SoVote

Feb/8/24 11:33:47 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, a Yiddish proverb I love is that if a wise man and a fool are debating, and rabbis love this proverb as well, what we have are two fools debating between each other. Sometimes I feel this is what I am watching. I have listened to the Herle Burly Podcast, and the new Minister of Immigration has appeared on it twice now. He talks a really tough game when he is on the podcast. Then he comes here and sings us a song on how great things are. We have an immigration system with a backlog of 2.2 million in applications. I have been told everything, including that moving to digital would fix it, that there would be a new system and that there would be more people. This department has more than double the staff and double the money it had in 2015, yet nothing is getting better. It is pretty much static. The backlog was about 2.9 million applications near the end of the pandemic and it is barely any better. A million people are waiting in the queue. We hear about this constantly. Members of Parliament and their constituency offices are inundated, with 80% to 90% of our case file work related to the immigration department. Families are broken because they cannot be reunited. Small businesses locally are missing that one critical person to fill a gap so they can then start hiring other fellow Canadians to fill the jobs, but they cannot do it. International students, who maybe have changed colleges, or are moving to a different program or are applying for a post-graduate work permit, are being told they cannot do that anymore, or they apply and run out of status and lose the temporary jobs they had. All of this is related to the customer service levels at the immigration department, which have not improved. I rarely hear the minister saying that this is being addressed. It is a concern for Conservatives, and it continues to be a concern, that service levels are poor and that immigration backlog continues to be very high. Nobody seems to want to take responsibility in the moment when they make the decisions. I believe we are on immigration minister five or six so far after almost nine years, and it still is not getting better. It is still not improving, except for the rhetoric among the cabinet ministers who accuse each other of letting the system get out of control or of making it a mess. Again, I am not the one saying that. I am quoting two ministers who are having this public fight among each other on whose fault it is, pointing fingers at each other. The most incredible part of it all is that they are blaming each other. In our great country, we of course have two official languages, so I will make some comments in French as well. We already had this debate in the House, in October or November when we debated another motion during a Bloc Québécois opposition day. It is actually mentioned in today's motion. Of course, we know that the government did not react to the motion. It did nothing. Going by what we can see, it made a few minor announcements for foreign students who are here in Canada. We know that more than one million international students are already here, according to a question that was answered in the House in October. We also know that the government reacts very slowly when opposition parties offer it solutions to new challenges for which we need to have an answer. Today, one of these new challenges is asylum seekers who have the right to come to Canada, particularly those from a country in which there is a huge problem. That is an issue we need to address, because in January, the Premier of Quebec, Mr. Legault, had to write a letter almost four pages long that was addressed directly to the government. If there were any consultations, it is obvious that nobody listened to the Premier of Quebec, since he had to write a letter. His letter says: “Over time, we have welcomed Chilean, Vietnamese, Haitian and Syrian refugees, and more recently Ukrainian nationals, whom we continue to take in”. We know that we now have problems with one country in particular, because in 2016, this government withdrew the requirement for Mexican citizens to apply for a visa to come to Canada. They can go online and just pay seven or eight dollars to get permission to come to Canada. Now, in Montreal, tens of thousands of people are seeking asylum after not informing the government about their reason for travelling to Canada. In 2016, about 250 asylum seekers came to this country in this way, back when there was a visa requirement. I have a press release that the government published at the time. It is only in English, unfortunately. I will read the relevant section. It comes from the Prime Minister’s website and is dated June 28, 2016. It may have been taken down, but maybe it is still on the site. Here is an excerpt from the press release: Closer collaboration between Canada and Mexico on mobility issues will also help encourage travel between the two countries while preventing any increase in asylum claims or other irregular migration. Officials plan to meet regularly to promote these mutual interests. We have gone from 250 asylum claims in 2016 to tens of thousands in 2023. According to the figures I saw online, 11% of the claims were accepted, which means that 89% of them were rejected. We are not the ones rejecting them; the independent panel is rejecting them. The panel says that it has seen the file and that the rules for becoming a refugee in Canada are not being respected. The 2016 press release indicated that systems would be put in place to prevent an increase in asylum claims. Yesterday, I asked the minister to give us examples of programs implemented and actions taken to ensure that asylum seekers from one country, in this case Mexico, will not make bogus claims. Of course, 11% of the claims were accepted. Yesterday, the minister said it was much higher, 30%. These are figures given during the debates. Perhaps he can give us the figures in committee. Even with those numbers, that means that 70% of the asylum claims were rejected. These people came here because the visa requirement had been lifted. We have to wonder what the government is doing. It has not created any programs. The only example the Minister of Immigration was able to give me had to do with programs implemented during the pandemic. However, they were public policies and the minister got rid of them in December, a month and a half ago, because they were no longer useful, he said. I reminded him that there was no pandemic in 2016. It began in early 2020. There was clearly no connection between the two. In committee, he had no other examples to demonstrate what he had done to keep this from happening. In his letter, Premier Legault talks about the cost of these decisions. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Then there are also costs in terms of human lives. People have come to Canada, thinking they are eligible to apply for asylum for a variety of reasons. Premier Legault says that in the “first 11 months of 2023, no fewer than 59,735 new asylum seekers were registered in Quebec. Projections show that Quebec will receive a record 65,000 applicants this year”. The trends continues. Of course, with this increase in asylum claims, there is also a human cost. Real people will be affected by the Liberal government's negligence. Two immigration ministers are publicly attacking each other. They are pointing fingers and accusing each other of creating all the problems, damage and mess in the areas of immigration and housing. I am going to talk about two articles by Romain Schué. In “Immigration Cartels”, he wrote: “Enquête uncovered human smuggling networks and fake passport makers linked to powerful Mexican organized crime syndicates that are becoming more and more heavily involved in human trafficking at the Canada-U.S. border.” Two Mexican cartels in particular, the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel, have ties to human trafficking. The government could not even talk about a program. I asked the minister to name one program, any program. One would have been enough, but the minister could not even come up with one name. In the other article, “South American crime network targets Canadian homes”, the journalist starts describing exactly what is happening now because the government made this change in 2016 and did not follow up. I wanted to share that example because basically the same thing happens with reports to Parliament on permanent immigration, as the minister said earlier. They are tabled in the House every November. They also cover temporary immigration. Lots of people come to Canada as temporary immigrants to work or study. Many of them change their temporary status to permanent after they get here. According to information provided by the department, about half of temporary immigrants become permanent immigrants through programs such as the provincial nominee program and the immigration program for construction workers. Roughly half of these people are already in Canada and have a home, be it rented or owned. It is simply a matter of changing their status. What matters to us, the Conservatives, is the experience newcomers have when they come to Canada. Today's newcomers are not having the same experience I had when I came to Canada. I arrived in Quebec, of course, because my father worked at the Sorel shipyard at the time. The leader of the Bloc Québécois talked about the fact that many immigrants who come to Canada are told that Canada is an English‑speaking country, but when they arrive in Quebec, they realize that French is spoken there, especially at work. That is what happened to my father. I know because he talked about it often. As we can see, cabinet is unable to decide who is to blame for the mess. The immigration system is out of control, and it is their fault. Even when the government appoints a new Minister of Immigration, it is his fault. In nine years, the government has destroyed the Canadian consensus on immigration. We need a common-sense government, and that is what we will have when the member for Carleton becomes prime minister in the next election. We will give Canadians hope for the immigration system.

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Mr. Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe (Lac-Saint-Jean, BQ)

Feb/8/24 11:45:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I very much appreciate my colleague from Calgary Shepard. He delivered a pointed speech, and he clearly has sound knowledge of the issue. He is also pleasant to work with in committee. Once again, I congratulate him on his speech. I completely agree with him that the management of the immigration portfolio is unacceptable. The government has appointed three different ministers of immigration since 2019. That says a lot about the way the Liberals are managing the immigration portfolio. My question is simple. My colleague spoke a great deal about the Legault government, and more specifically about Minister Fréchette's letter. Am I to understand that, should a Conservative government be elected, my colleague would agree with her about repatriating all immigration powers to Quebec to settle the matter once and for all?

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Mr. Tom Kmiec

Feb/8/24 11:46:30 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, what I am prepared to say is that we will have a common-sense immigration system. We will not need a referendum, since we will have a federal government that is able to work with all the provinces fairly. Furthermore, our government will make sure that the provinces are able to tackle the challenges. It will not call them names, compare them to heat pumps or insult them. It will work with them. That is what the Harper government did. It worked with the provinces, not against them.

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Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Lib.)

Feb/8/24 11:47:11 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I was the critic for immigration back when the common-sense Conservative government was in place and denied Canadians the opportunity to sponsor parents and grandparents to come to Canada for permanent residency. It literally killed the program. When we had the common-sense immigration issues, it took years to try to get a loved one, a wife, a husband or a significant other, to immigrate to Canada under permanent residency. Is this the type of common-sense, or should I say nonsense, Conservative policy we are going to see brought back under that type of administration?

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Mr. Tom Kmiec

Feb/8/24 11:48:17 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is sad that those members have not read the immigration plans pre-2015. It was a Conservative government that created the super visa program for parents and grandparents. It was a Conservative government that made the PGP, the parents and grandparents permanent immigration system, work better. What the Liberal government has done is create a lottery system whereby people have spent years in the lottery not knowing when their loved ones will be allowed to immigrate to Canada. In fact, in a case that was reported in the CBC, even the CBC is going after the government, nationals from Iran had been waiting five years to be reunified. Therefore, those married couples were apart for five years before seeing their loved ones again. By the way, every single permanent immigration stream to Canada is longer today than it was in 2015. It is the same way for student visas, work visas or tourist visas. It is taking longer. Mr. Kevin Lamoureux: Not true. Mr. Tom Kmiec: The member is saying it is not true. I invite him to check the immigration committee's records, because all the numbers have been tabled successively over the last year, which proves the case that all the backlogs are worse than they were in 2015 for almost every single program the government controls today.

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Ms. Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, NDP)

Feb/8/24 11:49:34 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I know that the Conservatives fancy themselves as friends of the immigrant community, but let us not forget that they brought in cessation, which said to refugees who came to Canada that they could not return to their country of origin for any reason. Even in the case when Saddam Hussein did not exist any more, if a person came from that place, they were not allowed to return to that country of origin to visit a dying family member. Also, they took away the ability for a second-generation born to pass on their Canadian citizenship to their children, which was being challenged in the court, and the court found it be unconstitutional. Would the Conservatives reduce immigration target numbers? Is that their common-sense policy that they are not telling Canadians?

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Mr. Tom Kmiec

Feb/8/24 11:50:47 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member has a lot of experience, especially on the immigration committee. I usually do not agree with her, but I do respect the fact that she brings a deep level of knowledge to a lot of the immigration issues that she approaches. We are usually on opposite sides of voting. She has basically supported this government for the last three or four years without objection, every single one of these immigration targets and the running of the department, and so she bears responsibility for the backlogged 2.2 million applications. She bears responsibility for the experience of Iranian nationals who are trying to flee the region—

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Iranian

The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Feb/8/24 11:51:25 a.m.
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On a point of order, the hon. member for Vancouver East.

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Ms. Jenny Kwan

Feb/8/24 11:51:28 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member is categorically wrong to suggest that I did not raise any concerns with the government's immigration policies—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Feb/8/24 11:51:41 a.m.
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Unfortunately, that is a point of debate. The hon. member for Calgary Shepard.

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Mr. Tom Kmiec

Feb/8/24 11:51:52 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I did say that she bears responsibility with voting on every single confidence motion and every single confidence measure in the House, and so she does bear responsibility for decisions made by this government. She is supporting the spending, she is supporting the employment, she is supporting the number it is hiring and how it is handling the files. That is what I am saying. The member wants to debate pre-2015 and what our previous Conservative government did. We have nine years of a Liberal government's tenure in office. We have two immigration ministers fighting it out in public, one saying it is out of control and one saying it is a mess. I rarely hear that member in committee side with the Conservatives who are trying to advocate for people and trying to find a solution to some of these problems. So, I am just calling her out here. I am trying to bear out on the public record what I see happening on the immigration committee and what I see happening in the House of Commons. An hon. member: Oh, oh!

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Feb/8/24 11:52:43 a.m.
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In the last couple of questions that I have allotted, after members have asked their questions, they seem to want to ask other questions. I would just ask them to wait until the appropriate time to do that as opposed to trying to interrupt the member.

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Mr. Sébastien Lemire (Abitibi—Témiscamingue, BQ)

Feb/8/24 11:53:02 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Calgary Shepard for his intervention and for his sensitivity on this issue. I think he made a number of important distinctions. He mentioned a few times that the government was not facing up to its responsibilities and was shirking its duty. I would like to ask him a straightforward question, and I hope he can offer some clarity. First, will the Conservative Party support the Bloc Québécois's motion? Second, as a shadow minister in the shadow cabinet of the member for Carleton, will he agree not to abide by McKinsey's goal of reaching a population of 100 million by 2100?

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Mr. Tom Kmiec

Feb/8/24 11:53:43 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, concerning the first part of my colleague's question, it depends. I know that this is not the answer he was hoping for. However, it depends. We will see how the debate unfolds. As for the second part of his question, as the member knows, we Conservatives voted in favour of the Bloc Québécois's motion on the Century Initiative. At the time, we voted with the Bloc Québécois and the other opposition parties in the House. I think that answers his question.

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Cois

Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Lib.)

Feb/8/24 11:54:14 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to focus on the time I was in opposition when we had a Conservative government and on another program where the member says that Conservatives did not have backlogs. I recall the backlog for experienced workers that got so long that Minister Kenney, as opposed to dealing with it, literally hit the delete button, and hundreds of thousands of people who were in the stream were deleted out of the system. I think Canadians need to be aware that the Conservative common-sense approach is to the detriment of the long-term healthy immigration policy. We have seen a number of areas where processing times are far better than what they were in the Conservative era.

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Mr. Tom Kmiec

Feb/8/24 11:55:08 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member is wrong. When the Paul Martin government was defeated in 2006 and a new Conservative government took over, it took a few years to realize that, in fact, there was a six million to eight million application backlog created by previous Liberal governments. At that time, the decision was made to reset the system to zero, because there was no way to fix it. Liberal governments, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, had basically broken the immigration system, like they have broken the immigration system today. The decision was taken to return people's money and their applications, to restart the system at zero. That was their fault. Let us talk numbers. I have the numbers for 2015. In 2015, according to IRCC, study permits took 31 days to process. Work permits took 42 days to process. Temporary resident visas took 13 days to process. In April 2023, study permits took 88 days to process. Work permits took 62 days to process. Temporary resident visas took 72 days to process. Those are bigger numbers than the first ones.

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Ms. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC)

Feb/8/24 11:56:16 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague has outlined some of the failures of the Liberal government in terms of huge backlogs in almost every area. I think it is important to point out, as well, the types of people who are being allowed in. We are talking about needing to build homes, but the numbers of construction workers are low. Meanwhile, there is an open door at Pearson airport, where people can just show up and claim refugee status.

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Mr. Tom Kmiec

Feb/8/24 11:56:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member for Sarnia—Lambton is correct. I asked the government to tell me how many construction workers were brought in through all immigration streams under the different NOC codes. The minister claimed that he was not the minister responsible for NOC codes. It is about 4,500 per year since 2016. We have a shortage of 100,000 residential construction workers just in Ontario. They are not going to meet their targets, because it has not been their focus area.

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Mr. Alexandre Boulerice (Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, NDP)

Feb/8/24 11:57:11 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I wish to inform the House that I will be sharing my time with my wonderful colleague from Vancouver East. I also want to note that the representative from the Conservative Party did not answer her very good question whatsoever. The Conservative Party seems to want to hide its intentions when it comes to immigration objectives. Other than fine speeches, the official opposition remains vague and is kind of playing secretive games. I think it is a shame that my colleague from Vancouver East did not get the response she was entitled to when she asked a very simple and very direct question to the representative of the Conservative Party. Today's debate is an important discussion that sometimes gets people, the media and certain columnists worked up. It is an entirely legitimate question on the type of society we want to build, the type of welcoming nation we want to be, the economic development we want to have and the contribution of people who want to come share their life here, with us, in Quebec or in Canada. There is a joke I have been making for some time. Obviously, Quebec and Canada are lands of immigration. I myself am a 13th-generation immigrant. The first one came in the late 17th century. His name was Jean, and he was a potter, a “turner” to the king. Incidentally, the name Boulerice was not written that way at the time; initially, it was a Breton name spelled as two words. I think we need to continue this tradition of integration and of welcoming people that we have had for centuries. However, it has to be done well and in a positive way. It must also be done with a positive eye to the contribution of all those who, for various reasons, want to come and settle here in the hope of a better life, to seek protection or to flee persecution, or to hope for better things for their children and families. These are people who work extremely hard and contribute to our development and economic activity in extraordinary and wonderful ways. According to recent statistics, 33% of recent immigrants start their own small businesses when they arrive here, and then hire people who have sometimes been here longer. These are entrepreneurs and job creators, people who also contribute to various sectors of our society. Twenty percent of immigrants are working in the construction industry. We are in the midst of a housing crisis, and these people are coming here to work. Yes, they live in houses and apartments, but they are also going to build houses and apartment buildings. One in five immigrants works in construction. That is a lot, and it is important to point that out. A total of 1.6 million immigrants across the country are working in our health care system. They are caring for our friends, our parents and our grandparents, for people in Canada who are sick. That is an huge number. When we talk about immigration levels and immigration capacity, we need to look at it from that perspective. Immigration is not only positive, but it is necessary for our economy. Most of the chambers of commerce are saying that there is a labour shortage in Quebec and that we need hands and minds to join our workforce. It is not every day that members will hear a New Democrat quoting chambers of commerce, but the NDP agrees that this is what is needed. The need for workers is being felt throughout Montreal and the regions of Quebec. Businesses want to do more and take on more contracts. They want to undertake new projects, but they need workers to be able to do so. We therefore need to be able to welcome immigrants and welcome them properly. I will say right off the top that I have no idea if Quebec should welcome 50,000, 70,000 or 35,000 economic migrants. I am not an immigration expert, demographer or economist. It all depends on the context, our needs and whether we can properly welcome and integrate them. Once again, the notion of integration capacity is very vague. Obviously, we are in the middle of the housing crisis right now. Our public services are feeling the pressure. The community groups that work with those immigrants and refugees are feeling the pressure. We need to acknowledge that, but closing the door to immigrants is not necessarily the answer, because that would cause collateral damage to our economic development and to our SMEs and businesses that need those people. We need a tailored response that is smart and, most importantly, based on evidence and reality. We do not need speeches that can sometimes be quite discriminatory or xenophobic towards the people who come here. This happens on a fairly regular basis with some columnists, and it seems to me a terrible shame that immigrants are being singled out and blamed for things like the housing crisis. It is utterly ridiculous. How dare we blame today's immigrants for our inaction over the past 30 years on building affordable and social housing? How dare we tell immigrants that they stopped us from building social housing over the past 30 years? They came here and they want to participate, start a family and send their children to school and university. This housing crisis is the outcome of inaction by Liberal and Conservative governments in recent years. The housing crisis existed before these immigrants and temporary migrant workers arrived here to work and make a contribution. For some columnists to point fingers and blame them is irresponsible, discriminatory and misguided. The federal Liberal government stopped investing in social and co-operative housing in 1994, and that is when the problem started. Then the Harper government made it even worse. That is a fact. The reality on the ground today is that the vacancy rate is 1.5% in Montreal, which gets a lot of newcomers and immigrants, and 0% in Rimouski. The housing shortage is worse in Rimouski than in Montreal, and it is not because Rimouski gets a lot more immigrants per capita than Montreal. It is important to set the record straight. NDP members think it is important to be able to do that. My colleague, the member for Vancouver East, will share some constructive suggestions later on that will enable us to examine every aspect and every nuance of this issue. Quebec's former immigration minister said that immigrants do not want to integrate, do not want to speak French and do not want to work. Let us stop saying that. It is not true. I live in Montreal. There are a lot of newcomers who work extremely hard. They all work extremely hard. They want to build a new life here in Quebec. They make an absolutely extraordinary contribution. They want to learn French. The problem is that there are not enough teachers. There are not enough French training services. The wait lists for French classes are endless. Part of the reason is that the Government of Quebec is not using the funding it is given by the federal government to help immigrants learn French. It uses it for other things, but that is another debate. Still, saying that these newcomers, these workers, do not want to integrate, do not want to contribute and do not want to speak French is not only shameful and irresponsible, but it is also completely false when we look at what is actually happening. Last Friday, I had the opportunity to meet with representatives of an organization in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie called the Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes. They made the same observation that we need these people. The debate about the number is a bit of a distortion in itself, but the reality is that these groups that help these people settle and manage the administrative tasks with the schools and hospitals are overwhelmed and do not have the resources they need. That is where our governments, here in Ottawa and in Quebec City, must do more to support those people on the ground, who are there to ensure good integration and who are able to do so. Our capacity to welcome immigrants relies heavily on these community groups that do not have enough and are overworked at this time. They themselves are telling us that it is not because there are too many immigrants, it is because they do not have the human and financial resources to do a good job. We need to build more housing; that is true. We need to build social and affordable housing. However, I think we have to look at the next logical step. Immigrants did not cause the housing crisis. Immigrants should be welcomed by us, whether they are asylum seekers, refugees or economic immigrants, who are selected by the Government of Quebec, by the way, with points for knowledge of French. Let us do better. I look forward to questions from my colleagues. I will be pleased to provide answers.

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Ms. Andréanne Larouche (Shefford, BQ)

Feb/8/24 12:07:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie talked about the community organizations that work very hard to help newcomers integrate. Granby is a welcoming place, and I am very proud of that. I am in regular contact with Solidarité ethnique régionale de la Yamaska, the organization responsible for integrating these folks. Its staff make an incredible contribution to that community back home. I commend them for their work, but they are definitely overwhelmed. I would like to come back to another point on which I wish I could agree with him. We in the Bloc Québécois, including myself and my colleague from Lac-Saint-Jean, do not want to start a war of numbers. We merely want to talk about the issue and have a discussion that is calm and as respectful as possible. What does my colleague think about the issue of international students and the immigration minister's idea to lower these thresholds? On the ground, if there is one thing that people in our communities and in the schools are telling us, it is that these students are part of our community. They are the lifeblood of our post-secondary institutions. Indeed, the immigration minister would be hitting the wrong targets by limiting the number of international students. I would like to hear my colleague's thoughts on that.

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