Bill C-11 (Historical)

Balanced Refugee Reform Act

An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act

This enactment amends the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, primarily in respect of the processing of refugee claims referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board. In particular, the enactment
(a) provides for the referral of a refugee claimant to an interview with an Immigration and Refugee Board official, who is to collect information and schedule a hearing before the Refugee Protection Division;
(b) provides that the members of the Refugee Protection Division are appointed in accordance with the Public Service Employment Act;
(c) provides for the coming into force, no more than two years after the day on which the enactment receives royal assent, of the provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that permit a claimant to appeal a decision of the Refugee Protection Division to the Refugee Appeal Division;
(d) authorizes the Minister to designate, in accordance with the process and criteria established by the regulations certain countries, parts of countries or classes of nationals;
(e) provides clarification with respect to the type of evidence that may be put before the Refugee Appeal Division and the circumstances in which that Division may hold a hearing;
(f) prohibits a person whose claim for refugee protection has been rejected from applying for a temporary resident permit or applying to the Minister for protection if less than 12 months have passed since their claim was rejected;
(g) authorizes the Minister, in respect of applications for protection, to exempt nationals, or classes of nationals, of a country or part of a country from the 12-month prohibition;
(h) provides clarification with respect to the Minister’s authority to grant permanent resident status or an exemption from any obligations of the Act on humanitarian and compassionate grounds or on public policy grounds;
(i) limits the circumstances in which the Minister may examine requests for permanent resident status or for an exemption from any obligations of the Act on humanitarian and compassionate grounds; and
(j) enacts transitional provisions respecting the processing of pending claims by the Minister or the Immigration and Refugee Board.
The enactment also amends the Federal Courts Act to increase the number of Federal Court judges.

Balanced Refugee Reform Act

[Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak today to the bill that the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism recently introduced in the House.

This refugee bill was eagerly awaited and badly needed. No one will be surprised to hear that the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act was very helpful to my fellow Vietnamese who immigrated to Canada at the same time as I did.

When people ask me about my background, they ask me three questions. First, they ask me where I come from; second, whether I remember the war; and third, whether I was one of the boat people. It is clear that Quebeckers and Canadians understand and agree with the principle of refugees.

This debate coincides with the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Many people from my country came here as refugees and became prominent citizens, like the refugees from other countries who came and made Quebec and Canada better.

The current act is quite out of date and sometimes gives refugee claimants a bad name. It is high time we modernized it.

On March 30, the federal government introduced Bill C-11 as part of its reform of the refugee system. If it were passed as it stands now, this bill could have a serious negative impact on refugees. It is not enough to pass a law to improve what is not working. What we must do is find a balance and create something that will work.

The Bloc Québécois has asked the government to provide the committee with the regulations so that we can do an exhaustive study, because many measures announced as part of this reform are not included in this bill.

The Bloc Québécois is in favour of studying this bill in committee, and I am proud to say that I will study it carefully, because I am the assistant critic. The member for Jeanne-Le Ber is the Bloc Québécois critic, and he does a very good job, by the way. We make a great team, and the people of Quebec can be glad to have a team like ours, because we will see to it that the flaws in this bill are corrected.

We are happy that the government is finally looking at implementing the refugee appeal division. However, we are disappointed that it is not fair, because not all applicants will have access, which we believe is discriminatory.

When people from designated safe countries are denied at the first level, they will not have access to this appeal division. Even if the government assures us that all files will be examined individually, there is no guarantee that there will be no mistakes.

My colleague from Jeanne-Le Ber pointed this out. We know the statistics of some IRB members. Some of them flatly reject 90% to 95% of the applications they receive, while others show more flexibility. A decision made by one man or one woman is arbitrary. That is why it is not fair that refugees from designated safe countries will not have access to the refugee appeal division.

Another thing: which countries will be designated safe by the minister and the government?

The government is currently working on Bill C-2, An Act to implement the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the Republic of Colombia. The government tells us that a free trade agreement with this country is no problem because Colombia respects human rights.

However, Canada accepts Colombian refugee seekers who claim their rights have been violated in Colombia. Will the minister put Colombia on the list of safe countries? I wonder.

On the one hand, the government says it wants to sign a free trade agreement with Colombia because it is a safe country. On the other hand, it accepts political refugees from that same country because their rights have been violated. What will the minister choose? Will the minister decide to list it as a safe country?

That is why we think that the idea of safe countries is questionable. We do not know where the minister will put Colombia and other countries that do not respect the human rights of women or homosexuals—these are recognized rights.

Even though the Conservative government sometimes has difficulty acknowledging them, these rights are still recognized in Quebec and Canada. What will the minister decide? Will he designate certain countries as safe even though they do not respect human rights, women's right or the rights of homosexuals? What category will these countries be in? It worries me.

A civil servant will make the decision. Applicants from designated safe countries will have no right to appeal. That is far too radical considering that the decision will have been made by a single person. It is possible that an applicant's individual rights will not be respected. He will not have all the rights that other people with the same background but who come from different countries will have.

Statistics for certain board members are alarming. We should not find this kind of unfairness when the decisions are made by civil servants.

It also says that an immigration officer will have 8 days, as opposed to 28, to refer a refugee claim to a first interview with a department official.

Some people are traumatized when they arrive here. They have been abused and pressured. Some come from very corrupt countries. They do not trust the government in the country they came from. When they arrive here, they are told that in eight days they will have to explain their situation to a government official. They have left a corrupt country where their rights were violated. They are told that they have eight days to prepare to explain their situation. That is not very long for people who have suffered such great trauma.

Then, the second hearing happens 60 days later. Do not forget that many refugee status claimants arrive here having left their houses, their families and their jobs with no preparation whatsoever. They did not bring any documents to prove what they are saying. They have to get those documents.

As MPs, we occasionally write to embassies in Africa. Although we have more resources than refugees or applicants, it takes a fairly long time for the mail to get there as well as for the reply to come back.

What will we do when the person does not obtain the documents required for their defence within 60 days? Will their application be refused automatically? Will this person be penalized because they could not provide the necessary documents?

At present, it takes 19 months and now we are talking about 28 days. Perhaps we could find a compromise. I believe there is enough flexibility to do so.

At present, more than 45% of refugee claims are accepted. When refused, the failed claimants can ask the Federal Court for a judicial review. This court presently accepts 13% of applications. Where an error was made in the decision, 2% of requests are allowed. In total, 60% of applicants are successful in the end. The tragedy lies in the fact that many failed applicants have found work, married, had children born in Canada and have learned the language. In other words, they have fully integrated in the host society.

The current backlogs are unacceptable for 40% of the claimants who will be forced leave Canada. This government is largely responsible for these backlogs. Indeed, since 2006, we have gone from 20,000 to 60,000 backlogged claims. We know that over a third of the board members could have rendered decisions, but there are many vacant positions, which has caused this backlog.

As my colleague from Jeanne-Le Ber put it so well earlier, we cannot help but wonder if these delays are arranged on purpose in order to stay within certain quotas set by the government. What will they do in the future to stay within those quotas? Will they deny more claims? This will not serve Quebec or Canada.

We must ensure that this new legislation does not discriminate against claimants and does not deny more claims because they are processed faster. That would be tragic, both for the claimants and for our current system.

It is definitely time to reform this legislation, but that does not mean it should be reformed in a slapdash manner. We can take the time to reform it correctly. There is a difference between saying that it should have been done a long time ago and saying that we will do it too fast, which could lead to other injustices. If we did that, we might improve what is not working, but we would risk undermining the parts that are working. We must ensure that this bill does not create new injustices.

In committee, my colleague from Jeanne-Le Ber and I will ensure that when the time comes to vote on this bill in the House, it will be much improved and will respect the needs of claimants as much as possible. We no longer want to hear that, according to statistics, 60% of claims are completed and are successful. It is sad to hear people say that refugee claimants are abusing the system.

It is an essential system that is desperately needed, but the current legislation is outdated.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-11. At the outset I, too, want to make note and compliment the minister for getting his bill this far and the fact that he has been here for all of the presentations is a big plus for him. I know that in the provincial legislature, and the only one that I am familiar with is the Manitoba legislature, that is an expected practice. The minister is always there to listen attentively to the speeches of the members. Therefore, I am really impressed that he would do that.

Also, I think there is a bigger issue here. The government is in another iteration as a minority government and it has taken this long for the government to figure out that that is what it is in, a minority government and that majority government possibilities are not guaranteed. Therefore, it has to make the best of the situation it is in.

We look to people like the minister, and he is not alone because there are one or two others over there who show a similar kind of appreciation for how they fit into the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately, there are many people on the government side, members and ministers, who do not appreciate that and it makes it much more difficult to work in a situation like this.

I think that under certain circumstances the government may last the full five years. I know I have said this before but if no one party moves up substantially in support, what would be the point of forcing Canadians to spend millions of dollars for an election that will probably produce the same results.

The fact is that our voters are out there and they want to see results. Whether it is that particular minister, another minister or the government who wants to make accommodations with opposition parties, I think that should be encouraged because it will hold us all in a better stead at the end of the day.

I have always said that there are advantages to minority parliaments. I am a fan of minority governments because I think that they do produce results. We had a very successful run in a minority Parliament of Lester Pearson from 1962 to 1968 where we got the unification of the armed forces. People would have thought that would be impossible to do. We got a new Canadian flag which also at the time seemed like an impossibility. All of that happened during minority situations. I am very positive that this minority situation can produce really good results.

Another point is that all we need to do is look at where this party started, where it warped from. Can we imagine the old Reform Party members looking ahead? I think they would be in a state of shock if they could see what some of their ministers are actually doing. This was a party that was very rigid and extreme in its views and, in some ways, it has come a long way.

I am actually fearful of a majority Conservative government because then we would see the ministers marching in here, dropping the bills on the desk and using a take it or leave it approach.

This particular bill has a lot of potential because of the minority situation. If the government truly wants to get it through, which I think it does, then it is prepared to make some amendments at committee.

One of my colleagues earlier talked about the idea that we should have sent the bill directly to committee and that would have given the committee more authority and more leeway to make more radical changes to the structures of the bill. The government did not agree to do that, which is fine. We now need to work with what is in front of us

I think all the representatives of the opposition parties have indicated that they look forward to the bill going to committee. Therefore, the issue becomes how the bill will play out at the committee stage. That remains to be seen because our critic has some positive things to say about the bill and some negative things to say about the bill. Perhaps some of her concerns can be dealt with and allayed at the committee.

I also want to note that our critic is a very hard worker in this area and understands her critic area very well. More important, she actually gets along with the minister. It is very important in a legislative environment that the critic and the minister get along, to the point where the minister himself mentioned that she had been invited and had attended a briefing session on the bill before it was introduced. That is a battle we had with the previous member. The member for Souris and I, in a past life, sat in sessions at the provincial level. Some ministers would provide information. The ministers who were considered the best and got the best results were the ministers who invited the opposition into their offices and gave them a briefing on the bill. There were other ministers, on the other hand, who just flatly refused and would not allow it at all. At the end of the day, they got poorer results, a rougher ride and a lot more stress than they would have had, had they adopted the more open approach.

I now want to deal with some of the issues in the bill. The refugee issue has been a cause for trouble and concern under previous Conservative and Liberal governments for many years. I remember both the Mulroney government and then the Chrétien government making political appointments to these board and then running into trouble with their decisions. We understand that political parties win elections and become government and it is accepted that they have the right to appoint some of their own people into positions, but this was one area where making blatant political appointments did not work out very well.

We have some stories in Winnipeg where people were literally abusing their positions with the refugee board. We also dealt with the area of immigration consultants, which is just a terrible area. We have had in Manitoba multiple times where immigration consultants have been called on the carpet for charging ridiculous fees, taking advantage of not only poor people and people who are refugees, but on the immigrant investor program, highly educated, intelligent, fairly wealthy immigrants being hoodwinked by shady people in the area of immigration consultants.

I am not sure what the answer is. Manitoba has some laws dealing with the issue provincially that I believe have some merit and work reasonably well, but I am all in favour, and I think all of us probably would be, of trying to rid the landscape of these immigration consultants, because more often than not they are tied into other businesses. They have a travel agency on the side or do income tax on the side. They essentially grab people in a web and control them, capture them and hand them off to one another. It is not the type of environment we want to be in.

Canada has an honourable past but it also has a speckled past in dealing with refugee issues. It is true that we have accepted a higher proportion of refugees, one of the previous speakers mentioned the numbers, relative to our size than any other country in the world, so that is to our credit, but we have other examples in our past for which we are currently not overly proud.

There is a long-standing tradition in many cultures of offering refuge to those fleeing persecution. In Europe, people during the middle ages could seek sanctuary in a church. In fact, there are cases in Winnipeg right now where people are in a church. Giving sanctuary was considered a sacred act.

Americans fleeing slavery were given protection in Canada in the days before the U.S. Civil War. Although there have always been people fleeing oppression, it was not until after World War II that world governments recognized the need to create formal legal obligations for countries to accept refugees. Prior to World War II, there was no legal distinction between immigrants and refugees. Even today, many people are unsure of the difference between the two.

In 1951, the refugee convention defined a refugee as someone who has a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership, social group or political opinion. When we apply a definition like that to what the minister is trying to do, I wonder whether he can see how people might be concerned about the whole issue of a safe countries of origin list. He has a lot of good things in the bill but this is one of the stumbling blocks.

It makes sense administratively and it would be quick and easy to just put a country on a list and say that everybody from that country should be seen in a certain light. However, I think we have moved beyond that in our thinking and want to look at the individual. I know it is hard for people to comprehend that somebody from France, England or the United States could be considered a refugee but the reality is that, even using the definition going back to 1951, there could be people practically under our noses who would qualify because at that point in time there was no list of countries.

I am not on the committee but I can appreciate that there are probably reasons why the minister feels this list of countries is required. He has gone the extra step to let opposition parties know today that he is prepared to work with that list and explained that it was not as black and white and arbitrary as we think.

Now we get into the regulations. Anybody who follows legislation knows that the bill provides the tombstone information that is not going to change but the regulations provide all of the details of how the bill is really going to work in practice. Those are changeable by the minister. If the government or the minister does not like something that requires a regulation change, they can simply go ahead and do it.

In opposition, we are always very careful that we do not give away too much. When we pass a bill, in our own minds we are pretty clear about it, but the reality is that once the regulations get promulgated we find out there are a lot of things in it that we did not really like. That may be part of the problem. If the minister could somehow convince the critics that he is not out to do bad things and has solid arguments, they may be convinced at the end of the day.

At the end of the day we know that no matter what we do we can always make changes. One of the beauties of the democratic system that we have in our country is that if we make mistakes, and we do make them, we have the ability to correct them and try to make them right.

I have some hope, unlike some of the other ministers over there, that in his case it may be possible to do something. It seems to me to be very arbitrary that we could say that people coming out of Hungary must be on that list or they will not qualify as refugees.

That may be true. Let us grant the minister that that may be 100% true. However, we should not be doing it on the basis of putting the country on a list. We should be looking at each individual applicant separately. If the individual does not qualify, then by all means he or she does not qualify.

Major regional bodies have attempted to refine and extend the concept of refugee. In 1969, the Organization of African Unity and in 1984, the Organization of American States, OAS, extended the refugee definition to people fleeing generalized violence in these regions. Today, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the international organization that safeguards the rights of refugees, estimates that there are 12 million refugees and over 6.3 million internally displaced people who are in need of protection.

There are people living in refugee camps in the Middle East who are probably into the second generation. I could be wrong. I do not think anybody is third generation. In my mind, that is where we should be putting a lot of our attention and concern. People are living in tent cities and they are stuck there for years and years. To me, it would be very easy to decide that they would qualify as refugees.

I would assume that is where church groups are really important in this whole process. They have been historically and have done a fabulous job. I remember that churches were involved in bringing the Vietnamese boat people over to Canada. Churches were very involved in that whole area. They should be encouraged. They have a sense of where the problems are in the world. They know that the people living in the refugee camps are people who need help right away. I trust their compass and direction in how to deal with the refugee situation.

Today, there are 12 million refugees and 6.3 million people who are internally displaced. Those are huge numbers. I do not have the statistic at my fingertips, but we are only dealing with 100,000 out of those 12 million per year. By the time we work our way through that group of people, there will probably be more people on the list.

Somebody was adding up the number of wars in the world and came up with 30 to 50 wars that the average person would not even know existed. We could ask the average constituent questions about whether there is a war going on in the Congo or elsewhere and they would be totally unaware of it. The fact of the matter is that people are only aware of issues when they see them on the television news on a particular night. They are quite aware of what is going on in Afghanistan and Iraq, but beyond that, the awareness just is not there.

Madam Speaker, did you indicate one minute? I do not see that well. Time certainly does fly. I have not even started on this. Maybe I will have to go to committee and see how the committee process works.

I did want to talk about the bad experiences we have had here in Canada. Anti-Semitic immigration policy proved deadly in the years leading up to World War II, when European Jews were refused entrance into Canada.

In 1939 the ship St. Louis left Germany carrying over 900 European Jews seeking refuge and protection on the other side of the Atlantic. They were refused everywhere they went. They had to return to Europe and most of those people died in concentration camps. That is an example of a very bad situation in our history.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is a privilege to speak to Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act. This bill came out of a lot of work that was done when the Liberals were in government in 2004 to 2006. We are pleased to see the minister has listened to members from all political parties and has tried to craft the bill in a way that will deal with something that has been a very vexing challenge for any government that has served our nation.

All of us know and hear about the tragic stories and have met refugees who have come to our country. They have endured lengths of time of great uncertainty in their lives, fleeing countries and environments that have been, at best, disconcerting to them and, at worst, life-threatening to them and their families.

The stories of terror and horror that they, their families and loved ones have been subjected to are often difficult for those of us who have lived in our beautiful country to understand or truly empathize with. It is a reality in far too many countries where the milk of human kindness does not run through some of their leaders and they and the people who follow them have inflicted crimes against individuals that are beyond our worst nightmares. Yet the people who members see in their offices have come to our country to find a better life, security, enjoy freedom and, above all else, to be protected and free of the kind of viciousness and brutality that infects too many countries in the world.

The genesis of the bill is to ensure that individuals who come to our country, or are selected to be refugees or apply to be refugees are true refugees in our country and are able to go through a process that enables them to enter into Canada in an expeditious fashion with uncertainties removed. More important, it ensures that individuals who try to take advantage of the system, queue jump and enter our country from other countries with no just cause are not allowed into the country, that they are removed from the system and sent back to their countries of origin expeditiously and that the moneys that come from our citizens are used wisely and responsibly.

The Liberal Party will support the bill going to committee. We do this not because we think it is a perfect bill, it is far from it, but we believe it is important and responsible for us to ensure the bill gets to committee where witnesses can appear and members of the committee from all parties can ask the tough questions, which will allow us to ensure the bill is crafted in the most responsible and effective way possible.

We are, however, concerned that the government took four years to put together a bill such as this, given the fact that Conservatives and their offices, like ours, have heard about the challenges and problems within the immigration and refugee system. It is very important that at the end of the day the bill be rooted in fairness and efficiency.

The reform package incorporates recommendations that have come from the Liberal Party, including the establishment of a refugee appeal process. The government, however, has given no guarantees that the backlog of refugee claims will be addressed any time soon. We are concerned that it will not preserve the fundamental rights of all claimants. We have called for assurances from the government to ensure that the new refugee reform measures will actually reduce the backlog and ensure that we have a balanced refugee system that will ensure individual rights.

Why does the backlog exists? It is important to go back to look at history. The government, for reasons known only to it, has spent an extraordinary amount of time dragging its heels, not filling chronic vacancies that exist within the Immigration and Refugee Board.

In the first place, we feel the appointment process, as has happened in many other areas, has been heavily politicized. By not having a full board has resulted in an explosion of refugee claimants. Right now there is a backlog of 63,000 applicants waiting in line. This has not always been the case. Prior to the Conservatives forming government, 20,000 people were waiting in line. That number has exploded to 63,000 because the government has failed to make appointments in an effective and efficient manner.

This malaise that affects the government's inability or unwillingness to appoint people to boards and to structures that are important to the function of our nation has infected other areas. The Veterans Review and Appeal Board is a good example. This is an important appeal board that resolves challenges facing our veterans. The government has heavily politicized this board, too, by appointing individuals who do not have the competence to handle these complex cases. As a result, we are seeing a backlog in the Veterans Review and Appeal Board and we are seeing that in the immigration and refugee appeal board system.

The government has failed to deal with this big challenge. In the process it has really done a huge disservice to our country and our citizens. The function of these government appointed boards relies on them having a full complement or an effective critical mass of people who can do the job. If these boards do not have that, we see an inefficient execution of the duties of those boards and people suffer as a result.

I want to go back to the Veterans Review and Appeal Board, which has to do with our veterans, veterans who have given to our country, veterans who have served our nation, veterans who need good health to maintain their standard of living. Our veterans have served our country throughout their lives, but when they need assistance and go to the VRAB they find a mess, which results in a lot of them suffering. I appeal to the government to grasp what I have said and fix the system because it cannot continue in its current form.

We need to have a fair and just process that will take the concerns relating to safe country of origin seriously. My colleagues and others in the House have mentioned that. We want to ensure that we have the tools to deter refugee fraud, while at the same time protect bona fide refugees.

One of the major concerns of the Liberal Party with respect to this is ensuring that true refugees come in to Canada, but we deter fraud and weed out those individuals who abuse the system. We need to protect those bona fide refugees who want to come to Canada, sometimes need to come to our country to protect their own lives.

Elements of the bill also seem to be somewhat improvised. The government has committed more than $540 million over five years toward reforms that it wants to implement, and that is a good thing. However, this number was simply not in this month's budget. It comes just after the government announced a freeze on departmental spending.

If the government is committing $540 million to implement these reforms, but is planning to freeze spending, then where is it going to get the money? Is the government going to cut something else? If it is going to cut something else, then what is it going to cut? We only have silence from the government. The responsible thing for the government to do would be to let the Canadian public and the House know where it will get the money to do this.

Canadians also cannot afford the gross mismanagement that occurred last year when the government took a really ham-fisted approach toward Mexico and the Czech Republic by putting visa restrictions on the two countries. It seemed like a band-aid solution and a knee-jerk response to a spike in refugee claims from these two countries. We know what the government's intent was, and do not dispute it for a second, but the way in which it did this was extremely damaging to our country.

By announcing out of the blue visa restrictions on Mexico, with no consultation, for example, the government cost many companies hundreds of millions of dollars. Language training groups, tourism companies and others relied on being able to attract people from Mexico. They had contracts signed for them to come to Canada so they could learn English, which has happened for a long time. That was stopped cold. There was a great deal of uncertainty. Many people's lives and businesses were ruined by this glib, offhand implementation of visa restrictions last year.

You and I know, Madam Speaker, from living on Vancouver Island, that this affected quite number of businesses in our communities and cost them millions of dollars. In fact, some of them went out of business. It was completely unnecessary. As I said before, I fully understand where this was coming from with respect to the spike in claimants. We know some of the rationale behind that and some of the legitimate concerns the government had with respect to that spike.

However, our contention is there was a better way of doing this. I would posit for the government that if it considers doing something like that in the future, it should consult with the businesses involved that could be hurt by this. It should listen to a number of the companies that benefit from bilateral relations with these countries. Their concerns from an industrial perspective and an economic perspective need to be listened to.

I would submit that listening to them would enable the government to come out with a better series of solutions to deal with the very real challenge they were faced with at that point in time. We are certainly willing to work with the government to provide it with information and ideas on this. I know it has its sources to utilize, too.

This is a little background. In 2004 the former Liberal government implemented changes to the appointment process to the Immigration and Refugee Board. These changes included an advisory panel made up of a number of individuals involved in the refugee process, which screened all applicants for the IRB.

When the current government came to power, it delayed appointments to the board, while it reviewed the process, which was its right to do. However, then it structured the system so the government could simply appoint half the people as members of the panel. It held off on appointments to do that. Rather than pursue a course based on merit, it has pursued a course based much more on politics. As I said before, this delay caused a massive spike in the backlog, from 20,000 to 63,000 now.

We know our folks at Citizenship and Immigration Canada work very hard. The minister knows this very well. They are tireless and all of us try to work very hard in our constituencies. My staff, Jeff and Vikki, in my Victoria office work very hard to try to resolve these issues in a timely fashion. It takes up a lot of their time.

The members and staff at Citizenship and Immigration Canada work very hard, but I would submit for the minister that he would be well-served to listen to the on the ground members of his ministry, those who work in the trenches and who do the person-to-person work. He would be well advised to ask them directly how he could change the system in a more effective way. In doing so, he would be getting information from those staff members who work on the ground and have to deal with the challenges every day.

He would also be wise to ask the tireless individuals who work for us as members of Parliament in our constituency offices about what they face. They have some very good ideas and solutions that the minister could utilize to ensure we have a better immigration system.

By listening to his staff, the staff who work in our offices and those who have gone through the immigration and refugee process, I think he would have three populations that could provide him with a lot of constructive solutions to make a better bill, one that would serve Canadians, immigrants and refugees very well.

Because of the changes the government introduced in terms of the appointment process, the chair of the board resigned and alluded to the fact that the politicization of the board was a factor in the chair's departure.

In the March 2009 status report of the Auditor General of Canada, chapter 2, Ms. Fraser noted her concerns regarding the timely and efficient appointments and reappointments of decision makers to the IRB. Ms. Fraser said very clearly that this process and how this is being done is something that is of great concern to her.

In addition to the growing backlog of applications, the recent spike in claims from certain countries has resulted in an ad hoc method of visa restrictions to constrict application volume. As I said before, we saw this in Mexico and the Czech Republic. We certainly hope that the government does not have a repeat performance on this because what would happen is that we would see simply another choke point in the system that would not serve things well at all.

The bill certainly provides a lot of further flexibility to the minister to deal with unusual spikes in refugee claims from democratic source countries and streamlining the removal process for unsuccessful applicants. We certainly support the streamlining of the removal of unsuccessful applicants. Right now the situation is actually quite grim in the sense that it takes an excessive amount of time for individuals to be processed.

I think the bill should be commended that it proposes changes to every stage in the in-Canada process. Currently people with successful claims are waiting an average of 19 months for a decision, and it takes an average of 4.5 years to process and remove an unsuccessful claimant. Obviously this is unacceptable, and we want to make sure that when the bill goes to committee the process that comes out of this is going to ensure that the wait time for individuals is going to be less than 19 months. That is a very cruel length of time, and the time it takes to actually process and remove an unsuccessful claimant at 4.5 years is also completely unfair to Canadians.

Some of the things the government wants to do at this point in time include having an information-gathering period, which currently is 28 days. It wants to shorten this to eight days. That seems like wishful thinking on its part, and I submit that is really not where the big backlog is that is causing a problem. There are other areas that can be much lengthier.

For example, the first-level decision phase is done by a government-appointed counsel appointee and is done within 18 months. Under the new process the first-level decisions would be made within the IRB within 60 days. That is a welcome objective, because if we could shorten that period of time from 18 months to 60 days, we would certainly have a much more efficient and effective system. However, we want to ensure that the individual, who is making these claims and will be the subject of these investigations, will be treated fairly under the system.

What is important also is the appeal process. Primary concern for us is that the introduction of a refugee appeal division must ensure that the first-level decisions that are going to be conducted will be done in a way that protects procedural fairness and fundamental justice sufficiently to avoid the RAD's becoming another bottleneck in the process.

If we look at the U.K.'s example, and that would be a worthy one to do, the U.K. has had a number of significant challenges in implementing this. In fact, in its process it has had a huge backlog of up to half a million asylum cases as of 2008 and it can take, get this, it is quite remarkable, 10 to 18 years to resolve. That is quite remarkable.

I know my time is ending, but I want to offer one other suggestion concerning refugees. Their children have a great deal of difficulty and there is a remarkable project called the Sage Youth project run by a remarkable immigrant called Tamba Dhar. She did this in Toronto. Essentially she provided children with mentors from their own community who would empower these children who may not have had good family situations. They provided solid adult anchors for those children within their own communities. I strongly encourage the government to work with the provinces to take a look at what Tamba Dhar has done with the Sage Youth program because the outcome is that these children were able to stay in school. None of them has run afoul of the law. They were not taking drugs. They had better outcomes. They had better employment outcomes and better educational outcomes.

I look forward to any questions.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be here to speak to Bill C-11, which provides for equitable reforms with respect to refugees. It is about time we looked at this because the process for dealing with refugee claims submitted by people who show up at our border crossings has been a big problem for a long time now. These people come to Canada claiming to have been persecuted in their home countries. Because they get no protection there, they come here to ask Canada for protection.

The number of claims awaiting processing has skyrocketed over the past few years. Processing delays are far too long for all cases, particularly those based on the Geneva convention, which defines a refugee claimant. People who submit claims live in limbo for years, but they deserve a faster response.

This also happens to other persecuted individuals in extremely difficult circumstances around the world. These people submit their refugee claims in good faith because in many cases, they believe the legal definition applies to them, but their cases are dismissed after they have spent several years in Canada. They may have jobs, friends, families, houses. The wait times are also far too long for some unscrupulous opportunists who take advantage of the situation to try to stay in Canada as long as possible or even permanently.

This problem is due in large part to negligence on the part of the current and former governments, which hired too few members. This has been the norm at the Immigration and Refugee Board for a long time now. When there are not enough board members to process claims, when staffing levels are only two-thirds what they should be, fewer claims are processed and wait times go up.

I have a very hard time understanding this situation. Why did the government not take action sooner? Why did it not take steps to shorten wait times?

The committee often studies what is going on in immigration. I have become deeply convinced that, unfortunately, wait times are being used as a tool to manage the arrival of immigrants or, in this case, refugees. Allow me to explain.

Normally, in the health care system, wait times are due to an insufficient allocation of resources, which is involuntary because resources are scarce. Because more people need services than there are resources allocated, wait times increase over time. That is why only a certain number of people can be treated every year.

Where immigration is concerned, it is somewhat the reverse situation. Insufficient resources are voluntarily allocated to processing claims so as to not exceed the quotas and objectives that have been set. This is never acknowledged officially or publicly, but almost everyone agrees that only a certain number of people can be admitted to Canada every year.

Society has the ability to absorb a number of people from all over the world. Means are therefore sought to try and control the influx. For many years, it suited governments to have prolonged processing times. It helped slow down the influx of refugees, who figured it would be complicated to get into Canada and that it would take a few years. This acted as a disincentive.

It became a problem when the government lost control and found itself with long wait periods and a process so complicated that it almost acts as an incentive for people to come to Canada. They figure that their claims will take years to process and, during that time, they will be in a safe country and will not have to fear for their safety.

So previous governments and the current government are to blame for part of the problem, but at least we have a bill before us that is aimed at tackling the problem.

I recognize that there is a problem and that it is good to have a bill to deal with that problem. I believe that this bill contains some interesting principles. The Bloc Québécois will support it at second reading to send it to committee.

We asked that this bill be sent to committee even before second reading so that we would have complete latitude to study it and suggest constructive improvements. But the government did not opt to go that route. I hope that if we work together in committee to make the bill better, we will not get bogged down in “proceduritis”.

Let us look at the main elements of the bill. No one will be surprised that I am going to start with the refugee appeal division. This bill finally provides for implementing this division, even though it has been in the act for quite some time. In fact, the 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act provided for an appeal division. At the time, two board members considered a refugee claim at the same time, and all it took was for one member to approve the claim for the claimant to be accepted. In 2001, the previous Liberal government told Parliament that it would reduce the number of board members from two to one, but that it would create a refugee appeal division to make up for the change and avoid arbitrary decisions. This Parliament voted for that. But the Liberal government unfortunately never implemented its own act and the refugee appeal division, and the Conservatives have not done so either.

That is why the Bloc Québécois has repeatedly tried to force the government to implement the division, the last time being when it introduced Bill C-291, which was passed at second reading but unfortunately defeated by a single vote at third reading because of a rather pathetic Liberal tactic.

I do not agree with the Conservatives' positions, but at least they were honest about the fact that they were opposed to the refugee appeal division and would vote against it. The NDP and the Bloc said they were in favour of the refugee appeal division and said they would vote to support it. The Liberals, on the other hand, said they supported it, but curiously, during the vote, 12 members were absent, that is, double the number of absent members of all the other parties combined.

The vote before and the vote after the vote in question were won by the three opposition parties by three votes, but when the time came to vote on Bill C-291, four Liberal members mysteriously remained seated and coincidentally, the bill was defeated by a single vote. That is a lot of coincidences at once. As we all know, that was the Liberals' strategy to try to appease their electoral base while still defeating the bill in the House.

I do not mean to dwell on the past, but I thought it was important to remind the House of what happened.

Let us now look forward. Why is the refugee appeal division necessary? Contrary to what is indicated in the bill before us, why should it apply to everyone?

All of our legal systems include the opportunity to appeal. The reason is very simple: because justice is administered by humans and humans can make mistakes, the system recognizes that the justice system can make mistakes.

Opportunities for appeal will therefore be included everywhere to correct potential errors.

The bill also proposes appeal mechanisms in our legal systems to ensure uniformity. The goal is to ensure a reasonable expectation that a certain type of case, say x, will produce a certain outcome and that every case like case x will produce that same outcome. That is not how it works at the moment.

Here is an example of how similar claims were treated differently by IRB members. This happened to twins, brothers from the same country. Their claims were reviewed by two different board members, and each one made a completely different decision. The cases were alike, they were brothers who had been through the same thing together, yet the board members did not make the same decision. Clearly, there is a lack of coherence. An appeal division would have made it possible to determine which board member was wrong or mistaken.

Appeal mechanisms seek to eliminate arbitrary treatment by giving our legal systems oversight over lower-level rulings. Some board members have rejected as many as 98% of the claims they have dealt with, while others have allowed nearly every claim that has gone before them.

If I were in court one day and someone told me before the hearing that the judge convicted in 98% of his or her cases, I would know that justice was not being served and that it was a farce. I would know the dice were loaded. But in a typical legal system with an appeal division, if every decision made by a board member or judge was overturned on appeal, the chief justice would eventually tell the judge that his or her rulings were a problem.

The same applies to the IRB. An appeal process ensures that those making the decisions in the first place really think them through. Decision makers have to remember that their decisions can be appealed. They have to really think about their decisions and consider whether they are likely to be upheld or systematically appealed.

That is not in the legislation. I know that there have been some intense discussions with the minister about the current potential for appeals in the legislation. There is none. I have been saying it all along, and I will say it again today. There are ways of getting around it, such as the judicial review process at the Federal Court. Very few applications are accepted. In all cases, only the procedural aspect of the application is examined. No one can request a judicial review on the basis of the facts. For example, if a member says that he does not believe a person's story and does not think he is credible, the Federal Court would never say that his story was credible and approve his application.

There is the issue of pre-removal risk assessments. This procedure is very rarely applied. In fact, only 2% of the applications involving new facts since the initial hearing are accepted. It is not truly an appeal mechanism. Neither is a permanent resident application on humanitarian grounds. Some people use it as a second attempt if they think there was an error with their case at the initial hearing. It does not fall under the definition of refugee status as adopted by the conventions supported by Canada.

I have spent a lot of time talking about the appeal division. I think that natural justice is something really fundamental, and we cannot ignore it. The problem with the bill before us is the exemption for so-called safe countries. The minister said that he would create a list, but we have no details about that yet, and people who come from these so-called safe countries will not have access to the refugee appeal division.

Finally, the bill takes a positive step by implementing the refugee appeal division and—let us be frank—by improving it in certain ways, for instance, with the possibility of presenting new evidence and testifying again. Nevertheless, a certain proportion of asylum seekers will not have this opportunity. In my opinion, that is a mistake. When it comes to equality of the most basic rights, we must not treat people differently based on their country of origin. That seems obvious to me.

When a person appears before a tribunal that will make a decision far less significant than one where the person could potentially be sent back to be tortured, killed or persecuted, the tribunal does not take the person's country of origin into account. When neighbours are in a dispute over a fence, neither party would ever be denied the right to appeal based on their country of origin. Everyone is treated equally, regardless of where they are from.

I do not see why this distinction would be made in the case of refugees. It is not necessary. The bill already provides for an expedited process, namely by suspending for one year the possibility of applying for a pre-removal risk assessment, a temporary resident permit or permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. These options that were once available to refugees no longer appear in the legislation. We do not think it is necessary to go so far as to prevent people from safe countries from using the appeal division.

I will now say a few words on the issue of deadlines, which are of particular concern to me. Deadlines do not figure in the bill, but I imagine they will be included in the regulations. It seems that the minister intends to give refugees eight days from the time refugee status is claimed to the time they meet with an IRB officer for help with the application. As I was saying earlier, although generally speaking it is a good idea to expedite the process, in some cases this can be problematic.

When a refugee from another country who has been persecuted and perhaps raped several times arrives in Canada, they are told that they have one week to tell their whole story. Many psychologists would say that you can work with a rape victim, for example, for months before they start talking about their experience. Perhaps we should include mechanisms to correct this. In addition, the interview will be used later, during the hearing and possibly the appeal, to discredit the person. They will be asked why they did not report certain things during the initial interview. We must ensure that the person's psychological state during the interview makes it possible to truly tell their story.

I also have concerns about the timeframe for the hearing, which is 60 days. It is a good thing if applicants who are ready do not have a long wait for their hearing. In some cases, however, it may be extremely difficult to obtain the evidence and documents that might be very far away. In some parts of the world, it can take two weeks for a document to arrive and another two weeks to send it back. That adds up to a month, leaving only 30 days for the lawyer to prepare the case.

Finally, I am very worried by the fact that, by and large, these reforms will be made by regulation, thus sidestepping Parliament. In addition, there is the matter of the timeframes I spoke about, the designation of safe countries, the assisted voluntary returns program that I did not have time to talk about, and so forth.

Yesterday's news reported on the case of a sick, pregnant woman, locked in prison and waiting to be deported. The government sometimes lacks compassion. Therefore, we are very reluctant to give it carte blanche. For that reason, we are asking the minister to submit the regulations in full before proceeding with a clause-by-clause analysis in committee. Thus, when we vote on the bill, we will at least be familiar with the proposed regulations.

I will be pleased to answer my colleagues' questions.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

First, Mr. Speaker, I wish to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Brossard—La Prairie.

As the member for Laval—Les Îles, I rise today in Parliament to speak on a very difficult piece of legislation, Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act. These proposed amendments deal with the fundamental right of individuals to seek protection in other countries, and specifically in Canada, when their government wilfully refuses to protect its citizens.

Instead, many of these individuals live in terror, afraid for their lives and for those of their families. In some instances, they are subjected to decades of civil war. They are subjected to cruel and unusual torture, in most instances at the hands of their own government, the same government that had pledged to serve and protect their human rights.

I also speak today in the House for the voices of the many women and children who have been subjected to force and violent rape by armies given the authority to ethnically cleanse a country. All this is done while the government stands silent. It not only does not protect its citizens but it does not even bring the perpetrators to justice. Many of the more than 50 wars that are going on in the world today have been going on for decades. The number of victims runs in the millions. Today, if the amendments that we will be asking for are not allowed to be incorporated into Bill C-11, then Canada's Conservative government will take away those rights to protection.

In the few minutes I have before me, I will speak to three areas of this bill: first, the eight-day rule, second, the right to remain in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds and, third, the notion of safe country of origin or, as described in clause 12, proposed section 109.1, designated countries of origin, where parts of a country within a country would be considered safe by the Canadian refugee authorities.

Implementing an eight-day information-gathering rule goes against everything Parliament has put in place to allow claimants a fair and impartial refugee hearing with the support of competent legal counsel. Eight days is not enough to give counsel time to gain the trust of the claimants.

I am talking about people who go through many countries before they get to Canada, who have lived illegally and who have slept just about anywhere before they came here. We are asking them to sit down with a lawyer, explain their problem and try to give all the details within the very short time of eight days. How can we expect a poor man, women or child, because often children come all by themselves without the help and support of their parents, to trust that person who is in front of them within eight days?

Eight days is definitely not sufficient. Eight days is not enough time to secure adequate cultural interpretation. We know, for the majority of the time, that counsel would be working with a third language. Very few of the refugee claimants who we receive in this country speak one of the two official languages.

On the issue of humanitarian and compassionate grounds, the bill before us would require a claimant to wait a full year before reapplying after his or her claim for refugee status has been rejected. These people will be in complete limbo during that one year period. What would happen if, after discussions with a lawyer, a claimant realized that his or her claim was made on the wrong grounds, given the situation he or she experienced? What if the claimant wants to withdraw a claim and make a new one on humanitarian and compassionate grounds this time?

Claimants who withdraw their claims before the hearing date should be entitled to apply for permanent residency. Under this bill, however, claimants who withdraw their claims before their IRB hearing date have nowhere else to turn. All doors and windows are then closed to them. They currently have no other choice than to face removal.

I would like to speak about a case I heard about last night, that of a young woman from Guinea, in Africa, who was a victim of spousal abuse and who will now be deported from Canada. Her abuse by her partner was so severe that she is permanently branded on her left breast, and even underneath, from the mark of a hot iron. When she tried to get the authorities in her country to protect her, she was not able to get the authorities to do so. That is exactly what a refugee is, somebody who goes to the authorities in her own country and does not get the protection of the police and of the judicial system.

According to her Montreal counsel, our system denied her refugee status. She told us and friends of hers told us that if she were to go back to her country of Guinea, then she would be again under the control of this man who so cruelly abused her.

Not only has Canada's humanitarian and compassionate system failed to allow this woman to remain, but we are sending her back on Tuesday, although she is now married to a Canadian citizen and is now in a high-risk pregnancy. Tuesday is tomorrow.

Here are some of the details. One, if she is forced to go back to her country, the chances are very, very high that she will run into the man who was her first husband, who will very likely never understand or accept that she has now remarried. Two, she is now in a high-risk pregnancy. She cannot really be put into an airplane.

Where is the clemency? Where is the justice? Where is the compassion? Where are the humanitarian grounds on which the minister could allow this woman and her unborn child to stay here, because it is up to the minister and his department?

Her counsel, who has sent me a copy of a letter that was recently written to the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, said that her Canadian physicians, right here in Canada, in Montreal, have confirmed that travelling would be extremely dangerous.

This is one case among many. Before I became a member of Parliament, I was a member of the IRB, the Immigration and Refugee Board.

As an IRB member, I reviewed hundreds and hundreds of cases. It is true that, in some cases, there are individuals who try to push through our system, but it is also true that the vast majority of people whose cases we see are like this woman from Guinea who needs our help.

My colleague, the MP for Vaughan, has declared that on this side of the House, the refugee appeals division was happy that at last it will be implemented. I am certainly happy personally, but it is clear that claimants will not be in Canada long enough to allow them to be present for those appeals. How can a refugee claimant appear before the appeals division to make her case heard if the new law implements a short eight-day period to gather information?

Other MPs have talked about the most controversial aspect of Bill C-11: the Immigration and Refugee Board will hear the case but the applicant will not be able to appeal to the IRB. Furthermore, this is all tied to the decision that will be made by the department or the minister—we are not exactly sure which one—regarding the designation of safe countries.

When I was a member of the IRB, we received refugee claims from Sri Lanka. People were told that if they went to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, they would find refuge and would not need to come to Canada. It was not recognized that, in Sri Lanka, it was perhaps harder to travel to the capital than it is in Canada because of the dangers faced by the refugee claimant.

The bill does not say which authority will be responsible for designating safe countries or the criteria to be used. I would like to share some anecdotes based on my experience as a former member of the board.

There are some countries in Europe where homosexuality is recognized and is not illegal. They are democratic countries, as the minister rightly stated earlier. However, from my experience on the Board, I know that when some homosexuals arrive in Canada, they say that they were beaten and persecuted in their country of origin and that they went to the police but did not receive any protection. The laws of their country also did not afford them protection.

Although there may be a law on the books, that does not mean they have protection. Although a country is democratic, that does not mean that these people will be protected in the outlying, rural, mountainous areas of that country. Protection on paper is one thing, and it is important; however, it is not the same as real protection. People are persecuted and are unable to obtain help from their country and its justice system.

We must ensure that our Canadian law can distinguish between people who wish to take advantage of our system and those who do are not protected by their country's justice system.

Just because a country is democratic does not mean that it will protect its citizens when necessary.

My comments are based on discussions I have also had with NGOs that have worked with refugee claimants for years and know the system very well.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I appreciate the minister's applause. He did speak about that in his remarks as well. However, there have been failures of our immigration refugee policy that left people unprotected. One of the most egregious of those cases was the Jewish refugees who came to Canada during World War II and were not welcomed and were turned away. There were also the people on board the Komagata Maru who arrived in Vancouver at the turn of the last century and were returned to India.

Our failure to welcome refugees has had terrible consequences as well for those individuals. When we turn away someone whose life is in danger, the possibilities are not very positive, to say the least.

However, Canada overall has been known as a country that welcomes refugees and does it in a way that most other countries do not, which is something that is very significant. We were recognized by the United Nations for our efforts in refugee resettlement in 1986 with the Nansen medal. Canada is the only country to have been recognized in this way. Other individuals and agencies have been recognized but Canada remains the only country to have received the Nansen medal.

One of the successes of Canada's refugee policy has been the fact that there has been a significant grassroots and community involvement in refugee resettlement. We have seen that in most of our communities. There are individuals who participated in the resettlement of a refugee and worked with a family, for instance. Many agencies and community organizations work on these issues. Many of them are related to the private sponsorship program, which has been an inspired part of Canada's refugee legislation, where groups of Canadians can get together and participate directly in helping the resettlement of refugees and refugee families in Canada. That was a brilliant policy decision and continues to be a backbone of our refugee policy.

Canadian churches have been very active in sponsoring and resettling refugees in Canada and they remain one of the key players in our refugee policy.

All of this has led to the fact that there is considerable ownership of our refugee policy at a grassroots level in Canada. Because so many Canadians have been directly involved in the refugee process, they believe they have an important interest in the policies and in legislation of the kind we are debating today.

Canadians recognize that the job is not done and far from it. Millions of people still languish in refugee camps near trouble spots around the world. That number is not reducing in a significant way and continues to be very troubling. The conditions in those refugee camps are also very difficult.

Far too many people are still persecuted, even to death, for their political views or for their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity around the world. Steadily, in many ways, we have been making it harder for those people to escape their own country and find a safe haven here in Canada.

We did things like the safe third country agreement with the United States that said that if a refugee came through the United States before making a claim in Canada they could be returned to the United States. I think that was abandoning Canada's responsibility to those people when Canada's policy was different from that of the United States when it came to offering people protection.

We introduced things like documentation requirements before people board airlines to fly to Canada ensuring they had documentation when often many refugees and people who are escaping persecution do not have the required documents.

In recent years, our refugee determination system has been a mess, frankly, because we have used it as a political football. We have seen many political considerations given, political appointments in terms of people who were sitting on the IRB, and other ways that we have played games with our refugee system at the cost of protecting people. That has resulted in huge backlogs in our refugee determination process.

Our previous governments, both Liberal and Conservative, have allowed this backlog to grow. At the end of the last Liberal government, the Liberals had taken some important steps to improve the situation. They had made progress with regard to the backlog and the Immigration and Refugee Board, the IRB, was at a point where it was almost caught up in a sense when the Conservatives came to power in 2006. There was still a backlog but there will always be a backlog situation in any of these agencies. However, the IRB was to the point of believing that the backlog was manageable and one that would not have produced many serious delays at that point.

Unfortunately, when the Conservatives came to power I think they played politics with the IRB. They refused to reappoint board members who had been appointed by the Liberals and they also refused to appoint new board members. The result was that the backlog ballooned back to where it had been in earlier years. As a result of that backlog, the unfairness also grew. We lost many experienced people from the IRB in that period. The IRB lost that experience, that ability to do an effective and fair job.

The Auditor General even became involved when she warned that the system was collapsing under the huge backlog. This is another situation where the IRB and refugee process as a political football came back into play. I believe the crisis today was created by the Conservatives, by the current government, and now they are creating a solution to the problem that they created. It is a bit of a revolving door and one that continues to concern me.

Conservative and Liberal governments have also shown great disrespect to the existing immigration and refugee law, and that is primarily for their refusal to implement the refugee appeal division which is a feature of the current Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. This act was brought in and debated in 2001, given royal assent in 2002 and contains a provision for a refugee appeal division, something that the minister described as “dormant”. Well the reality was that the Liberals and Conservatives refused to implement that part of the law that had been debated and passed here in the House of Commons and in the Senate. It was never implemented. I think the refugee appeal division would have brought a measure of fairness to our refugee determination system.

The refugee appeal division, RAD, came about through negotiation when the government of the day wanted to move from two member boards at refugee hearings to one member boards. The compromise to ensure fairness was the refugee appeal division. It was not an expensive proposition. It would have cost $8 million to $10 million to establish and $2 million a year to run, not a significant sum in terms of our overall expenditure in the refugee program, but it would have added a measure of fairness to that process.

There was a distinct lack of respect for the process in the past and I wonder if the current legislation before us has a provision for a refugee appeal division, but I do not know. My expectation of fairness of actually seeing that implemented, I have to say, I am a little cynical given our experience with the existing RAD and the fact that it was never implemented.

The NDP has always called for an effective, fair and streamlined refugee process and we have said that there are some principles that need to be the foundation of our refugee determination process. We believe that each case should be assessed on its individual merit. We believe in the need to invest in high quality initial decisions and that we need to get it right the first time. It needs to be a non-political process and the decisions need to be made by an independent body. It needs to be a simple system that avoids unnecessary rules. The necessary resources to ensure that the system functions appropriately need to be in place so that backlogs can be avoided. We also need to remember at all times that human lives are at stake and that we need to uphold human rights standards throughout this important process.

New Democrats have long proposed some specific measures for a fast and fair refugee process. These include that all appointments of IRB board members should be done by an independent appointment commissioner with set criteria for expertise in refugee matters. Such a merit-based appointments process was championed by our former leader, Ed Broadbent. We believe that there needs to be a crackdown on unscrupulous immigration consultants by banning them from the Immigration and Refugee Board hearing room and providing legal aid for proper representation. A provision for appropriate legal representation for refugee claimants continues to be a real issue in our refugee determination system.

We believe that we need to hire more permanent refugee protection officers to clear the backlog. We have seen this done in the past with some success. We also believe that we need to set up the refugee appeal division so that consistent decisions can be made based on fact and law. Parliament mandated, as I mentioned, this refugee appeal division in 2001 but the Liberals and Conservatives chose to ignore the law and not put it in place.

Bill C-11 has some serious flaws. Some of the key organizations that have an interest in the refugee process have outlined some of the problems.

Whenever I look for information on our refugee process, I look to the work of the Canadian Council for Refugees, which is an umbrella organization of many Canadian refugee serving organizations. It has delineated its concerns with this legislation, which I believe merit close attention. One of its key concerns is the designated countries of origin list. This bill would empower the minister to designate countries whose nationals would not have access to the refugee appeal process. This is the so-called safe countries of origin list. The council points out that the word safe does not appear anywhere in Bill C-11, which seems somewhat problematic given the intent of this legislation.

The council also believes that this is an unfair proposal because treating claimants differently based on country of origin is discriminatory. It believes that each case must be assessed individually. It believes that some claimants will be particularly hurt, including women who are making gender-based claims and persons claiming on the basis of sexual orientation. In many countries that are otherwise considered peaceful or safe, there can be serious problems of persecution on these grounds.

Claimants from designated countries will face a bias against them even at the first level since decision-makers will be aware of the government's judgment on that country. There will be an overall presumption of safety in certain countries that will affect the process.

Some claims from countries that are generally seen not to be refugee producing are among those that most need appeal due to the difficult issues of fact and law, such as the availability of state protection. The denial of fair process to these claimants may lead to their forced return to persecution, a violation of human rights law.

The Canadian Council for Refugees says there are other concerns as well about designated countries of origin. It says:

Having a list of “safe countries of origin” politicizes the refugee system. There will be new diplomatic pressures from countries unhappy about not being considered “safe”.

As currently drafted, the amendment would give the minister a blank cheque to designate any country, part of a country or groups within a country without reference to the principles of refugee protection. Those are serious issues that have been raised by the Canadian Council for Refugees.

The council goes on to note that it has problems with the eight day interview and hearing process after 60 days. The government has proposed that claimants be interviewed by the Immigration and Refugee Board after eight days and that their hearing take place 60 days later. The council believes that eight days after arrival is too soon for a formal interview. The interview is used to take the claimant's detailed statement about his or her claim. It would be unfair to the most vulnerable claimants, such as those traumatized by experiences of torture or women unaccustomed to speaking to authority figures.

Some claimants are ready for a hearing after 60 days, but others are not, including refugees who need to build trust in order to be able to testify freely, such as persons who have experienced sexual assault. Other refugees need more than 60 days to gather relevant documentation to support their claim, especially those whose claim relates to a newly emerging pattern of persecution or those who are in detention.

Again, there are very serious concerns about holding hearings before claimants are ready to deal with that important part of the process.

The Canadian Council for Refugees also raises concerns about decision makers and who is making the decisions in this process. It notes that first-instance decision makers would be civil servants rather than cabinet appointees. Members of the refugee appeal division would be appointed by the cabinet.

It says that this does perhaps go in some way to dealing with problematic political appointments, but it also raises some concerns, noting that assigning refugee determination to civil servants is fundamentally problematic because they lack the necessary independence

It also notes that limiting appointments to civil servants will exclude some of the most highly qualified potential decisions makers, from a diverse range of backgrounds such as academia, human rights and social service. It believes that will affect the quality of decisions.

The question of appointments to the RAD remains unresolved. Under the bill they would be political appointments, which will affect the quality of decision making.

The CCR notes problems with the appeal and pre-removal risk assessment. It notes that the pre-removal risk assessment still exists but that it is an ineffective and inefficient system. Also it believes that, for some claimants, this will continue to be an issue because of its inefficiency requiring a whole second structure to do the same work as the immigration and refugee board, something that is not fully addressed in the bill.

The Canadian Council for Refugees is also concerned for the humanitarian and compassionate consideration provisions of the bill. The bill would bar refugee claimants from applying for humanitarian and compassionate consideration while their claim is in process and for 12 months afterwards.

Applicants for H and C consideration would also be barred from raising factors related to risks here and in the country of origin. The CCR believes that H and C consideration is necessary as a recourse to consider human rights issues including the best interests of children and potential risk to persons. Closing off this recourse may be contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Those are some of the concerns raised by the Canadian Council for Refugees.

Amnesty International, another well-respected organization that has a key interest in refugee policies, also has very serious concerns about the safe country of origin list. It says that such lists constitute discrimination among refugees that is strictly prohibited by article 3 of the refugee convention. Article 3 of the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees is about non-discrimination. It states:

The Contracting States shall apply the provisions of this Convention to refugees without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin.

Amnesty International also notes in a statement on this new legislation:

...over the course of nearly fifty years of human rights research around the world we have consistently highlighted it is not possible to definitively characterize countries as safe or unsafe when it comes to human rights. We are very concerned that decisions about which countries to include on any such “safe country of origin” list will almost inevitably be influenced by considerations other than human rights, including trading relationships and security cooperation with other governments.

One of the other organizations that has taken a very key interest in this is the Canadian Bar Association. Its citizenship and immigration law section is very concerned about the bill and asked that it be subject to a referral before second reading so that the committee could deal with the very serious concerns that are raised in it.

Yesterday I met with a refugee activist in British Columbia who is also very concerned about this legislation. She was very concerned that safe countries do not necessarily mean that all the people of those countries are safe and that the legislation needs to talk about safe people. She was also concerned about the language around bogus claims and abuse of the system, which she thinks was not particularly helpful in all of this.

There are many concerns about this legislation. I hope we can have a very fulsome debate on it and one at committee as well. I would have preferred that we got there before second reading so it could be a really extensive debate at committee.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak in this debate on Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act.

The Conservatives, in their penchant for giving bills nicknames, have called this the “balanced refugee reform act”. I am hoping beyond hope that this will be the case with this legislation but there have been some serious concerns raised about the bill and I hope to speak to some of those.

Canada has always been a haven for refugees. We as a country have done very well by those refugees who have arrived here and made Canada their home. Whether it was the United Empire Loyalists at the time of the American revolution, Hungarians in 1956, people from the Unites States who resisted the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese boat people after the end of the Vietnam War, or people from the People's Republic of China after the events of Tiananmen Square, Canada has benefited greatly from these significant refugee movements. Those are just some of the movements of political refugees that have seen people come to Canada.

There have also been significant refugee movements fleeing economic problems and other social problems in their country of origin. We saw the Irish in the 19th century at the time of the potato famine. We saw Scottish emigration, eastern European emigration and emigration from Asia and Italy. In fact, my own family and probably many of our families came to Canada as economic migrants. All of these groups and many others have contributed greatly and continue to contribute greatly to building our country.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise here today to speak to Bill C-11.

I would like to begin by saying that the Bloc Québécois will support sending this bill to committee so it may be studied more thoroughly, along with all issues pertaining to immigration and refugees.

This bill raises a number of concerns. We have already pointed out several inconsistencies relating to refugee status.

I would like to talk about two people I know personally from my riding. A man and woman, now married, are refugees from Tanzania and they are still waiting for their children. They have been fighting to bring their children to Canada for five years. They were asked to submit to DNA testing. The UN even had to intervene to do a comparative study and ensure that these children really are the children of this refugee couple in Canada. Now that we have received the results, we hope things will speed up, but there are still some obstacles.

When the children of legitimate refugees in Canada spend five years in refugee camps, we have every right to wonder if the measures proposed by the minister are rigorous enough to ensure that refugee claims under the family reunification program are being assessed correctly.

A number of countries are considered safe. We have a major problem with this provision in the bill. Who can determine with certainty whether or not a country is safe? Apparently Mexico is considered a safe country. However, on the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada website, Canadians travelling to Mexico are discouraged from visiting certain regions of the country because doing so would put their lives at risk.

If it is too dangerous for the lives of Canadians and Quebeckers, is it not too dangerous for the Mexicans living there? Why are Mexicans who want to be free from the shackles of the drug wars and power struggles throughout their country not allowed to claim refugee status? Are we perhaps underestimating the safe nature of that country?

Yesterday, a new government was elected in Hungary. At first glance, that country seems safe. The right wing government has two thirds of the seats. With that many seats, it can implement measures to advance its program without having to consult other political parties. Hungary may have been considered safe yesterday or today, but tomorrow human rights there might not be respected the same way and the situation might change.

The House has passed a bill on free trade with Colombia. And yet there is a call for greater respect for human rights in that country. If a Colombian citizen applied, could he be considered a refugee in Canada if we have a free trade agreement with his country? We have to wonder.

In Colombia, abortion is illegal and punishable by a prison sentence. In more than 70 countries around the world, homosexuality is illegal and even punishable by death in some countries. What would happen if people from those countries came here? We know what our Conservative colleagues think about homosexuality. In a country where homosexuality is legal and part of our daily lives, a minister who offered a subsidy for Toronto's gay pride parade was rebuked and put in her place.

Therefore, we have good reason to ask whether giving the minister the latitude to designate safe countries without consulting this House is an acceptable measure.

On the other hand, we are pleased that the minister wants to speed up the refugee claim process. However, we must not move too quickly and we must be careful. We all know that a refugee is often someone who has left their country in a hurry with nothing, without documents or money, and is truly destitute. When a person leaves their country with absolutely nothing, it takes a little more than eight days to obtain the necessary documents.

We might be able to do something, to make some changes to the bill so that the person's first appearance is scheduled more than eight days later. This would allow the person to obtain documents, think about what he wants to do, how to do it and better understand what is happening. The person would have the opportunity to consult the various organizations in the community that could help him.

It has also been noted that there are some changes in the bill with respect to the refugee appeal division and we are pleased that it is finally being implemented. In fact, the Bloc Québécois has introduced two bills to create and implement the refugee appeal division, even though it was contained in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that this House voted on. Neither bill was successful. One version even died after being adopted by the Senate. When it returned to the House, the bill died because, if I recall correctly, the House was closed for an election.

It is unfortunate because, since 2005, the number of people applying for refugee status has more than doubled, from 20,000 then to 60,000 today. That is truly a lot of people claiming refugee status.

On the weekend, I got a call from a psychologist who works with victims of rape, incest and sexual abuse. She told me about a woman who had been imprisoned last week because she claimed refugee status and was not believed. This woman is from Guinea, where customary marriages are still common. She was married at a very young age to a much older man, who abused her sexually and physically. She had very obvious signs of torture on her body, and even a scar from an iron on her breast. The hospital here in Canada was able to determine that this woman really had been abused.

This woman claimed refugee status, and after having lived in Canada for some time, she met a man from her country of origin, fell in love with him and married him. After getting married, she pursued her claim for refugee status, but she was told that her marriage with this man was not genuine and she was accused of fraud. She was told that she had only married this man to obtain refugee status and sponsorship, although they had been legally married in front of the entire community. They are together, they are married, and they are now expecting a child.

Last year, at the beginning of the economic crisis, the Minister of Labour said that if there was no work in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces, workers should go out west, where there is work. This woman's husband listened to the minister and went out west to support his family. The couple was then told that their marriage was not genuine because he went to work out west to support his family. That is unbelievable.

Last week, this 42-year-old woman, who has type 2 diabetes, was put in jail. She is now at the immigration detention centre in Laval. On April 28, she is going to be sent back to her country, where nobody will take care of her or her soon-to-be-born baby. Yet this very day, G8 ministers are in Halifax talking about maternal and child health, and the Prime Minister wants to introduce a maternal and child health initiative.

We cannot even take care of people here who are suffering and who could die if they return to their home countries because they will not receive adequate care. They could die. In Guinea, there are no doctors to provide the care that this woman will need until she gives birth because she has type 2 diabetes and is obese.

In reviewing the immigration system, we have to begin by making sure that public officials and judges have solid reasons for turning down applications from all individuals who have legitimate claims.

People have all kinds of reasons for wanting to stay here. A claimant might be a man who just wants to support his family. In contrast, a claimant might be a woman who says that she was forced to marry and will be found guilty by her ex-husband's family if she goes back to her home country. In these countries, women are held responsible if their husbands die. They can be charged and may suffer greatly.

How can we justify sending people back to countries like those whose values differ so dramatically from our own? Why would we support women in developing countries and save their lives when we do not support women and save their lives when they come here to ask for our help? I would really like to know. I am really confused about this, and I would like an answer to that question very soon.

I hope that this woman will be allowed to stay here. I hope she will not be sent away before her baby is born. It would be inhumane to send a woman in such a high-risk situation back to her country.

The refugee appeal division should have been implemented earlier so that this women could really appeal the decision made against her. Unfortunately, we are told that the refugee appeal division will come into effect by 2013 or 2014. That is three years from now, three long years for people who are suffering and wondering whether their claim will be heard. I hold out very little hope that this will happen.

I have often heard the minister talk to refugee, immigrant and other groups, and I believe he tells the truth. But I would like that honesty to extend to the measures he introduces.

I know that it is not as easy for a party to be in government as in opposition, because it has to take budgets and other factors into account. But the government members also have to consider what their colleagues are saying and calling for.

I hope this minister will do what he needs to do to ensure that all genuine refugee claimants can obtain refugee status. Too many people around the world are suffering. Moreover, we signed the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which means that we must not take refugee claimants' sexual orientation or country of origin into consideration, or what they are or what they do.

All we must consider is what they need.

We will support Bill C-11 so that it goes to committee and we can suggest amendments and correct measures that we feel are slightly random, unjustified or unjustifiable. I hope that everyone who is watching today will support what the Bloc Québécois is doing so that all refugee claimants can obtain refugee status.

In conclusion, the men and women who sit in the House have ideals and values similar to our own in some areas. I am certain that we will make the right decisions. We will do everything we can to ensure that the parts of the bill that we are not happy with are amended. Otherwise, the bill will not meet our expectations or refugee claimants' needs.

[Maurizio Bevilacqua, Liberal, Vaughan, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is critical that we examine the legislation before us and ensure that the refugee system reform measures will fix the refugee system challenges our country faces. Let us put the system into its proper context.

Today we have a backlog of 63,000 refugee claims. People in genuine need of protection wait about 19 months for processing claims. We have witnessed the drastic 50% decrease in the number of finalized claims and an almost 50% increase in the cost to finalize a single claim. The estimated cost to taxpayers is approximately $29,000 for processing each claimant.

There was a delay by the Conservative government in filling vacancies at the Immigration and Refugee Board which negatively affected the performance of the board. The minister's 2009-10 report on planning and priorities states that the shortfall in decision makers has contributed to the growth of the pending case inventory and to increased average of processing times. In addition, the Auditor General, in the March 2009 report of the Auditor General of Canada, chapter two, asserts her concern for the need to timely and efficiently appoint and reappoint decision makers to the IRB.

These facts and others made the case for comprehensive refugee reform very obvious and an absolute priority. Although reform of the refugee system is needed, we must ensure that it is fair, efficient and just. While the reform package incorporates some Liberal recommendations such as the refugee appeal division, we have to do due diligence on the bill. After all, there are concerns about what has occurred in the past four years, such as slow processing times and longer wait periods for persons claiming refugee status so, caution is in fact warranted.

Therefore, before any refugee reform legislation is implemented, we will ensure that it meets our standards of procedural fairness, that it is just, fast and efficient and that it does not undermine the trust many people place in our system. Obviously, as the minister alluded to, Canadians cannot afford further poorly implemented band-aid solutions like the imposition of visas on individuals from countries such as Mexico and the Czech Republic as happened last summer. This is the reason we will seek assurances that this reform package is going to meet the highest standard of public policy-making.

In 2004, the former Liberal government implemented changes to the appointment process for the Immigration and Refugee Board. Changes included an advisory panel made up of lawyers, academics and others involved in the refugee process which screened all applicants for the IRB. When the present government came to power, unfortunately it delayed appointments. Everyone knows the result of that has been a ballooning refugee backlog. This is what the bill is also trying to address.

In addition to the growing backlog of applications, there has been concern expressed about the integrity of our system. As I said earlier, recent spikes in claims from certain countries have resulted in an ad hoc use of visa restriction to constrict application volumes. As mentioned earlier, significant examples of this occurred last summer when in response to a spike in claims from Mexico and the Czech Republic, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration imposed visa restrictions on both countries. When we impose visa restrictions, we can jeopardize or strain relationships with countries, in the case of Mexico with one of our North American economic partners. In the case of the Czech Republic, there were also bad feelings created in the European Union as a result.

The government's justification for the bill is focused on streamlining the system to deal with the growing application backlog, providing further flexibility to the minister to deal with the unusual spikes in refugee claims from democratic source countries and streamlining the removal process for unsuccessful applicants.

The bill proposes changes to almost every stage of the in-Canada process. Currently, people with successful claims are waiting an average of 19 months for a decision and it takes an average of four or five years to process and remove an unsuccessful claimant.

Information is currently gathered within 28 days through a personal information form. Under this bill, personal information would be gathered within eight days of a claim through an interview process. It is hoped that this will avoid delays related to incomplete forms and late paperwork. However, there have been significant concerns that this timeline is unrealistic and will result in claimants being unable to get appropriate counsel.

Possible changes around timelines and appropriate legal aid protection should be considered. We cannot afford to have a system where legal counsel is effectively denied and where a poor decision will lead perhaps to a number of time-consuming adjournments.

In the current system, a first-level decision is made by a governor in council appointee within about 18 months. Under the new process, the first-level decision would be made by an IRB public servant within about 60 days. Other countries that have public servant first-level decision makers tend to have higher rates of successful appeals. This can make the process less efficient overall and undermine trust in the refugee determination system.

For instance, the UNHCR has expressed concerns that administrative decision makers in the United Kingdom are inadequately trained and are not producing quality credibility assessments at hearings. Although CIC officials claim that the decision makers in the new system would be senior level and would be highly trained, there is no guarantee of that in this package. The fact that decision makers are housed in the independent IRB may alleviate some concerns regarding their independence, but close assessment of their qualifications, training and hiring processes will be required.

Concerns have also been raised about the 60 day timeline, whether it is realistic and whether it will limit a claimant's ability to obtain representation and compile a proper case within this timeline. Review of these timelines and possible further legal aid support will be required.

There is currently no appeal within the IRB and review is left to the Federal Court. It should be noted that the concept of a refugee appeals division was part of the initial Liberal plan for the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

The bill would create a new refugee appeals division, RAD, staffed by governor in council appointees to review negative first-level decisions. The target for the appeal process in this case would be within four months. Most of the appeals would be paper based, but there would be an opportunity for an oral hearing and the introduction of new evidence that was not available at the time of the first hearing.

In the United Kingdom, 89% of the initial 2007 decisions were appealed and 23% of those initial refusals were overturned. This has led to a huge court backlog of 450,000 cases as of 2008 in the United Kingdom, which may take between 10 to 18 years to resolve. By comparison, in Canada only 1% of asylum appeals are currently successful.

Guidelines are expected to clearly set out when an oral hearing is necessary and when an appeal should proceed in writing. The adjudicator's decision to proceed in writing or not would create an additional administrative decision that could be appealed to the Federal Court.

The primary concern about the introduction of the RAD would be to ensure that the first-level decision is conducted in a way that protects procedural fairness and fundamental justice sufficiently to avoid the RAD becoming another bottleneck in the process.

The system does not currently include a designated country of origin list. The bill would provide the minister with discretion to create designated countries of origin. This is one of the most contentious proposed changes.

The UNHCR has already expressed concern that any such process must take into account the gender and sexual orientation persecution issues in many democratic countries. This may also create diplomatic problems as countries lobby to be put on the list or may be insulted that they have been left off.

UNHCR has previously indicated that safe country of origin practices are acceptable as a procedural tool provided we have safeguards in place. The bill would remove access to the RAD for individuals from designated countries of origin. However, claimants can still have a negative decision reviewed by the Federal Court.

There are still unanswered questions about the process for adding countries to the designated country of origin list. Although we have been assured that this will be used as a last resort to avoid the imposition of visas in countries in good human rights records, issues of fairness and fundamental justice will have to be addressed.

Legal experts are pointing to a major difference between Canada's proposed legislation and that of European countries. The word “safe” does not appear anywhere in the relevant section of Bill C-11. This omission, they say, places too much legal discretion in the hands of the minister and raises serious questions about the law's potential use. It may be appropriate to look at the process by which countries are designated and incorporates some level of independence for selection or parliamentary oversight through amendments.

Currently a claimant has access to multiple appeal processes, including the Federal Court, after each additional rejection. The bill would restrict access to other avenues of appeal for one year following the last negative decision. That means that once the IRB, or RAD, if triggered, has rendered its decision, post decision processes will be barred for one year to allow for removal within that year. Applicants would retain the ability to appeal to the Federal Court. For the information of members, barred avenues include pre-removal risk assessment, section 25, a humanitarian and compassionate grounds application, applications for temporary residence and administrative deferrals of removal.

There would also be a ban on concurrent applications under the refugee protection system and under section 25 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Prior to the first level decision, applicants in the refugee system would be required to select which stream they would like to pursue. Unsuccessful refugee applicants would be banned from section 25 applications for one year from their final IRB determination. After one year from the final IRB decision, the section 25 avenue would again be reopened or open to the applicant. Any time bars to accessing pre-removal assessment or humanitarian and compassionate applications would still need to be reasonable and procedurally fair, as the life, freedom and security of the applicant could be at stake pending the outcome of these decisions.

The humanitarian and compassionate review process operates as an avenue of last resort for persons who do not fit into any of the categories in IRPA to appeal directly to the minister. Limiting access to humanitarian and compassionate grounds could lead to people being deported in the face of humanitarian injustices and safeguards. This will require close review. This issue will require further study to assess the practicality of closing all these avenues of recourse.

The reform package proposes $540.7 million over five years and $85.4 million in ongoing funding. The $540 million is broken down into $324 million over five years for the development of the new refugee system, $126 million to address the backlog and $90 over five years to increase the number of refugees resettled from abroad.

The concern we have, and I have stated this to the minister, is that these funds were not set out in budget 2010 and the Conservatives told us program spending was frozen for the next several years. The minister has stated that these funds are in the fiscal framework, so it will have to be determined what will be cut to take into account these new expenditures. For instance, according to budget 2010, CBSA was actually identified as a source of savings of $54 million in 2011 and $58.4 million in 2012-13 through streamlining and cuts, but had been allocated $142 million in new money under this plan. Questions about transparency and accountability of funding are of concern. We want to ensure that the investment Canadian taxpayers make actually goes where it is supposed to go.

There has been a wide variety of reaction to the tabling of Bill C-11 and even prior to the introduction of the bill. For example, the UN High Commissioner was concerned prior to the introduction of the bill about the countries of origin idea. He stated that the new measures must recognize such things as “sexual preference”, are “grounds for persecution even in democracies”. He also noted other potential issues about gender.

Another individual, Professor Peter Showler, notes that the requirement that the first hearing take place within 60 days after a very quick interview is too quick and impractical. It is impractical in the sense that the refugee will not be able to find a lawyer, inform the lawyer, let the lawyer gather the evidence and present that evidence at the hearing. If that first hearing is not a good hearing, the entire system will unravel fairly quickly. He suggests that 120 days would be a more realistic time frame.

Lastly, the Canadian Council of Refugees does not agree with any of the major changes in the bill, stating that the introduction of a list of “safe countries of origin” is a mistake and has basically criticized the entire approach.

The Liberal Party and the Auditor General of Canada have noted the need to reform the refugee system for a while now. We must address some of the flaws that I have stated, however, there are some positive steps in this bill regarding needed refugee reform.

We must examine the effectiveness and fairness of the timelines for the first decisions so that they are realistic and ensure that the refugees are adequately represented. Refugees may face logistical challenges in acquiring the necessary materials to support their cases due to poor infrastructure in source countries or translation requirements. We must ensure the fundamental justice of vulnerable people involved in the system and ensure a flawed first-level process does not result in a backed up system at the appeal level, like they are struggling with in other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom. It is important that we ensure that all claimants have equal and fair access to the appropriate legal representation.

In the case of the quality of first level decision-makers, it is important that the government provide more specific details about the independence and qualification of the proposed first line decision-makers.

Clause 12 of Bill C-11 would give the minister the authority to designate a country, or part of a country, or class of nationals of a country, according to criteria to be established by regulation. Persons from designated areas of classes may not appeal negative refugee protection decisions to the Refugee Appeal Division. Nor may the minister appeal cases involving these people. Instead applicants and the minister would need to seek leave to appeal the first level decision from the federal court. The designated authority of origin clause may be problematic in its design, as it may present concerns of transparency and accountability.

Several lawyers and academics have raised concerns about the specific wording of the provision in Bill C-11, which refers to “designated countries of origin” rather than “safe countries of origin”. They argue that the current wording provides the minister with too much discretion in designating countries and that it is susceptible to politicization.

Bill C-11 would make several changes to the humanitarian and compassionate grounds for foreign nationals in Canada. For instance, according to subclause 4(1), the minister may not examine requests to remaining Canada's permanent residents on humanitarian and compassionate grounds if less than 12 months have passed since the final negative IRB decision.

It is obvious that we have presented a credible case for changes to a number of elements of Bill C-11. As Canadians, we take pride in the fact that our country offers a safe haven to so many who are victims of fear, discrimination or persecution in their home countries. Throughout this parliamentary debate, our focus must be on creating the best possible refugee system.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Minister of Citizenship]

moved that Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise here today to speak to Bill C-11, the balanced refugee reform act.

This bill and related reforms would reinforce Canada's humanitarian tradition as a place of refuge for victims of persecution and torture, while improving our asylum system to ensure that it is balanced, fast and fair. The bill would ensure faster protection of bona fide refugees, reinforce procedural fairness by implementing a robust refugee appeals division at the IRB and ensure faster removal of those who seek to abuse Canada's generosity by making asylum claims.

Canada has always been a place of refuge for victims of persecution, warfare and oppression. English Canada was founded by refugees fleeing the American revolution, the United Empire Loyalists. Canada was the north star of the underground railroad for escaped slaves from the southern United States.

In 1956, Canada welcomed some 40,000 refugees of Soviet communism fleeing the invasion of Budapest. In 1979 and 1980, Canadian churches and families welcomed some 50,000 Vietnamese or Indochinese boat people, creating the magnificent foundations of our privately sponsored refugee program.

Having said that, there have been moments when we turned our backs on those most urgently in need of our help. We think, of course, of the example of the European Jewish refugees during the second world war who Canada refused to accept, detailed in the great historical work None is Too Many written by Harold Troper and Irving Abella.

We must learn from the mistakes of that period so that we never repeat them. I believe we have learned from those mistakes, because Canada has welcomed some one million refugees to make a new start here in Canada in security and with our protection since the second world war.

There remain an estimated 10.5 million refugees, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, around the world. Every year, some 20 developed democracies resettle about 100,000 refugees, and from that number Canada annually resettles between 10,000 and 12,000 or 1 out of every 10 refugees resettled globally, second only to the United States with 10 times our population.

The government is also active with our international partners to help those in need. Take, for example, the government's commitment to resettle up to 5,000 Bhutanese refugees from Nepal over several years. We have already welcomed more than 850 Bhutanese refugees in several communities across Canada. In addition, we have also completed the resettlement of more than 3,900 Karens from Thailand.

I was very proud last year to announce a special program to welcome to Canada over the course of three years some 12,000 refugees from the conflict in Iraq. I visited some of these families in Damascus, Syria, last May and I must say I still remain touched and deeply moved after hearing their stories of violence and persecution, often on religious grounds.

Everywhere I go across the country, I encourage community groups, church groups, faith groups and others to participate in our privately-sponsored refugee program to help rescue those Iraqi refugees and other people in need of our support around the world.

In addition to all those things, we have increased our support for the UNHCR in its important work to help displaced populations on the ground. In fact, to quote Abraham Abraham, the UNHCR representative to Canada, “Canada, a major settlement country and a major donor to UNHCR activities worldwide, has for the time in its funding of UNHCR's global operations worldwide reached a new level of over $51 million, making this the highest ever annual Canadian grant to the UN refugee agency”.

I am proud that happened under this government.

In spite of our many achievements, I believe that in the context of balanced reform to our refugee system, Canada can and should do more to help those in need of our protection. That is why, as part of this broader package of reform to our refugee systems, including our asylum system, I have announced our intention to increase the number of resettled refugees welcomed to Canada by 2,500 individuals, to 14,000. We would continue to lead the world and set an example for other countries.

I propose, in the context of refugee reform, that we increase by some 20% or $9 million the refugee assistance program to provide initial assistance for the successful integration of government-assisted refugees typically coming from UN camps. I have also announced, as part of these increases and targets, an increase of some 2,000 positions for people to come through the very effective, privately sponsored refugee program.

Bizarrely, these huge increases in Canada's generosity that I announced were criticized by one individual claiming to speak on behalf of refugee organizations, demonstrating that there are some in this debate who are neither objective nor balanced in their approach. However, I must say that I was gratified to see the overwhelmingly positive response from those who actually work with refugees, not just issue press releases but actually do the practical work with people who need a new start.

For example, Mr. Abraham of the UNHCR said, “This is an encouraging move in the right direction that yet again demonstrates the humanitarian commitment of Canada to provide protection to needy refugees for whom resettlement is the only solution enabling them to rebuild their shattered lives with respect and dignity”.

Mr. Tsehai of Canadian Lutheran World Relief expressed his “sincere appreciation and deep gratitude for your announcement to increase the PSR target to a 6,500 annual level”.

A coalition of sponsorship agreement holders, groups that bring the refugees to Canada, said they were “thrilled with the news”.

There can be no doubt that this government is committed to continuing Canada's proud humanitarian tradition of protecting those in need, but let me turn my attention to the asylum system.

We also have, as all members will know, a very robust, highly regarded and extraordinarily fair charter-compliant legal system for the consideration of asylum claims made by refugee claimants arriving in Canada. Unfortunately the system has many serious, longstanding problems and everyone knows it.

I would like to credit the member for Vaughan, the official opposition immigration critic, for having raised this issue as early as 18 months ago and doing so in a non-partisan fashion. I would also like to commend the Leader of the Opposition for having pointed to the problems in our asylum system, which must be addressed.

One of the problems is that we have had long, very large backlogs in asylum claims as a permanent feature of the system. The average size of the asylum backlog in our system over the past 10 or 15 years has been 40,000 people waiting for a hearing on their applications for asylum protection in Canada. That means that, typically, people have been waiting about a year to get even a hearing. Right now the backlog is as high as 60,000 people waiting for a decision or a hearing on their applications, meaning that people have to wait 19 months for a hearing. This is not acceptable. We must do better.

If someone manages to escape one of Ahmadinejad's prisons in Iran and he arrives at one of our airports with the scars of torture fresh on his back, we do not offer him a quick pathway to security and protection in Canada. We give him a form and say we will check back with him in 19 months.

That is not good enough. Frankly, those who defend the status quo, who say that these permanent, huge backlogs and the large number of false claims, which contribute enormously to those backlogs, are acceptable, have taken the wrong position with respect to our moral obligation to provide speedy protection to those in need of it.

The truth is this. Too many people try to use our asylum system as a back door to gain entry into Canada, rather than wait patiently to come here through the immigration process. The result is that too many people abuse our system in an effort to jump the immigration queue. There are a number of problems with the current system, which encourage unfounded claims.

How do I make this assessment that there are many unfounded claims? In the last two years, we have seen that some 58% of the claims for asylum made in Canada were subsequently deemed to be unfounded or not in need of our protection. Many of those claims are actually withdrawn by the claimants. I will give one example.

I suspect if we went to any of our constituencies and asked people what they think is the most likely source of refugee claims in Canada, they might say Iran, North Korea, Somalia or Iraq. In point of fact, it is an EU democracy, Hungary. Last year, there were 2,500 claims. Subsequently, 97% of claimants from that European democracy went on to withdraw or abandon their own claims, indicating to us that they do not need our protection. Why they came and went through the asylum system is a good question. A clue may be found in a criminal investigation into allegations of human trafficking involving many of these claimants who are being victimized, allegedly, by a human trafficking ring.

However, of the 2,500 claims made from that EU democracy, only 3 claims were found to be in need of our protection. Therefore, with six out of ten claims being made, which were subsequently found not to be in need of Canada's protection, and with Canada receiving one of the highest levels of asylum claims in the world with a 60% increase in the number of claims filed between 2006 and 2008, all of this to me indicates that Canada has become, regrettably, a country of choice for those who seek to migrate, not through the normal legal system, but by inventing claims often facilitated by unscrupulous agents and third parties in the immigration industry.

These problems are serious. Even the Auditor General has pointed to the backlogs creating this pull factor for false claims. What we seek to do in these reforms is to create and reinforce balance that respects our obligation to provide due process that is compliant with the charter and with the United Nations conventions on torture and refugees to asylum claimants, balance that does not restrict access to the asylum system for those who believe they have a need for our protection but balance that will provide faster protection decisions for legitimate refugees while providing faster removals for the many who actually come here seeking to abuse Canada's generosity.

How do we propose to do that? First, there would be an initial information gathering interview that would provide earlier contact with an officer from the IRB than claimants now have. Although these officers would not decide on claims, they would be able to identify claims that appear well founded and could recommend expedited processing for them. What this means for people who have managed to escape persecution is that they would not have to wait a year and a half for protection but could receive it in a matter of weeks.

I understand that some claimants may be too traumatized to explain what prompted their claim. That is why during an interview if the officer determines that a claimant is in this situation, he or she could have the discretion to postpone the interview until the claimant could receive the appropriate guidance and support.

The information that officers would gather, coupled with solid facts about the nature of their claim, would lead to hearings at the refugee protection division, staffed by a highly trained, independent public servant, within 60 days. In cases where there is a good reason for delay, there would be that flexibility, but an information gathering interview within eight days and a hearing at the IRB within sixty days would be the norm.

The proposed new system would also include, and this is very important, a full appeal for most claimants. Unlike the appeal process proposed in the past and the one dormant in our current legislation, this refugee appeal division, or RAD, would allow for the introduction of new evidence and, in certain circumstances, provide for an oral hearing.

By the way, that is responding to a demand from some of the opposition parties for a very long time. I should point out that when the Liberal government was in office, three subsequent immigration ministers and the government took the position that they could not implement the RAD until there was a streamlining of the overall asylum system. We are now providing that streamlining. It is time to say yes to the appeal division in the context of a more efficient but still fair system.

I will now turn my attention to one of the more contentious aspects of the legislation, which would be to allow for the designation of certain countries as being safe. The nationals from those countries, under these reforms, would still, and I emphasize still, have the same access they currently do to our asylum system. They would still have access to an appeal by our independent judiciary at the Federal Court. They would still have access to a fully charter compliant process that actually exceeds our international obligations but the consideration of those unfounded claims from designated safe countries would move somewhat more expeditiously, reducing the process by about four months by not allowing them to make two appeals, the first one being to the refugee appeal division.

Someone said that this is unfair or inappropriate. No less authority than the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said here in Ottawa on March 24, “there are indeed safe countries of origin. There are indeed countries in which there is a presumption that refugee claims will probably be not as strong as in other countries”.

He went on to say that we could not deny access to the initial hearing, which we do not in our proposed reforms, and that it was important to have a fair and transparent process for designating these countries, as do most western European asylum systems whose example we are emulating in these reforms.

I wan to be absolutely clear that the proposition is not to create a comprehensive list of all countries designated as safe or unsafe. To the contrary. The criteria would be the following. A country would need to be designated as safe. We propose that this designation process would be in the hands of a panel of senior public servants who would make consultations with UNHCR and would refer to independent human rights supports by NGOs. The criteria would be: if a country is a principal source of asylum claims to Canada, the overwhelming majority of which are unfounded; and if such a country is a signatory to and in compliance with international human rights instruments, which has a strong human rights record and which offers state protection to its citizens, including vulnerable individuals.

Why do we need this? The reason is that periodically we see huge spikes in unfounded claims from democratic countries. Twenty-five years ago it was Portugal, not under a dictatorship, but a social democratic government. Thousands of claims were received and almost all of them were found to be false. What did Canada do? It imposed a visa.

In 2000, it was Chile, not under Pinochet, but a social democratic government, the most stable and prosperous democracy in South America. We received thousands of claims and almost all of them were found not to be in need of Canada's protection. How did we respond? We imposed a visa on Chile. In 2003 and 2004, it was Costa Rica, the most stable and prosperous democracy in Central America. We received thousands of claims and almost all of them were found to be not in need of our protection. Canada imposed a visa. In 1997, it was Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Thousands of claims were received and almost all were unfounded. We imposed a visa. Now I mention the situation with respect to Hungary.

When we see these spikes, it is important to understand that these are not just happening spontaneously. We have solid reason to believe that behind these waves of unfounded claims from democratic countries, there are often networks encouraging, facilitating, advising people, commercial networks, the bottom feeders in the immigration industry or sometimes there is evidence of even criminal networks.

All we are saying is that we need a tool other than the imposition of visas to address those spikes in unfounded claims. I appreciate the support and agreement of the Leader of the Opposition in this respect. Last August, in Saint John, New Brunswick, he said, “I want a legitimate, lawful refugee system that to get to the openness point welcomes genuine refugees”. He then said, Look, there are a number of countries in the world in which we cannot accept a bona fide refugee claim because you do not have cause, you do not have just cause coming from those countries. It is rough and ready but otherwise we will have refugee fraud and nobody wants that, including bona fide refugees”.

The Leader of the Opposition may have gone a little bit too far in suggesting that we deny access to the asylum system to claimants from safe countries, but his general concept is entirely sensible and has been endorsed by virtually every newspaper in the country, for example, that has editorialized on this matter.

As I said, these reforms have been broadly endorsed. Eighty-four percent of Canadians say that the government should take steps to reform the refugee determination system,. Eighty-one percent of Canadians agree that refugee claims should be dealt with more quickly so that genuine refugees can settle in Canada faster and bogus claimants can be sent home more quick. By a margin of four to one, Canadians agree that more needs to be done to quickly remove from Canada people whose refugee claims are unfounded and rejected.

The Toronto Star has said, “the government deserves credit for showing the political will to act on an issue ducked by many of our predecessors”. The Globe and Mail says, “Canada has a crying need for a revamped refugee determination system”. The Montreal Gazette says, ”these reforms are a solid and a sensible attempt to reform the system”. Peter Schowler, former IRB chairman and head of the refugee think-tank at the University of Ottawa says, “the Conservative government has managed to propose a system that is both fast and fair, striking a reasonable balance between the two”. The Canadian Lawyer Magazine says, ”the lawyers in the immigration field probably support these reforms”.

These are balanced, reasonable reforms that I believe all members in all parties can support. I will be open to reasonable amendments that achieve the objective of a fast and fair system when this bill gets to committee. I hope that on this urgent issue we will all put aside partisan politics to some degree to allow our humanitarian tradition to prevail so that we can improve and protect the important humanitarian tradition of providing protection to those in need of it.

Business of the House

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, as my hon. colleague has indicated, I know we have some visitors who we are looking forward to seeing in the chamber shortly, so I will keep this brief as well.

When we get to government orders, following the visit, I will call Bill C-4, Sébastien's law, which proposes to protect the public from violent young offenders. Following Bill C-4, we will call Bill C-13, fairness for military families.

We will continue with that business tomorrow.

Next week it would be my intention to begin second reading debate on Bill C-11, the balanced refugee reform act, Bill C-10, Senate term limits and Bill C-12, democratic representation.

Next Wednesday, April 28, shall be an allotted day.

As for the take note debate, that is under advisement.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Chair, would you entertain the motion that upon completion of the wait times study, we study the visitors visa issue; however, if Bill C-11, the refugee reform bill arrives to committee, it would take precedence?

Do you want to entertain that, or do you want to have it back to the committee so that we could spend more time at the subcommittee and study...?

What would you prefer? I just think it's cleaner.

Balanced Refugee Reform Act

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Minister of Citizenship]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)