Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 6th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Mr. Clerk.

I don't have anyone else on the speaking list, so we'll go to Mr. Redekopp.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Sorry, I just wanted to say a couple of things on this.

This is a really important issue. Of course, this goes back to the war that happened when the Taliban took over Afghanistan. When all that was going on, here in Ottawa there were some Liberal political staff and Trudeau-appointed senators who conspired to bypass normal procedures by providing these forged papers to certain friends to circumvent the proper process in Afghanistan for those trying to get out.

This parliamentary committee got hold of certain documents, including emails, that exposed this conspiracy and held hearings back in 2022, actually, and 2023, but we were constantly blocked by the Liberals from calling key witnesses, such as the chief of staff for the defence minister, George Young, who allegedly ran this conspiracy.

We also learned in our hearings that the immigration department, Global Affairs and the Canadian Forces all launched their own internal investigations into these activities.

This motion is just to enable us as parliamentarians to get the most up-to-date information from Global Affairs Canada on their investigation. We'll see if the Liberals are going to be transparent and allow this to happen—

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

I didn't want to cut through my colleague's comments, but he's talking about a conspiracy. I think that's out of order. What happened in Afghanistan was not a conspiracy. His conspiracy comments are out of order.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Madam Kayabaga.

Mr. Redekopp, the floor is yours.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

When we tried to bring George Young to this committee to answer questions on the subject, every time I moved the motion, the Liberals blocked it.

I don't know if “conspiracy” is the right word. Maybe—

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Cover-up.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Cover-up. Sure. We can use cover-up.

Will the Liberals finally support the efforts of the opposition parties to get to the bottom of this, or is there something being hidden here? We need to know the answer to this question, because we have documented proof of a Trudeau-appointed senator, Liberal ministerial political staff and sitting Liberal ministers who participated in this.

If there's nothing to hide, we should just be able to get these documents—unless there's somebody who needs to be protected. It certainly can't be political staff, because I think they throw them under the bus often. It can't be a senator, because they're already implicated in this. Who's left? Maybe the Prime Minister. I don't know, but let's find out.

Let's get this information. Let's get it. The law clerk is wise enough to redact it as he needs to.

I'm just excited to get this motion passed. Hopefully, the Liberals will support it.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you.

Mr. Kmiec is back, so I'm going to call the vote now.

(Motion agreed to: yeas 11; nays 0)

Mr. Kmiec.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm glad we could get through that portion of our agenda and pass that important motion.

I have another motion that I've put on notice that I would like to move at this time:

That the committee acknowledge it has received correspondence from the President of Canada-Hong Kong Link, Andy Wong; that it express its deep concern at the unreasonable delays being imposed on Hong Kong Pathway applicants of up to 21 months; that over 8,000 applications are still waiting to be processed; that Hong Kongers in Canada are freedom-loving people and keeping them in limbo is wrong; that the committee call on Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to immediately begin processing renewals and extensions of Open Work Permits and Study Permits; and that this matter be reported to the House.

Here is the urgency of the matter, Chair.

We've all received a letter from Canada-Hong Kong Link. It explains the situation facing many of the applicants and respondents. Many of them are losing status, and it's also affecting their children, because when the parent loses status, the children oftentimes can't continue to go to school legally, so they're being removed from those schools, and the situation in Hong Kong is not getting better.

There were trials against Jimmy Lai. Other people who worked for Apple Daily and student protesters from the pro-democracy movement there have all been targeted. Some of them are being released, but they're being released with criminal penalties. On their records, it shows that that they were criminally charged and convicted. Sometimes the Hong Kong constabulary upgrade the charges to something much more serious when they're released, so they're having greater difficulty coming to Canada.

Then, once they're in Canada, once they have a visa to stay here, when they apply for permanent residency or for an extension, they face unreasonable delays, despite the fact that they were promised publicly and repeatedly by the Liberal government and by the minister that their matters would be heard in a timely fashion and would be expedited.

So far, I can count 8,357 applications that are still in processing. That's according to the Toronto Star report of March 15, 2024. I have spoken directly to persons working inside IRCC on whether, in fact, there is still priority processing for Hong Kongers. There is a lack of clarity. I've heard both that there isn't and that there is from my case file manager and from members of the Hong Kong community in Canada, whether they're in Toronto, Vancouver or elsewhere. They are saying, in fact, that they've been told the opposite, that they're not getting priority processing. That's causing a lot of anxiety in the community, and people are very worried about their futures in Canada.

In addition, they're also worried about whether or not Canada is still a welcoming place for pro-democracy activists. We all saw what the Hogue inquiry found on Friday last week, that, in fact, there was interference in our election. It wasn't successful, but the PRC is participating, and they're also targeting members of the Hong Kong community.

I am one of 18 parliamentarians who were targeted by the PRC by the APT31 reconnaissance pixel email attack. That's already been raised with the Speaker of the House of Commons, but if the government can't protect parliamentarians or won't protect parliamentarians, as we discovered with my colleague Michael Chong and his family being targeted by the PRC, many Hong Kongers see that, and they're extra worried. If the government won't protect parliamentarians, they hold no hope that the government will do right by them.

There are many groups now advocating for that priority processing for Hong Kongers to be done. I have a petition in the House of Commons as well that asks for an acceleration of the approvals to ensure that processing is done in a timely fashion and that “Hong Kong citizens' applications will not be rejected due to target restrictions”.

I'll read off some of the points they're making. They say, “Permanent residence (PR) pathways for Hong Kong residents takes effect on June 1, 2021, and expires on August 31, 2026”. They mention that, “More than 8,000 Hong Kong citizens are awaiting PR processing as of April 2024. Some of these applications have been waiting for over a year, despite being designated”—like I said—“for priority processing.” They say that “in December 2023 and February 2024, only 30 and 48 cases...were approved for permanent residency”.

That is from over 8,000. That is a huge discrepancy. If it's a priority to give people a yes or a no—I'm not saying everybody will get a yes—the department should at least be giving people an opportunity to plan their lives out and plan for their own future. It's difficult to plan when you're not given an answer.

The petition continues, “The Hong Kong pathway lacks measures to extend OWP, leaving some individuals with expired visas without access to health insurance, jobs, and education”. As I said, it's affecting children. In the cases that I have been tracking, there are well over 50 that I've found so far in different applications where children have been affected.

Again, the target number for PRs based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds is being reduced by the government. That's according to the government's own immigration targets plan tabled in November. It's going to be reduced to 13,715 by 2024, and by 2025 it will be 8,000. This reduction raises significant questions of whether Hong Kong citizens and residents will still be accommodated within the stream.

If the government plans to reduce the total H and C down to 8,000—and I just mentioned that there are 8,357 applications, which means that some applications have dependents attached to them—and they're all supposed to receive an answer, hopefully, within a reasonable amount of time, then what is the government indicating to them? There are lots of other agency applications going on, and they can't all be reserved for Hong Kong residents.

The government is saying, on one hand, that it does care for these Hong Kongers who are fleeing an oppressive Communist regime that, through the Basic Law and further legislation that's passing at a local level, is further constraining the freedoms of Hong Kongers and pushing more people to leave the country and flee, like eastern Europeans did in the 1970s and 1980s and like my family did in the early 1980s. My father came here in 1983 and then could not return to communist Poland. It's the same situation facing Hong Kongers today, and we have a stream that is shrinking in size and is now below the total number of applications that Hong Kongers alone have put in. There are lots of other humanitarian and compassionate grounds applications that are being made.

I want clarity from the government on exactly what it's going to do, but I want this reported to the House so that we can have a fulsome debate there and so that the House is made aware of what is going on. All these numbers are publicly available, and this motion puts them all together as a presentation piece, so that we can clearly see that this particular community has a great deal of anxiety about its future in Canada and about how many of its members will be allowed to stay as permanent residents and make contributions to Canada. They love democracy, human rights and free speech. They want to participate in the democratic process. These are, hopefully, future Canadians who will completely integrate into our system. We have a long history of Hong Kongers moving to Canada—becoming parliamentarians, even—and making a contribution to Canada. I have a lot of friends from there. I just find it appalling that the government would leave these people hanging, typically, until the last minute.

If I can make a comparison to what's been done with Ukrainian CUAET visa holders, when the program was to be shut down or extended, the government waited until the eleventh hour to announce what it was going to do. Now there are Ukrainian CUAET visa holders who are feeling the same rising level of anxiety that Hong Kongers in Canada have. I feel like this is the bellwether for how the government's going to treat other diaspora communities who are fleeing to Canada because of oppressive regimes overseas, so we have to do more. I want this reported to the House so we can have a fulsome debate.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Mr. Kmiec.

I have the speaking list: Mr. Chiang, Mr. Redekopp, Madam Zahid, Madam Kwan and Mr. McLean.

The floor is with Mr. Chiang. Mr. Chiang, go ahead, please.

[Paul Chiang, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Welcome back, Mr. Chair, from moving your private member's business.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I thank the members across for the two motions that we are discussing this morning in committee. I'm sure we can get some work done today and get these things done so that we can move on with the other pressing matter that this committee has to work on.

I would like to amend the following thing in Mr. Kmiec's motion. After you wrote “open work permits and study permits”, delete “and”, and I would like to add, “pursuant to Standing Order 109, that the government provide a comprehensive response.” I'd like to add that to the end of the motion. In this way Mr. Kmiec can get an answer from the government on this important issue. Hong Kongers are important to me also. I have lots of Hong Konger friends too, one of whom is right across from me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you.

Mr. Chiang has brought an amendment.

Mr. Kmiec, do you accept that as a friendly amendment?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I'd like to hear debate from others.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Okay.

Now I will give the floor to Mr. Redekopp.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

You can keep my name on the list for after this is done.

I think it's important that we do this motion. I think there are other pathways to get responses from the government, including talking about it in the House. I don't like the idea, then, of adding this to the motion, as it takes away that ability from us.

I think I would not agree with this amendment to the motion, but I do support the motion, which I can talk about after.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you.

Does anyone else want to speak to the amendment made by Mr. Chiang?

Madam Kwan.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to actually move a subamendment to the amendment. In fact, on this issue, what I think needs to be done is, of course, for the government to immediately resume priority processing for Hong Kongers. When the immigration measure was first introduced, the processing took six months, approximately. That's the average time it took people to be able to get their PR application. Now, it's being extended to 21 months.

In the meantime, what's happening is that people's study permits and work permits are expiring. For a few people I've talked to, they have already expired. For others, they are about to expire, so time is of the essence.

We know that immigration processing is often actually much delayed. What I would like to do, then, is amend this amendment as follows. In the line where it says, “to immediately begin processing renewals and extensions of open work permits and study permits”, I would like to change that to “immediately automatically renew open work permits and study permits for Hong Kongers as they wait for their permanent residence applications to be processed”. Then the rest follows.

I think that is absolutely essential, because the fear here for a lot of the folks is that as they wait.... Even if the government says it will resume priority processing, actually, government officials, from what I understand from one community group, have indicated to them that they have actually never stopped priority processing. However, nonetheless, it's taking 21 months for these applications to be processed.

In the meantime, people's statuses are expiring, so we need to make sure they don't lose their status. We're looking to what's going on with the priority processing and to resuming that work so that people don't end up being sent back to Hong Kong.

What's happening right now in Hong Kong is that article 29 has passed in Hong Kong, whereby the Hong Kong government is escalating the arbitrary detentions and arrests of Hong Kongers. Can you imagine, if people are sent back, what they will face? I fear that for them and their family members.

I am a Hong Konger. I was born in Hong Kong. The people there are subject to this turn of events where the national security law has been brought in and the Basic Law for Hong Kongers has been all but dismantled. As well, frankly, the promise that was made when the handover took place, not just to Hong Kongers but to the international community, has been breached.

Therefore, I think it is incumbent on us to do this work. The government says that it stands with Hong Kongers, so let's do it not just by words but in action. What needs to be done at this point in time is to ensure that priority processing is resumed and, in the interim, that the Canadian government automatically renews their work permits and study permits.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Madam Kwan.

Before I go to the debate, Mr. Clerk is asking if you can provide us with exactly where this should be inserted.

Mr. Clerk, is that all you want?

[The Clerk]

Yes.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

I will repeat the language.

After the words “Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to immediately”, strike out the word “begin”. Then, we add in the word “automatically”. Then, we strike out the word “processing”. Then, the word “renewals” becomes “renew”, and we strike out “and extensions of”, and then it goes on to “open work permits and study permits”. After that, we add in “for Hong Kongers as they wait for their permanent residence applications to be processed”.

That last piece is just to make it clear that it applies to Hong Kongers. It's not forever in terms of renewing their study permit or work permit; it's just until their PR application is processed, so that they don't end up losing status as they wait and then getting caught in the bad situation of having no status while they wait, in violation of IRCC regulations, or being sent back to Hong Kong to face consequences that I certainly don't want to think about.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Madam Kwan.

We are debating on the motion brought forward by Mr. Kmiec, amended by Mr. Chiang and subamended by Madam Kwan.

Mr. Chiang, you are on the speaking list.

If anyone else is wishing to speak to this subamendment, please raise your hand.

Go ahead, Mr. Chiang.

[Paul Chiang, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Madam Kwan, for bringing your subamendment.

As you say, you were born in Hong Kong. I, myself, was not born in Hong Kong, but I do have lots of family in Hong Kong. Hong Kong holds a special place in my heart, too. I learned Cantonese because of my Chinese heritage, and I want to make sure I stay connected to my heritage.

We are good to support you on your subamendment. This committee is here to work together, to make sure we get the work done and that we can move forward, not to dwell too much on certain things. I would love to work and get this thing done. Hopefully, one day we can all go back to Hong Kong for a visit.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Mr. Chiang.

As there are no more hands up, I'll take the vote.

(Subamendment agreed to)

Now we are back to the debate on the amendment, and I have the speaking list.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

On a point of order, Chair, was the consent to the subamendment, or both the subamendment and the amendment proposed by—

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

It was on the subamendment proposed by Madam Kwan.