44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 11, 2023 10:00AM
- May/11/23 11:09:00 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am very proud and, especially, very grateful for having been born here in Canada. It is a major victory to be born here in Canada, because it is a country full of opportunity. I was born to a single mother and adopted by two teachers who always taught me that here in Canada, no matter where you come from, you can achieve whatever you want as long as you work hard. This is the same country where my wife arrived as a refugee and it is the country we want for our children.
Unfortunately, it is not the country we are seeing today. Everything is broken in Canada, after eight years under this Prime Minister. He does not like it when I say that, so I will say it again: everything is broken after eight years under this Prime Minister. This includes the immigration system. Our country had a reputation for its immigration system, which is one of the best in the world. It was based on common sense. People were invited to come work here, people like the Italians who built our infrastructure. Workers from around the world have come here to build hospitals, houses and our economy, and to enrich everyone's lives.
What do people see when they come here now? They see no houses. Nine out of 10 young Canadians are convinced they will never be able to buy a house. We lack health care services. Why? It is because our immigrants are being blocked from working as doctors and nurses. Over a million immigrants who are interested in coming here, to Canada, have had to wait longer than the government's prescribed waiting period.
Even when they do manage to get here, immigrants have a hard time getting work permits. People want to work, but this Prime Minister and his utterly incompetent government stand in their way. Not only that, but the strike that the Prime Minister caused led to even longer wait times for families living apart, potential workers who cannot start their jobs, and refugees seeking safety and security here in Canada. The Prime Minister's utter incompetence is the cause of these problems.
Instead of focusing on the job, which can be boring, and repairing the damage he has done, the Prime Minister and his multinational executive friends, like Dominic Barton, want to create grand utopias for us. Instead of building our country on the basis of common sense, which has worked for over 100 years, the Prime Minister wants to create a great revolution and paint a utopia that will never exist. He should focus on the backbone of our system, in other words, reduce the time it takes for a small or medium-sized business or a farmer to hire a foreign worker when no Canadian is available to do the job. He should unite families, especially in the case of grandparents, so that they can take care of their grandchildren when the parents are at work. Finally, he should allow more non-profit organizations to sponsor refugees and provide them with care, opportunities to learn English or French, and access to a job and housing.
He should do the common-sense work. Instead, the Prime Minister wants to focus on the priorities of large multinationals, such as McKinsey, and its former CEO, Dominic Barton. That company has received over $100 million in contracts from this government and dreams of turning the country into a utopia.
I will never listen to those people. I am going to listen to the common sense of ordinary Canadians, the people who do the work. That is how the common-sense Conservative government I will be leading will repair the damage.
That is why I will be voting for this motion. Because I want to reject Dominic Barton and the Century Initiative and to base our immigration system once again on the common sense of ordinary Canadians.
Speaking of common sense, I will be splitting my time with the common-sense Conservative member of Parliament for Calgary Shepard, Mr. Speaker.
I am so proud and grateful that I won the lottery of life to be born here in Canada. I was born of a teenage unwed mother, who put me up for adoption to two school teachers. They taught me that it did not matter where I came from; it mattered where I was going. It did not matter who I knew; it mattered what I could do.
That is the country my wife came to as a refugee. That is the country that a lot of her family, her brother to be a soldier, her other brother to be a carpenter, her sister to be a nurse and for her family to work hard and achieve great things. That is the country I want all our kids to inherit, but that is not the country we see today.
Canada, after eight years of the Prime Minister, the out-of-touch Prime Minister, is broken. What is especially broken is the immigration system that leaves a million immigrants waiting longer than the acceptable wait time to get into Canada.
We see international students abused and exploited by human traffickers, shady consultants, some of them losing their lives and being sent back to places like India in body bags because the Prime Minister and his government have failed to protect them from the predators and the scam artists who are destroying their lives.
We see 20,000 brilliant immigrant doctors blocked from working in their professions by government gatekeepers. We see 32,000 immigrant nurses blocked from their jobs. It boils my blood to sit in a hospital waiting room for five hours with my daughter who has a migraine headache because there are not enough doctors and nurses, while gatekeepers block brilliant immigrant doctors and nurses from doing their jobs.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister gleefully tells us about all the wonderful meetings he is having with mayors about housing and infrastructure. I do not really care about their meetings, because the gatekeepers at municipal governments, the governments that the Prime Minister is funding with billions of dollars, are blocking housing construction, so our immigrants, working class and youth cannot get homes.
After eight years of the Prime Minister everything is broken. However, instead of fixing the basics, he is focused on another grand utopian project, that of his friend, Dominic Barton, the multinational CEO, former ambassador to Communist China, who helped bring about the opioid crisis that is savaging our working-class families. He has come up with a bright, new idea that he is going to triple our national population to 100 million. We do not need anymore utopian schemes from globe-trotting millionaires and multinational insiders. We need common sense for a change.
Here is our common-sense plan to get back to the basics. The first is to clear the backlog so immigrant families can be reunited, so our farmers and small businesses can fill jobs for which there is no Canadian available; allow our churches, mosques, synagogues and other non-profit organizations to sponsor more legitimate refugees; get them language training so they can learn how to speak French or English, get a job, get working and get contributing; speed up work permits for those people who already here waiting for their cases to be heard. They might as well be out earning a wage, contributing to the economy. They want to work. Let them work. It is common sense, for God's sake.
Speaking of work, let us bring in a blue seal national standard for all our professions. We have a Red Seal standard that allows tradespeople to take a test, prove they are qualified, get to work and move across the country to fill needed vacancies in the job market. Why do we not have a blue seal standard that would allow foreign-trained nurses, doctors, engineers and other professionals to prove they are qualified and within 60 days of applying to work in their field, get a yes or no based on their tested ability, not based on where they come from? We would have more doctors, more nurses, more common sense.
What I am saying is let us get back to the basics. Our immigration system was the best in the world eight years ago, but now we have immigrants who come here and then say they want to go back because this is not what was promised.
I have said that everything is broken, but what is broken most of all is the promise, the promise of Canada; the promise that we will reinstill a promise that in Canada it does not matter where people come from, but where they go. It does not matter if their name is Martin or Mohamed, or Singh or Smith, or Chong or Charles, or Patel or Poilievre, if they work hard, they can achieve anything they want in the greatest and freest country in the world. This is the common sense of the common people united for our common home. It is their home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.
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- May/11/23 11:40:57 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as someone who is an immigrant to Canada myself, having come here 50 years ago, and as an MP who has attended citizenship ceremonies where I have seen the pride when newcomers become part of the fabric of Canada, and I have seen the many contributions they make in my riding, I am a bit confused by the Conservatives' speeches today.
I have seen the Bloc members congratulating the Conservative leader, I guess, in supporting this motion. What we have before us is a motion that styles immigrants as a threat to some Canadians and blames immigrants for housing shortages and for delays in the health care system.
I am really unclear, having heard the speeches that sound like they support immigration, about what the Conservatives are doing with the motion before us today.
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- May/11/23 11:41:40 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I completely disagree with the member's characterization.
I read the motion, both in French and then in English, and it sounds exactly the same to me. This motion basically rejects the Century Initiative, which is big business executives with these pie-in-the-sky dreams, these utopias that were talking about 75 years from now.
I want to talk about the immigrant experience today, right now. What they are experiencing on the ground is long wait times, families broken up and people divorcing. Spousal sponsorships for Iran are completely blocked at the visa processing offices during a revolution led by women in Iran. Spousal sponsorships are not being processed. There are people who have waited years, sometimes up to five years. There are people getting divorced because they cannot even bring in their partner from a place like Iran, where there is an autocratic regime. They are persecuting women and men on the streets right now.
We should be doing so much more. I do not see any of that in this motion right here. This is simply rejecting a ridiculous pie-in-the-sky utopian dream that these big business executives put together for McKinsey.
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- May/11/23 12:08:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, part of the motion says, “tripling Canada’s population has real impacts on the future of the French language, Quebec’s political weight, the place of First Peoples, access to housing, and health and education infrastructure”:
I want to address this issue. I appreciate the member's work at the immigration committee. I have come to know him and respect a lot of the work that he does.
However, I think we are embarking on a very dangerous path, where we could signal that we are going to be vilifying and blaming the immigrant community for the health care crisis we are facing, the housing crisis we are facing and the problems that we have seen as a result of colonization of Canada for indigenous peoples.
It is not the immigrant community that should be carrying that weight, but rather, it is the governments that should be carrying that weight.
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- May/11/23 12:10:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, there is no question that the provinces and territories need to step up and address that issue, but the federal government also needs to do the same.
Because the federal government, with its immigration measures, only allows migrant workers to come to work in Canada with the identified employer, they are not able to work elsewhere. Those with the talents to work in other sectors are unable to do so because of immigration restrictions, even though they meet the criteria and have the credentials. The federal government has a role to play to fix that problem.
At the end of the day, I hope we can all recognize the value of those in the immigrant community. Instead of vilifying them, blaming them and turning our guns on them, we should say that we are one community and we welcome immigrant communities. It does not have to be one or the other.
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- May/11/23 12:12:21 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is precisely what I fear with this motion. That is why the NDP is not going to support it, as it ties housing to the immigrant community.
The housing crisis exists because successive Liberal and Conservative governments failed on housing. They cancelled the national affordable housing program, they cut funding, and then they were developing initiatives that do not meet the needs. They are not tackling the core of the issue, which is corporate landlords. Instead, they continue to give them special tax treatment.
The issue here is not the immigrant community. It is the lack of action from successive Liberal and Conservative governments that has caused the housing crisis, and I would argue, also the health challenges that we face today.
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- May/11/23 1:45:39 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, in order to grow the population, we need people from all over. Quebec was created from immigrant populations.
I encourage my colleagues to visit Grosse‑Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site, which is truly an extraordinary example of what immigration has brought to Quebec and to Canada as a whole.
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- May/11/23 1:53:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, let us imagine this. We have thousands of people in waiting lines, being processed. The Conservatives say they do not want to deal with this particular stream, so what they are going to do is just delete them all. Imagine being in queue, waiting for years, and the Harper government decides that the waiting lines are so long and that one of the ways they can deal with them is just to delete them, to pretend they did not even exist. A lot of people had a difficult time with that one.
One can imagine why the Conservatives say that things are broken. We are still fixing the broken system that we inherited from Stephen Harper. That was truly broken.
The leader of the Conservative Party says he wants people to feel good, to feel as if they can make a difference. Do members know what he talks about? He talks about immigrant credentials. That is a very important issue. There is no doubt that it is an important issue. In fact, the government has spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars to assist provinces in getting immigrant credentials recognized, far more money than Stephen Harper.
What does the Conservative leader say today? He says that they are going to have a blue seal program, and that a person would come to Canada, write an exam and be a doctor anywhere they want in Canada. That is balderdash. That is absolute, underlined, “cannot say the word”. At the end of the day, the Conservatives do not know what they are talking about. They have no idea what all is involved. One cannot just say, “Here, write an exam and then we will allow you, as a doctor, to practise anywhere you want in Canada.”
An hon. member: That is how it works.
Mr. Kevin Lamoureux: No, that is not the way it works, Madam Speaker—
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- May/11/23 1:56:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, what I was trying to clearly demonstrate is the fact that the Conservative leader has absolutely no idea, in terms of immigration policy or the types of things that would really make a difference, and we see that. I really wish I had the time and wish we were allowed to ask the Conservative leader questions based on the speech he delivered. Not only was he wrong on so many fronts when he tried to say that our system is broken, when in fact we inherited a broken system, but he also used the opportunity of the Bloc's motion to talk about the immigration policy of the Conservative Party. There is no Conservative policy on immigration.
I think he understands, to a certain degree, some of those hot issues, but he has no idea how to deal with them. If we want to talk about immigrant credentials, we have to work with the provinces and different stakeholders. By telling people who are here today, or would-be immigrants, that they just have to write an exam and they will get the so-called blue seal, trying to make a comparison to the Red Seal, the Conservative leader is doing a huge disservice. He is trying to give the impression that the Conservatives would do a better job on immigration, when their record is the absolute opposite. That is the reality of the situation.
That is why I found it very difficult to be in my seat while the leader of the Conservative Party tried to explain a Conservative policy on immigration. The Conservative leader needs to go back to the drawing board. He really and truly needs to look at ways to contribute to the debate on immigration, because he failed on all accounts coming into this particular debate.
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