44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 11, 2023 10:00AM
- May/11/23 11:26:27 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one of the hardest parts of being in politics is having to speak right after the leader of the Conservative Party. He just delivered a powerful speech that was full of compassion for newcomers who choose to settle in Canada.
As many members know, I was myself a newcomer several years ago. I immigrated to Canada from Communist Poland. That country is no longer communist. That era is behind us. It is now a democratic country, and I am proud of my ethnic background.
My leader was right. Everything in Canada is broken. All federal government programs are broken, but immigration programs are even more broken.
As the immigration critic for the Conservative Party, I follow this file closely. I would also like to point out that one can become francophone as an immigrant. As I have often mentioned in the House, I am a child of Bill 101. It really is possible to learn how to be a francophone as an immigrant.
I know that the leader of the Bloc Québécois often mentions, with a hint of despair in his voice, that protecting Quebec culture is impossible. From my personal experience, I think culture can be preserved.
I am a Calgary MP, as my family is in Calgary now, and I am a proud Albertan. I still follow the day-to-day happenings in Quebec, but I also follow the work of great comedians. I want to mention one in particular who, to me, is one of the best in Quebec: Sugar Sammy. He is a great comedian. Many allophones and immigrants who have lived in Quebec, or who are still living there, follow Sugar Sammy.
I was in Quebec a few weeks ago, and I saw several announcements about an upcoming Sugar Sammy tour in Quebec. I know he may not be the comedian the Bloc would have preferred me to name, but I want to mention him, because I think he is a great Quebecker. He makes me laugh.
I want to come back to the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. There are backlogs in nearly every program. There are over 2,000 immigration applications from newcomers to Canada that are behind schedule. These people are waiting to come to Canada or to be allowed to stay in Canada.
I want to mention a few programs because I do like numbers. Let us talk about the government-assisted refugees program. I know that many Liberal members are going to talk about this program. One Liberal member already has. In 2019, it took 15 months to process applications. Today, it takes 33 months. That is a three-year wait.
There are also privately sponsored refugees. I am talking here about charities, churches, mosques or temples that decide they want to sponsor a refugee, usually from their community, and bring them to Canada. These refugees are desperate people who need help, and Canada gives them that opportunity. Private community groups cover all of the costs associated with that refugee coming to Canada. In 2019, it took 23 months for the federal government to process that type of application while today it takes 38 months. That is nearly a four-year wait.
Let us now talk about the federal skilled trades program. As another member mentioned, in 2019, it took 12 months to process applications under that program. Now it takes 20 months. For skilled workers in Quebec it used to take 22 months to process their applications and now it takes 73 months. As for business people in Quebec, it used to take 54 months to process applications, and now it takes 67 months.
I am not pulling these numbers out of thin air. These numbers can be found on the government's website. The Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship came to the House to tell us that these numbers were not up to date and that this would take only six months from now on. If it is a six-month wait time for people applying today, then that is great. However, those who submitted their application one, two, three or four years ago are waiting their turn and will continue to wait. They will wait four, five, six or seven years. Sometimes no one knows how long it will take.
What is more, 90 to 95% of the files that are sent to Conservative MPs at their riding offices have to do with immigration. An error was made, the wait times are too long, the questions are not clear, etc. No one answers the phone. No one answers the email. The responses provided by the employees at immigration are sometimes confusing and contradictory and no one knows where we are headed.
We should be focusing on what could be done to help newcomers and people in our communities in the next 75 days, not the next 75 years. The Liberals have caused the challenges people are facing today.
In 2015, there were no backlogs in processing applications. The Canadian immigration system was the best in the world, and countries everywhere were trying to copy it. It was based on a points system, which gave everyone the chance to come to Canada. I want to be clear that it was a neutral system. If the person was young and well educated, they had a better chance of coming to Canada as an economic immigrant. Our immigration system treated everyone equally. Other countries wanted to copy it, but no one wants to copy our current system, which was created by the Liberals eight years ago. The backlog in the current system is over two million applications. After the pandemic, the backlog reached 2.9 million.
The Liberals claim that the backlog was caused by the pandemic, but that is not true: it was caused by them. The backlog had reached two million files before the pandemic. The pandemic made matters worse.
As my leader said, the things that newcomers go through and the services they receive from the federal government do not meet our expectations.
I myself am an immigrant, and I know that the people in our communities have a hard time finding a job, a place to live or people who share their mother tongue. In Canada, we can learn French and English. I, for one, learned French from Passe-Partout; I know all Quebeckers are familiar with that show. English is my third language, and I learned it by watching Sesame Street.
This is a good opportunity for me to switch to English. There are a lot of opportunities for immigrants who come to this country, including those like me. I grew up in Montreal and am a child of the Bill 101 education system. It does work; I am proof, I think. There are many of us who are proof that it does work, that they can take up the language.
However, we have unrealistic plans. The false utopias that are being proposed by the Century Initiative are completely ridiculous. We have McKinsey executives, big business executives, including one from BlackRock and others, who do not spend the time visiting communities, smaller towns and rural regions, which are desperate for workers. Newcomers are coming to Canada, and there have been so many waves of immigration to Canada that have vitalized entire regions and communities. I know that, for example, in northern Alberta, there is a huge Ukrainian community, of Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox people, which is now accepting another wave of people fleeing the war in Ukraine. They are finding an opportunity to speak their mother tongue while also brushing up on their English or their French.
There are also communities in northern Alberta that are French communities and that have a historic French connection. I remember that, my first time in Alberta, when I first moved out there, I went into a rural area for, I think, a birthday party. There were two nuns there. They spoke to me in French. I could not believe it; it was immaculate, perfect French. They came from a French convent. We had a long discussion in that language, because that was their experience of being in Alberta: They had been brought up with both languages.
My leader was right. The Liberals have had eight years and have completely broken the immigration system. What we should be looking at is services. The newcomer experience to Canada is awful. That is why so many of them are talking about returning to their country of origin; it is because they cannot find the opportunities that they were promised here.
There is so much we can do to make sure foreign credentials are recognized. My father was not able to practise here as an engineer because he could not pass a language exam. He passed all of the technical exams. That is the experience of so many immigrants who come here and are discriminated against just because they have credentials from overseas. We have heard the numbers: 32,000 nurses and over 20,000 doctors. There are engineers in my riding who cannot practise here easily, because they are being discriminated against because of where they got their years of experience or where they got their credentials and education.
The provincial colleges need to be told to stop gatekeeping and allow people to practise their professions, to do the thing that they love here in Canada, to add to our communities, build a family and provide for themselves. That is the Canadian dream. That is what we have to restore.
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- May/11/23 1:21:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, Canada is a concept, one that has changed greatly over time. At first, Canada was the heart of New France. The conquest brutally changed its identity and turned it into a British colony.
Modern Canada arose from another change that took place with the betrayal of the night of the long knives, when the country's DNA was changed in secret, behind closed doors and without Quebec or the first nations.
We are on the eve of another great change. We can rest assured that the very essence of Canada respects the strong tradition of ignoring democracy when it comes to major issues. I am of course referring to the Century Initiative. I am saying this in French in the House, because French was never considered by this initiative, as admitted by one of its authors.
Economists, and I am well positioned to talk about them, do not always think about identity. It is not necessarily the first thing they think of when developing a public policy. French, democracy, political balance, political weight are not necessarily their priorities. They think about GDP, productivity and the cost of labour. It is up to us in the House to reflect on these issues.
However, even in terms of economic issues, the Century Initiative project is poorly designed, poorly thought-out and impossible to implement. I say that the project is poorly designed because this Liberal government sets its economic targets based on false and simplistic economic parameters. If we want to solve the labour shortage, says the government, let us bring people from all over the world to work here.
Although immigration has a role to play in filling specific gaps in the labour market, it is far from being a magic bullet to fix this problem.
As economist Pierre Fortin explained in the report he presented last year to Quebec's ministry of immigration, francization and integration, a sustained increase in immigration creates a bigger workforce, but also increases demand for goods and services. He believes that in taking into consideration the further increase in demand for health services and education, the increase in employment opportunities would be negligible.
Other public policies can be put in place at the same time to address the labour shortage, as the Bloc Québécois has proposed on numerous occasions and in a constructive manner. For instance, tax credits should be granted to people who have reached retirement age but may want to remain in the workforce. Let us think about it. These individuals are trained and want to work. However, ridiculous tax policies prevent them from staying in the workforce. This could be fixed quickly. This is not a long-term solution like immigration.
Rodrigue Tremblay, professor emeritus of economics and a minister in the René Lévesque government, also explained the situation like this:
A rapidly growing population requires additional infrastructure (housing, hospitals, schools, universities and infrastructure of all kinds). Savings and capital are therefore needed to build that infrastructure.
He goes on to say the following:
When a population grows too quickly, this can sometimes lead to a general decline in the standard of living.
Ultimately, the countries that perform the best in terms of standard of living and quality of life are not the most populous countries in the world. They are countries like Norway, Ireland and Switzerland, whose population size is more similar to that of Quebec than Canada.
What makes Quebec unique, in addition to its language and culture, is the quality of its social safety net and its public policy, which are recognized as progressive. I am extremely proud of them. Quebec's low-cost child care system sets the bar. In fact, the federal government is trying to set up something similar, the kind of system we have had for decades. Quebec's affordable education system, its universal health care system and all its other social policies also set the standard.
Here is another example I am very familiar with: Quebec's parental insurance plan, copied by other jurisdictions around the world and head and shoulders above other such programs in Canada. To maintain and even improve that level of service, the Government of Quebec has to make wise economic and demographic decisions that ensure the long-term sustainability of its social services. The National Assembly provides all those social services, so it is up to it to determine Quebec's optimal population level.
It will be up to Quebec to offer and use its own budget to pay for the services and infrastructure that will be specifically offered to the newcomers we welcome with open arms, as everyone knows.
This project is poorly thought-out. Indeed, one has to be extremely out of touch with reality to think that a country like Canada, with such a delicate political balance, could work with this type of immigration policy without even consulting Quebec and the provinces. I really wonder why the Bloc Québécois has to keep reminding the House of this, but Canada is not a unitary country. The onus will be on Quebec and the provinces to deal with this immigration flow. The federal government is not a character in a video game seeking to make Canada an empire. It cannot continue to impose the whims of its preferred consultants on the democratically elected governments throughout Canada.
I have said that the project is poorly crafted and poorly thought-out, and I would like to add that it is impossible to implement. How does the federal government think it can pull off something this big when it is not even able to adequately deliver on any of its missions?
The Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship has a chronic inability to process claims in a timely manner. I will give some brief examples. After the pandemic, there were over 2 million files in the department's backlog. We are talking about the labour shortage, and 25,000 applications for skilled workers in Quebec were on hold on the federal government's desk. Skilled workers wanting to work in Quebec had to wait over 24 months—if they were lucky—while the service standard is 11 months, which itself could be considered to be quite long.
As we can see, the Century Initiative is a bad project. It is politically problematic, economically ill-conceived, and administratively impossible to implement. It has only one great advantage: It forces the people of Quebec to choose between turning into quaint folklore and becoming independent. My choice is obviously independence. I do not think that is news to anyone in the House.
I am an immigrant myself. I was born abroad. The language we speak at home is Spanish, and that is the language I use when I speak to my son. My mother came to Quebec at the age of 37 and passed the bar in her third language. We grew up in a house where the first language was not French, and yet we all chose independence. This is our project. We will build this country together, newcomers to Quebec with old stock Quebeckers, as well as with our brothers and sisters from the first peoples—because anyone who wants to be a Quebecker is a Quebecker.
Canada wants to reach a population of 100 million people and invite immigrants to come and contribute to its economic growth. All my Bloc Québécois colleagues and I can do better. What we can offer immigrants, whom we will always welcome with open arms, is an invitation to the founding of a new country. That is the idea that drives us, and it is the idea of the century.
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- May/11/23 4:42:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that just proves my point about what I would call arrogant and predatory federalism. My colleague did not make any effort to understand the explanations I gave about what multiculturalism is. He did not make any effort to understand the specificity of the Quebec nation.
Based on the preconceived ideas that he has about what it means to be a Quebecker and the type of nationalism that we assert in the House every day, he sees Quebec as a small, closed society. I have seen that before. We read about it in the 1960s. Members need only read some of Hubert Aquin's writings.
My colleague believes that Quebec would be fine in a very strong Canada that minimizes Quebec's identity. That is his objective, but we do not support it. We will continue to annoy him.
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- May/11/23 4:55:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to quote Boucar Diouf, a Quebecker who considers himself a part of Quebec society and who says that our society is a close-knit one. He said, “It is impossible to live together without truly embodying the word ‘together’. Multiculturalism”—
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- May/11/23 4:57:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the NDP members obviously do not want me to read that quote, and yet it is universalist. As I was saying, “Multiculturalism is much more like living side by side and harbouring frustrations with one another, with results that fall far short of the ideal presented by politicians.”
The truth is that multiculturalism rejects the idea of a common culture, encouraging the coexistence of multiple cultures side by side. It favours cohabitation based on indifference rather than on recognition and the respect of differences, which invariably leads to the ghettoization of cultures.
That is why what we in Quebec want is an intercultural model based on three fundamental principles that form a common standard that protects Quebec's distinctiveness. Being a Quebecker has nothing to do with looking like a Quebecker. Being a Quebecker is first and foremost a political choice. A person can identify as a Canadian. I respect that. They can also identify as a Quebecker. We hope that everyone who settles in Quebec can get on board with that and identify as Quebeckers. It is up to them how they identify themselves.
We are asking for respect for what defines the soul of the nation, in other words French. We cannot welcome 500,000 people a year and not tell them that Quebec's official language is French.
Secularism is a principle that my colleagues surely agree with. It is important to Quebec, which had its Quiet Revolution and separated church and state. The other principle is equality between men and women. From there, each person, with their diversity, can indeed come build the country with us and that is what we want.
How is any of that xenophobic? How is it racist? These are values born of philosophical liberalism that are meant to be at the very core of the political foundation of every member in the House.
I am out of time. I thank the members from the NDP for sabotaging my speech.
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- May/11/23 5:16:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, on this side of the House, I have many colleagues who represent the interests of Quebec, including the Prime Minister, who is proud to call himself a Quebecker. I know there are many ministers and members of my caucus who have a strong sense of belonging and are proud to be Quebeckers and Canadians. We will always help the Quebec government achieve its goals.
Today, what matters is that we want our new plan to be realistic, but we have to be ambitious. We really need to support immigration. We know that people are in dire need of people to help them.
When we talk about it here, we always refer to “the employer”, but we should actually be talking about the employees, in hospitality, in restaurants, in hotels. They too want more workers to help them. They need it.
I want to thank them in the House because they worked very hard for all of us during the pandemic.
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- May/11/23 5:47:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased that my hon. colleague from Saint-Jean said that we should take immigrants' interests into account. We should not resort to a utilitarian argument to speak on behalf of these people.
I am a Quebecker. If we want to ensure the vitality of the French language in Quebec and if we really want to put ourselves in the immigrants' shoes, we could ask the hundreds of thousands of francophone immigrants from West Africa and the Caribbean who would like to come to Quebec if they are ready to accept the conditions in Quebec and—
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- May/11/23 6:02:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as a Quebecker, I would like to thank my colleague. We definitely do not have the same point of view.
In my community, which is not that far from his, there are many francophones and many new immigrants from western Africa and Haiti. The percentage of these immigrants has increased significantly. Why are these people settling in Quebec? It is because they have the right to continue speaking French, living in French, going to school in French and seeing their family grow in French. These people play such a significant role in building the vibrant province and country I call home, and I believe that is a good thing.
I would like to hear my colleague's comments on that, because for me it is obvious.
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