Hon. Elizabeth Marshall: Welcome, minister.

Minister, parliamentarians depend on the work of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Yet, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, your department, along with Treasury Board Secretariat and Canadian Heritage, wrongfully refused to disclose to the Parliamentary Budget Officer how $16 million for initial implementation costs for Bill C-13 would be spent. This funding was announced in December. By now you would — or at least should — know how you are going to spend it.

You also refused to provide to the Parliamentary Budget Officer information concerning the ongoing tasks and costs associated with the bill. Yesterday, Mr. Giroux told the Senate’s Official Languages Committee that it’s the first time as Parliamentary Budget Officer that he has gotten such a refusal from three departments.

Minister, Mr. Giroux also told the Senate committee that Canadian Heritage has since provided him with some of that information. Will you instruct your own officials to provide all information on Bill C-13 to the Parliamentary Budget Officer? If not, why not?

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you for the inspiring question. Congratulations to all the students involved.

It reminds me of when I was an undergraduate student signing up in my first year to volunteer for the World University Service of Canada, or WUSC, an organization that seeks to bring refugees to Canada for the purpose of studying.

Are there lessons we can learn? Yes, absolutely. No one has a monopoly on good ideas, the government included. To the extent that we can understand how to support some of the world’s most vulnerable who also form part of the cohort of international students who make some of the greatest social and economic contributions to our communities, I think we can continue to do this.

One of the things I’m reluctant to do, though, is to find a good idea and have the government take it over. When it comes to refugee resettlement, private resettlement in Canada is actually the envy of many countries around the world when I engage with them on a bilateral basis. When people have a built-in network of supporters who have put energy, time and, sometimes, funds into welcoming people into their communities, it actually results in them being supported well after they arrive.

To the extent that the students at one of your alma maters want to see what we can do to help spread this kind of generosity, please note this is right up my alley. Supporting some of the world’s most vulnerable and leveraging our education system to do it seems like a positive initiative to me, and I want to reiterate my congratulations for this innovation. The positive social development space is deeply encouraging.

[Translation]

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you very much. This is an important question. For those who may not be aware, the quote, I believe, given the description, would have been pulled from a description of how our Express Entry system operates in Canada.

The Express Entry system scores people based on a number of factors: their education, work history, age and language competencies. What we see is that people who have a suite of skills have a higher score and are more likely to be invited to apply to come to Canada as a permanent resident.

There are some changes we can make to the system to attract workers who will make an even bigger contribution, not solely based on their scores but also by matching them with the regional needs or sector-by-sector needs of the economy. Those are the flexibilities I discussed in Bill C-19 that were recently adopted by the House of Commons.

In addition, though — and this is important, building on my answer to Senator Deacon’s question earlier — with respect to the Start-up Visa Program, we have an opportunity for growth, in my opinion. I want to be careful not to allow people to have a “golden passport” where they make an investment and can become Canadian. I don’t think that’s reasonable. However, if we can look at the rules to determine who is coming to set up a business that’s going to employ people in Canada and that will have a lasting impact on our communities, then we should examin how we can make revisions to the program to achieve those ends while still promoting high-growth sectors, such as the tech and innovation space.

It’s not easy to nail down the specifics of a policy that will have all those outcomes, but we will do that through consultation and collaboration with the sectors that have the greatest opportunity to use those streams to bring people here to start businesses that will employ Canadians.

[Translation]

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Before I begin, it is essential to acknowledge that Canada has both domestic and international obligations. The language we use is very important.

[English]

I do find it frustrating when I see a number of my colleagues describe people as being illegal. It’s a dangerous use of words, particularly when you recognize that our domestic and international laws provide an opportunity for people who are fleeing extremely vulnerable circumstances to make a claim for asylum within our body of laws. That doesn’t mean everyone does it, but I think labelling everyone who is seeking asylum as “an illegal” is a dangerous use of words.

That said, for people who do cross in an irregular fashion, including at Roxham Road, for example, it’s important that we have a system to deal with it, that we recognize that migration is a social fact and that it’s not up to us as to whether it will happen but how we manage it.

If we were simply to close Roxham Road tomorrow, for example —

[Translation]

 — that is not a solution. It simply moves the problem from one place to another. That is unacceptable.

[English]

What we need is to have a functioning asylum system where the rules are clear and that is properly funded, including by a $1.3 billion investment in the recent federal budget, to process people in a fair and timely way, so they understand the result of their claim, and so Canadians will have faith that the process has integrity.

With respect to the specific numbers, I don’t have them in front of me. If you have a specific request, I would invite the honourable senator to follow up with my office.

Hon. Rose-May Poirier: Thank you, minister, for being here today.

Minister, the families of those who were on board Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 were understandably shocked when they learned of a so-called friendly soccer game between Canada and Iran originally planned to take place earlier this month. The families continue to seek justice for their loved ones, and your government hasn’t given them much support over the past two and a half years. On May 17, when the Prime Minister was asked by a reporter why his government granted visas for the Iran team to enter Canada, he didn’t answer the question but put the blame on Canada Soccer, an organization which does not grant visas. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has that power.

Minister, could you confirm that your department processed visas and work permits for the Iranian soccer team and their delegation to enter Canada? If so, why, and how many visas and work permits did you approve?

Hon. Donna Dasko: Thank you, minister, for being here. My question today is about Ukraine and the government’s efforts to assist Ukrainians in their terrible situation.

Between March 17 and June 8, your department received approximately 296,000 applications under the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel program, of which approximately 132,000 had been approved as of June 8. That would mean that fewer than half of the applications during that time period have been approved.

I would like to hear from you how you might speed up this process, what efforts are being made, and what your department is doing to deal with these applications. Thank you.

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you very much. With enormous respect, this program is something I’m incredibly proud of. This is a program that has now seen, together with other measures we put in place to expedite existing applications, well in excess of 30,000 Ukrainians make their way to Canada this year.

For a significant period of time, we were actually processing people on the two-week standard we had broadcast. There are some exceptions to that, of course, based on the individual case file, but there is not a big challenge in terms of processing these cases in an expedited way. The large delta that you see between approvals and applications is more a factor of the continued arrival of new applications in large numbers.

Something else that I’m watching very closely is the delta between approvals and arrivals. I visited the region — of course, not to Ukraine before our embassy reopened, but to Poland, as well as certain other European nations. We have heard that there are a significant number of people who are taking out, more or less, an insurance policy because they don’t want to go very far from Ukraine. They want to return home as soon as it’s safe to do so.

We’ve put everything into the system that we can to expedite the processing of these applications and, frankly, it’s working. I think this policy is an enormous success and may actually serve as the basis for temporary protection models in different circumstances into the future.

[Translation]