have been conscripted into it. Rather than just talking about the problem, Conservatives have actually put the solution to this problem in Bill C-350, and I invite members to read it. We proposed an amendment to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which would say that a person is deemed not to have been a member of an organization if certain conditions are met: if they were required to fulfill a mandatory service period within the organization, if they did not commit atrocities while they were part of the organization and if they did not extend their stay with that organization.
We have not just talked about the problem and said, “This is unsolvable, so we are not going to do it.” Conservatives have recognized the issue and proposed an amendment in Bill C-350 that would solve the conscription problem. Therefore, I encourage members who are serious about wanting to do this to support Bill C-350 and get it through second reading, so it can be studied and further refined at committee and we could actually get this done.
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- Sep/19/23 10:19:29 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the next petition I am presenting deals with the Canada summer jobs program.
Sadly, Ukrainian youth who have come to Canada as part of the authorization for emergency travel are not able to participate in the Government of Canada-funded summer jobs program. The petitioners believe, and rightly so, that this is an unfair exclusion and that youth coming here as refugees should not be prevented from accessing this very large number of summer jobs, which happen to be funded by the Canadian government. They are are looking to support themselves and their families. The petitioners note that youth from Ukraine are facing unique barriers and should not be barred from summer jobs in this arbitrary way. They call on the Government of Canada to allow Ukrainian youth under the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel to apply for jobs funded through the Canada summer jobs program. Sadly, it is too late for this summer, but there will be other summers in the future.
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Madam Speaker, on much simpler matters such as passports and immigration applications, the government has massively expanded the delays we are seeing. When we already have families who are being privately sponsored for refugee status having to wait for three years and we hear the government saying it is going to approve exemptions in a reasonable amount of time, we do not have three years to wait, clearly, to get these exemptions moving forward.
By the sound of the question, my colleague from the Bloc has exactly the same concerns that I have, which are around timelines: how long it has taken us to get this far and how much longer it will take to not only pass the legislation, which is part of the process, but also get to a point where organizations are able to implement programs.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to start by congratulating the member for Dufferin—Caledon, a member of the Conservative caucus, for putting forward this bill. It is a bill that very much reflects Conservative Party values and emphasizes the importance of open and fair immigration. It is also a bill that is very pro-family. It recognizes the value of strong families and of families being able to spend time with each other, and the need to have creative measures that allow for families to spend time together.
What we really need to reflect on in terms of reforms to our immigration system is the value of family and extended family and how we can promote family connectedness so that people do not have to suffer through these processes and spending long periods of time away from close family members in the context of waiting for applications to be processed or in the case of other situations. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to that a bit today.
Specifically, the bill put forward, Bill C-242, by the member for Dufferin—Caledon, would amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act as follows:
to allow a parent or grandparent who applies for a temporary resident visa as a visitor to purchase private health insurance outside Canada and to stay in Canada for a period of five years.
It would also require the Minister of Immigration to prepare a report on possibly reducing the minimum income requirement for a child or grandchild. This recognizes the value of what is often called a “super visa”, supporting family members so they can be together and support each other.
A bit of context is important here. Very often, families are looking at sponsoring members of their immediate or extended family to come to Canada for permanent immigration. That is a valuable channel, but there are limits to it. There is an additional option, one that maybe reflects the desire of some family members who would like to come and stay for a long time in Canada but do not plan on permanently immigrating here. I believe it was a Conservative government that developed the idea of having a super visa program as an additional channel for people. The super visa is for people who are not immigrating permanently to Canada but would simply like to come here, be with family members, like children and grandchildren, and spend extended periods of time with them.
As a condition, those who come are expected to purchase private health care and are therefore not relying on the public system. This is very reasonable. We should not stick ourselves in this binary of saying that either people do not come or they come and immediately have all the social services associated with someone who has a permanent presence in Canada. Instead, we can create mechanisms that allow people to come and spend significant amounts of time in Canada with family members, while paying privately for insurance. At the same time, we should look to make these channels more accessible and more reasonable so that more people can take advantage of these opportunities to be together as a family.
The super visa program is a very good program and a very popular program, and for those who are able to fit into this stream, it really achieves the best of all possible worlds. It is beneficial to Canadian society to have these folks come and be with family members and provide various kinds of support to their families. Also, again, it recognizes the fact that there are some limits in the permanent immigration stream regarding parents and grandparents. It strengthens this particular stream and allows those who may not wish to be here permanently to nonetheless come and be present in and supportive of their families.
Needless to say, the value of extended families is well known, I think, to all Canadians. For many cultural communities, there is a particular recognition of and appreciation for the role being played by extended family members. As I give this speech now, I have five children at home, and I am very glad that my mother-in-law is able to visit and play such a key supportive role in our family. That enables me to travel and enables my wife to do all the things she does. For newcomers to Canada who do not have the benefit of grandparents being here in Canada, that can create some really significant challenges.
Having that super visa channel available and extending it to five years, making it more accessible and making it easier for people to make those health care insurance purchases by giving them a broader range of options of who they can purchase from, makes that transition so much easier for people who are living and working here in Canada. This is really designed to ease that process. Again, it reflects a Conservative understanding of the value of family connections, both within the idea of a nuclear or immediate family, but also within the extended family and the supports that are provided there.
This is an excellent bill, but there are many more things that the government needs to do, and that Conservatives are calling on the government to do, to address the unnecessary pressures on families that are associated with our immigration system right now.
One of the main complaints we are hearing in our offices is the strain that is created for families by backlogs. The fact is that across a broad range of immigration categories, there are huge delays, and this forces families to be apart from each other for much longer than they should be. The idea that people have to wait years, for instance, to have a spouse come to Canada, or that they have to wait years for other members of their families or for caregivers to come to Canada who meet all the requirements and are very much needed, is an issue that we need to really get to the bottom of.
This affects the issue of refugee sponsorship as well. The delay, I think, is three years for private refugee sponsorship, so Canadian community groups, church groups and others who are waiting to sponsor vulnerable refugees have to wait for a three-year period. It may be that those refugees are in a vulnerable situation: they may be in need of ongoing financial support where they are or their security may be in question, yet they are sitting and waiting while the Canadian sponsors are sitting and waiting for that long processing delay. Those lengthy delays are simply unacceptable, and they require urgent action by the government and by all of us.
In our last concern of the election platform, I was very proud of some of the concrete proposals that Conservatives put forward in terms of expediting, processing and addressing the long backlogs. Of course, the adjudication process is critically important, but it needs to be timely. It is always tragic when families are forced to be apart for years for no reason other than bureaucratic delay, so we need to do much better. The government needs to do much better in terms of ensuring a lean, effective and results-driven immigration system. We all see these frustrations in our offices right now, and this is why we have really been pushing forward on the issue of backlogs across the range of categories.
As well, my colleague for Dufferin—Caledon gave notice of motion at the immigration committee today on a motion to call for addressing the backlogs in citizenship applications, which is a different issue from immigration applications. There are various elections coming up in different parts of the country. Here in Ontario, there is going to be a provincial election relatively soon, and people who would otherwise be eligible for their citizenship and would participate in that election are waiting in longer and longer queues to get their citizenship applications processed. It is not just on the front of families being together, but it is on other fronts, such as people being able to exercise their democratic rights and other things where the issue of delays, inefficiencies and backlogs within the immigration system has concrete negative effects for families. We put forward some concrete proposals in our last election platform around addressing this. I think it is very important.
I will conclude by congratulating the member for Dufferin—Caledon and recognizing the work that he is doing in trying to strengthen and make more accessible the super visa program. This very much aligns with our vision of a family-friendly immigration policy: one that recognizes the value of strong families and of families being able to be together.
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- Mar/29/22 11:41:14 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member's speech was very much on point. The Liberals always claim that other people are being partisan when they do not want to support an obviously good idea that has the support of the rest of the House and the support of Canadians. It is important that we being forward a substantive issue at a critical time and it is too bad that it sounds like the government is not going to support it.
I was struck by the last question from the member for Winnipeg North, in that he implied that more support should be offered by provinces and by universities when in fact the federal government has been criticized for not stepping up to provide basic assistance for those coming from Ukraine. Those who are coming are not technically considered refugees under the refugee category, which means they do not have access to federal programs that normally exist for people in that situation.
I wonder if the member from the Bloc wants to comment on the fact that the government has been heavily criticized by the Canadian Ukrainian Congress and others for not offering support to those who come from Ukraine, and then the member is using the needs for support as an excuse for not allowing visa-free travel. The government should be offering that support, but why not let people come through the visa-free travel channel since the government is not currently offering that support as it is?
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- Mar/29/22 10:46:39 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is an excellent question from the NDP. Unfortunately, I think it is a question more for the government to answer than for me.
However, I will speculate that with a lot of its immigration measures, it seems the government is obsessed with control. It is capping private sponsorship, and the member for Winnipeg North is saying that we need to know exactly how many people are coming. It is all about government controlling the process.
I would say that individual Canadians who want to sponsor vulnerable refugees, who want to welcome Ukrainians who are fleeing, can step up, and they will do that. It is not for the government to try to control the precise number. In cases of a crisis like this, it should listen to and respond to Canadians' willingness to welcome those who are in a crisis situation.
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- Mar/29/22 10:32:26 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to be able to participate in the debate on this Conservative motion for concurrence to take a number of measures related to immigration required to support the people of Ukraine, and, in particular, to implement visa-free travel from Ukraine to Canada.
I will start by saying I recently joined the immigration committee. It has been a pleasure to work with colleagues from all sides on the immigration committee, especially the member for Calgary Forest Lawn, our shadow minister, who has so much passion in this area. As he mentioned in his speech, he was privately sponsoring refugees as a private citizen before he was elected to the House of Commons or anywhere close to that. We need more members who take this area very seriously and are able, independently of the spotlight and outside of their elected lives, to actually be willing to put their money where their mouths are.
Before I get into the immigration measures, I want to speak to the situation unfolding in Ukraine overall. There has been a great deal of debate in the House on this previously. It is important that we do not let up and allow it to drift out of the headlines. We cannot stop really thinking about the ongoing situation and conflict.
When I spoke earlier on the situation in Ukraine, I said that I believe Ukraine will either be Putin's Afghanistan or Putin's Czechoslovakia. Of course, we know the sad history of Czechoslovakia at the beginning of the Second World War when the world kind of just let it happen. It negotiated the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and allowed Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia. That was a step to further aggression and violence.
On the other hand, we also know the history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where, as a result of significant support from the west that allowed people within Afghanistan to fight back against the Soviet invasion and to have the equipment they needed, they were able to drive out the Soviet invaders. That ultimately played a critical role in changing the tide of history in the aggressive agenda that had been pursued by the Soviets up to that point.
It is up to us to look at this situation and ask if we are going to support the people of Ukraine, so Putin's experience in Ukraine will be like the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, or are we going to allow the invasion to happen in the way similar to how the world kind of accepted the takeover of Czechoslovakia? That is the choice, and it requires our active engagement, our significant support for Ukrainians and our persistence in that enterprise.
Of course, we know that there is a lot of discussion in the news about possible negotiations and a possible back-and-forth dialogue happening. What is critical for us, as external actors, is to say that, regardless of negotiations taking place, we will not let up in sanctions and in holding Putin accountable unless he withdraws from all sovereign Ukrainian territory, respects the sovereignty of Ukraine's government, and respects the ability of Ukrainians to express themselves through democratic elections and make political choices about their future. Our role is to continue to apply significant sanctions. That is what we on the Conservative side have been saying is required, including significant increased lethal aid and other forms of tactical support to Ukrainians, tougher sanctions and, as our leader has called for, very importantly, air support for humanitarian corridors.
Speaking of those humanitarian corridors is a good transition point to talking about some of the immigration issues. While many Ukrainians are staying and fighting, heroically standing in the way of the Russian invasion, there are many people, such as women, children, the elderly and those who are not able to fight, who are desperate to get to safety. The UNHCR estimates that the number of Ukrainians who have fled the country is approaching four million. It is a very large number.
I want to congratulate Ukraine's neighbours, such as Poland, Latvia and other countries in the region. They have done incredible work. Everyday citizens of those countries are welcoming Ukrainians into their homes and stepping up to support Ukrainians in their hour of need. However, other countries that are farther away could play a greater role as well. Those of us here in Canada, with our large Ukrainian community and our close cultural and other ties, can play a critical role in welcoming those who are coming from Ukraine, many of whom, of course, hope to go back after the conflict is over. There is urgency to act now.
With respect to government action, the frustrating thing is that sometimes it seems like the government is solving problems but with such a delay and such a long time scale that things are ending, or past the point when they could best be solved, when the government is talking about it.
For example, it was announced that the government originally said that people coming from Ukraine could stay for two years; now, it is saying they can stay for three years. Obviously, three years is better than two years, but all of us are hoping this will be long over within two years and that people will have been able to go back within two years. We do not know.
It is hard to predict the future of how these kinds of things will unfold, but the government is making a promise about the far end, a time horizon, when what is really needed is to say how we can get people to be able to come more quickly right now, because right now is when we have the problem. I think we can make comparisons to other issues, such as COVID programs, where the government missed the boat and then, after the fact, would say, for example, that it was going to do ventilation in schools two years after this thing started. This is, I think, a problem with the way the government operates, sadly. It is not on top of issues, but then promises to do the thing we should have already done.
When it comes to immigration support for Ukrainians who are seeking to find a place to live and be in safety during this time, we are calling on the government to focus on the urgent immediate action now to help people get to a situation of safety. From this came a committee motion that was designed to really move this issue forward and emphasize to the government what needed to be done. A key part of that was the call for visa-free travel.
I do want to say that, while working on the immigration committee, the spirit of collaboration that exists has been really strong. It was a Conservative motion, but I think it is fair to say to my friends in the NDP and the Bloc that they were enthusiastic and keen about getting visa-free travel as part of this motion as well, and I am very hopeful we will see the same level of support and enthusiasm from other opposition parties, in terms of getting this motion adopted by the House of Commons. I hope, notwithstanding the fact that the Liberals voted against this motion at committee, that the Prime Minister, the immigration minister and the government will take seriously the will of the House of Commons in this respect. If a majority of the House of Commons votes in favour of saying we need visa-free travel, there is not a formal legal obligation on the government to implement the will of the House in this case, but I think there is a moral obligation in a democracy for the government to take seriously what the House of Commons is saying in this respect.
I do expect, given the positions taken by other opposition parties, this motion to pass, and I think it is a reasonable norm of democracy that, when a government that got a third of the popular vote is told by all of the rest of the parties in the House of Commons that it should take a certain action, the government actually takes that seriously and responds to it.
My colleague who spoke previously mentioned the arguments the government has used against bringing in visa-free travel. We saw them make some of these arguments at committee. They have said there are security issues that require a visa, and I think my colleague has demonstrated well, and the immigration minister sort of acknowledged this, that to whatever extent there may be individuals who are not actually sympathetic to the Ukrainian side who would try to use this program to get in, it could happen anyway with the provisions the government has put in place.
Moreover, I think the minister has said that it takes too long to pull back the visa requirement, which does not make a lot of sense to me. If the government is so slow in its operations that removing a requirement takes weeks and weeks of delay, that seems like a problem we should try to solve at a more fundamental level, because what we are calling for is not to add additional requirements to complicate the process; we are just asking the government to remove existing requirements. That should be a fairly simple, straightforward thing to do, and for the government to say that the imposition of this whole new program it has developed would somehow take less time than simply removing the visa requirement, I do not think that makes a lot of sense.
In any event, and I have sort of come back to this a few times in different contexts here this morning, I think we should ask and expect the Government of Canada to move faster during critical situations like this. I think we see this across the board with immigration. It is useful to think about how in the last year we had the situation in Afghanistan and now we have the situation in Ukraine. In both cases the government did not plan enough in advance and then told us it cannot move fast enough. It will say that it has all these papers it has to move around and things to sign, and that it is just going to take too long. The effect of accepting that somehow it is okay for these processes to take as long as the government is saying they will take is that it has real costs in human life and security.
The cost of government delays and inaction in the context of Afghanistan was that there were many people we should have gotten out that we did not. The cost in the case of the situation in Ukraine is, again, further delays, and more people being in harm's way for longer than necessary and longer than they should be.
I want to point out as well some of the statements being made by representatives of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress on immigration measures. For one, I think their position was actually misstated in committee. There was a member of the Liberal caucus who implied that somehow the Ukrainian Canadian Congress was not pushing for visa-free travel. The same day the Ukrainian Canadian Congress issued a statement clarifying that it does want visa-free travel. It also presented some concerns about the program the government has put in place, and maybe I will get to that in questions and comments.
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