44th Parl. 1st Sess.
September 17, 2024 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise today on Bill C-71, an act to amend the Citizenship Act. I will be splitting my time with the most hon. member for Durham.
“Broken immigration policy, dangerous loopholes”: Somewhere between abject incompetence or willful malice, these five words summarize this reckless bill. It would tragically add to an already reckless NDP-Liberal immigration policy that destroys lives and breaks apart the cohesion of Canada. It proposes granting citizenship to individuals born abroad with at least one Canadian parent who has spent 1,095 days in Canada without requiring those days to be consecutive or ensuring basic criminal record checks. The Liberals have failed to disclose how many people would gain citizenship under the legislation or how they plan on tackling the existing immigration backlog with the extra pressure that Bill C-71 would create.
Under this Prime Minister, our immigration system has become a revolving door for exploitation. Criminals and con artists take advantage while hard-working Canadians and newcomers pay the price. Over these past nine years, it is remarkable how badly this Prime Minister has failed Canadians and newcomers.
How did we get here? The answer, regrettably, is ignorance. These NDP-Liberals have always believed they know best, arrogantly so, even when the facts tell a different story. To understand the damage, let us look at their inheritance in 2015. In 2015, we were the envy of the world: a balanced budget; a roaring economy; an expanding middle class; low crime; and the most successful immigration policy in the world. Housing was affordable. When our common-sense Conservative leader was Minister of Housing, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $1,172. Today that has doubled.
This was not by accident. It was intentional. It took hard work by a Conservative government that cared about the prosperity of all Canadians and that cared about ensuring that newcomers succeeded. Our immigration system was structured to ensure newcomers contributed to our economy and that by working hard and playing by the rules, the Canadian dream was theirs to realize. That promise is now broken.
NDP-Liberals ignored the principle of Chesterton's fence. That is, never tear down a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place. Within 18 months, they tore down each fence put in place to protect our system. They increased the number of temporary foreign workers while scrapping measures to ensure Canadians had the first opportunity for jobs. They watered down language and citizenship knowledge requirements, exempting anyone under 18 and everyone over 54. They arbitrarily ramped up permanent resident targets to 300,000 a year without considering the impact on everyone's housing needs.
Today, housing prices have doubled; international students are packed into inhumane conditions, at times eight people to a small apartment, or worse, homeless under bridges; suicides are rampant; and housing builds have not kept pace with population growth. Last year alone, over 1.2 million people were added to the population, while Canada only built a third of the housing needed for those people to live.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reports that we need 5.8 million new homes to restore affordability, but we are building fewer homes than we did in the 1970s, with housing starts on the decline. Nobody believes the government's so-called targets, and hundreds of thousands of human beings are paying the price. Instead of firing those responsible, the Prime Minister rewards them. The same person who lost track of one million people as Minister of Immigration is now in charge of fixing the housing hell he helped create.
The rule of law has been shattered. Since 2015, violent crime has surged by 50%, and reports this summer reveal that the NDP-Liberal government has granted both citizenship and student visas to known terrorists. Take Ahmed Eldidi, who slipped by two national security screenings before being rewarded citizenship in May. He appeared in an ISIS terror snuff video, cutting a victim into pieces in 2015. Only at the 11th hour, with allied intervention, was the RCMP tipped off to his attempt to conduct an ISIS terror attack on Canadian soil. What did our Minister of Public Safety have to say? He said that this is the way the investigative and national security system should work. No, it is not.
Then we learned that another terrorist, Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, was awarded a student visa. Khan was plotting what he called “the largest attack on U.S. soil since 9/11”, a large-scale attack on Jews in Brooklyn.
This is not just limited to two cases. Communities across our country are subject to attacks and crime in their places of worship, their schools, their businesses and their homes. Almost daily here at home, mobs are on the march, threatening individuals' dignity and freedom.
820 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Sep/17/24 1:36:10 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I am grateful for the commercial break.
Almost daily here at home, mobs are on the march, threatening individuals' dignity and freedom. How are Canadians supposed to trust the NDP-Liberals with our safety and national security? How are newcomers, who want to work hard and raise a family here, supposed to have faith in the incompetent government's immigration policy? The Canadian dream is broken.
Skilled immigrants who came here in search of a better life are stuck in low-wage jobs, unable to work in their trained professions because of bureaucratic red tape. If one wants a doctor they must call an Uber. Medical professionals are being denied from serving backed-up patients. There are 10 million Canadians who will soon be without access to primary care and the caregivers they need are ironically a two-minute wait away. StatsCan recently found that 15% of immigrants leave Canada within 20 years of arrival, many because they cannot find jobs in their trained professions. International students are exploited by diploma-mill colleges and sold fake degrees and false promises of employment, residency and citizenship.
Desperate people turn to fraudulent claims of refuge, knowing the NDP-Liberals have loosened the very restrictions that protect Canadians. For what? How many destroyed lives need to be sacrificed at the altar of this horrific incompetence or actual malice? In some ways, they know exactly what they are doing. They have used the chaos of their own broken immigration system to their partisan advantage, turning a blind eye to the international students who were bussed in to vote in Liberal nominations, like they did in Don Valley North. When criticized, they clutch their pearls and decry racism. Shame on them. What is racist is pitting refugee against refugee, pitting one group against another, shilling up desperate people for cheap jobs to kowtow to corporate interests, pandering to mobs that do not share universal values and obsessively trafficking in racial identity rather than individual dignity.
Canadians at home are not surprised by the broken state of our immigration system under the NDP-Liberals. They are devastated by the division they now bear witness to after nine years of this abuse. After nine long years of this nonsense, every Canadian knows the reality. Housing is broken. The rule of law is broken. Citizenship is broken. The Canadian dream is broken. Canadians who have worked hard their entire lives are watching their country be torn apart while new Canadians who came here with hope are discovering the dream they were promised has gone up in smoke. Families are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Newcomers are denied their potential, while terrorists are given the welcome mat. It was not like this before the nine years of the current Prime Minister, and it will not be like this after he is gone.
Canada is one of the oldest democracies on planet Earth. We are not some postnational project; we are a promise, and ours is a promise to keep amid the gathering darkness of broken immigration, broken dreams of common citizenship, crime, chaos, drugs and disorder that roam across our streets. We will restore the promise. We will be the light. Ours is a country where it does not matter what one's name is or where one comes from, but what one can do. It is a land where if one works hard and plays by the rules, one could earn a good living, raise a family and own a home. With freedom comes a responsibility to uphold those freedoms for all. Our freedom finds expression through the rule of law and a democracy that is to shape those very laws. Ours is a promise to keep for Canadians and newcomers alike that we will never give in, never back down and never surrender to the forces that would break us.
648 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Sep/17/24 1:41:20 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, in her previous interventions, the member had described a situation where her family, her grandparents had come from abroad. My family also came from abroad in the late 1960s.
The glorious thing about Canada is the diversity of our ideas. For many people across the way, for the NDP-Liberals, they think of diversity as multicoloured perspectives of the same ideological disposition.
In a Canada that is prosperous and free, we value freedom of debate. We value the freedom that every Canadian of every background can stand in the chamber and speak with strength to the issue of our citizenship and our immigration. Our citizenship is what unites us. Our democracy and the rule of law is at the core of who are, and it is this tradition that my constituents have advised me to uphold in the chamber today on this debate.
145 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Sep/17/24 1:42:51 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, my understanding is that this was a debate that was unanimously agreed to in this chamber.
Our issue is with the performative announcements that the NDP-Liberals make when it comes to our immigration plans. Without ever having a plan to deal with an overburdened immigration system, they once again present performative ideas as to how they are going to meet their targets.
65 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Sep/17/24 1:44:45 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, the inheritance that these NDP-Liberals had when they arrived in office was an envy of the world. Across the left and the right, our immigration policy was the envy of the world. Around the world, people looked at how Canada had managed its immigration levels, its housing, its health and its economy. This is an issue in which the NDP-Liberals, over nine years, have sown wanton division across our country and irresponsible government, which is a mixture of absolute ignorance or willful malice. I think it is somewhere between both.
94 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
