Evidence of meeting #4 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was backlog.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Jason Kenney Conservative Calgary Southeast, AB
Parents and grandparents is a different question.
What I'm saying is if we want to eliminate the backlog and speed up processing times we're going to have to do two things, probably increase admissions and limit incoming applications.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative David Tilson
Mr. Minister, thank you for coming this morning.
We had an hour with you, and I'm sorry I had to cut you off a couple of times. It's a difficult issue. I expect, hopefully, sometime towards the end of our witnesses we might invite you to come again.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative David Tilson
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, again.
We have two witnesses. I'm going to introduce Mr. Richard Kurland, who's a policy analyst. My notes say “attorney”. That suggests you're an American, but we'll call you whatever you want to be called.
12:35 p.m.
Richard Kurland Policy Analyst and Attorney, As an Individual
I'm a member of the B.C. Law Society and a member of the Quebec Bar.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative David Tilson
Oh, you're a lawyer. Yes, sir.
You've appeared in front of this committee before. You appeared at the wait-time study. We thank you again for coming. We appreciate your knowledge.
Please proceed.
12:35 p.m.
Policy Analyst and Attorney, As an Individual
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We are all well aware of the challenge of processing times. We know the existence of the backlogs. I don't think we need additional witnesses to provide whining and complaining. We need creative solutions to the backlog problem. What I'd like to do is look quickly at the big picture, focus on the two strategic backlog areas where solutions are needed, and then go controversial and provide policy solutions.
In the big picture, 60% of Canada's immigration inventory is fixed, cured. I'm speaking of the economic class, the skilled workers. The politically courageous decision to cap intake of federal skilled workers in 2008 was the appropriate solution at the time. In respect of the pre-2008 skilled worker backlog, we still have a chicken in the python to digest. I anticipate that this will disappear in the next two fiscals. So the complaint is not about federal skilled worker immigration to Canada.
We have also, better late than never, cured the inventory issue when it comes to Canada's investor immigration inventory. We accomplished this by capping the intake in 2011 at 700 cases. Operationally, there are big question marks on how it was done, but the fact is that by shutting intake you reduce the backlog growth trend: pure math.
Where we cannot fix things are in the categories affecting parents, grandparents, and spouses.
The spousal category should not be on the table, because, frankly, it's a just-in-time inventory. Processing times have been growing, slight slap on the wrist operationally or tug on the ear. That's 80% of cases being done in a lot more than the nine months committed to by this government. So that may need a quick tweak.
As to the parents and grandparents, that's going to need a novel approach.
So we have two inventories, backlogs, in Canada that merit the attention of this committee. One is investors, who represent $9 billion cash to be transmitted to the Government of Canada, not into private sector businesses. This money is wire-transferred to the Government of Canada, $9 billion in 22,000 cases.
The other inventory is an inventory of love and respect, parents and grandparents. The challenge is to introduce a temporary backlog measure that will create within the backlog inventory of parents and grandparents two new processing streams. A processing stream with an addition to our existing stream would require a political decision taken by the members here.
Let's face it, parents and grandparents are not expected to work when they arrive in Canada. There's no taking of jobs. They're not criminals, and they're not security risks. As a matter of fact, they're not even presenting significant health risks, because they must successfully pass immigration medicals. The real concern is money. When they are here, they have access to medicare. Unfortunately, during their working lifetimes they did not have the opportunity to pay premiums into Canada's medicare system.
My proposal is to allow them an opportunity to pay a lump sum to the Government of Canada in compensation for 20 to 25 years of medical insurance, the same way parents must provide travel insurance when they want to visit Canada for one year. It's not all parents should pay. This is a temporary measure. If you like analogies, it's like a bagpipe. You need to put an additional pipe into that inventory to reduce the pressure and outflow it.
The amount of $75,000 is more than sufficient to defray the cost of medicare. I've gone into the field and asked families across this country what they think. In the greater Asian community it's a no-brainer. When the parents retire, they sell their property and the first $75,000 off their million-dollar-plus residence goes to the government. The greater Indo-Canadian community have similarly responded, saying they do not expect a free ride, they do not want something for nothing. They say, tell us the amount, our family will raise it, especially if we're already paying $6,000 a year in babysitting.
Economically, it makes sense. Ask Canadians if they would like these two additional streams: one, for $75,000, you priority-process within the backlog; for the second stream, it would be the same deal, $75,000, but if there's insufficient quota in that year you allow them forward—after they pass screening, criminal, and medical—on payment of the $75,000 to the Government of Canada, on a 10-year visit to Canada. They can wait until their number comes up, cost-free to this government and to the taxpayer.
That's my opening eight minutes.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative David Tilson
You finished a minute ahead of time, sir. Thank you very much.
Our second witness today is Mr. James Bissett.
Good morning to you, sir. You are a former ambassador and you have been to this committee before. I think you appeared on Bill C-11, which is the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative David Tilson
Thank you, sir. We appreciate your knowledge.
You have up to eight minutes.
12:40 p.m.
As an Individual
It's going to be hard.
I'm going to start by saying that the most effective way of undermining or crippling the management of an immigration program is to allow a backlog to develop. Unfortunately, that's what happened when the 2001 immigration act was passed. It did not, for some strange reason, contain any mechanism for controlling the flow of immigrants, and the act said, paraphrasing section 11, that anyone who met the selection criteria “shall” be accepted.
Of course, the department should have realized that there are many thousands of people out in the world who can meet our selection criteria at any one time. What happened was that within months a backlog began to build up. The government attempted—I think in 2002, less than a year after the act was put into effect—to correct that by saying that all those in the backlog would have to meet a higher mark on the selection criteria. That, of course, was ruled by the courts to be illegal and unlawful.
So nothing was done about the backlog until 2008, when, by that time, it had reached a million people waiting to come in. That's like the province of Saskatchewan being outside, waiting to come to Canada.
There was an attempt in 2008, and it was moderately successful, by the previous minister to Minister Kenney, to control that to some degree by first of all changing the act so that it meant that anyone, even though they met the selection criteria, “may” be accepted, not “shall” be accepted; there was no obligation to accept everybody who met the criteria. That was an important step, and it was difficult to get through. In fact, it had to be included in the budget to ensure that it would get through.
At any rate, that was helpful. Later, as the minister said this morning, they put a cap on the skilled worker component of the movement. That, as Richard has mentioned, has also been quite successful.
The problem is that there still remain many thousands, basically of grandparents and parents, in the backlog.
One of the adverse results of having a massive backlog is that people who want to get here find other ways of doing so. That has resulted in what I consider to be one of the most serious implications of the backlog, and that is that it allowed the tremendous development of the temporary foreign worker program, something that we in Canada had always avoided, knowing what happened to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s with the guest worker program. Thousands of guest workers came into Germany, France, and other countries of Europe, but of course they didn't go home. They're there now and have formed a large underclass in many European cities. It's a serious problem.
We avoided that like the plague until the backlog developed and employers, who wanted and needed skilled workers, found another route of getting them: they got them as temporary foreign workers.
Last year there were 283,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. That figure, when you add it to the 280,000 immigrants who came in, is significantly large. On top of that you have roughly 250,000 foreign students in Canada, and the foreign workers and probably many of the students are not going home. You can be sure of that.
That's the adverse impact, because many of the so-called skilled temporary workers are not so skilled. They don't have to meet any requirements, basically. They don't have to meet education skills or education and training. Many of them are unskilled and are the first to suffer if there is a layoff.
The problem here, really, if you look at it, is that the current government has lost control of the immigration program. Of the 280,000 or so immigrants who came to Canada, I would guess that only about 20% or fewer were selected or controlled by the federal government. I have figures here, but of the 280,000 who came in, 214,000 had nothing to do with the federal government except being checked for criminality and medical.... They were brought in by employers, they were brought in by provinces, they were brought in by relatives, or they consisted of refugees and humanitarian cases and several thousand live-in care workers or caregivers.
In effect, as far as I'm concerned, the federal government has lost control of the movement.
Add to that the asylum system, in which there is a backlog again of some 50,000 waiting. Again, even if they are found not to be genuine by the board, the chances are that they won't be sent home. That, I think, is a serious problem.
Until the backlog problem is resolved, I don't think that any department or any minister is going to be able to manage the program effectively.
How could the problem be solvedt? Richard has given some solutions. My own view is that we have a legal as well as a moral obligation to let the parents and grandparents in. I think it was a mistake to put the sponsored category in the act, as was done. Normally in the past we only accepted parents if they were over the age of 60 and grandparents if they were over the age of 65. Opening it up to parents of any age means we're getting a lot of parents who are in their forties and fifties and who are entering the labour force.
But that's beside the point. The current problem, I think, is that until you get rid of the backlog, you're not going to be able to manage the immigration program effectively. I would suggest that the way to do it is through a variation of what Richard is suggesting or by biting the bullet and letting the parents and grandparents in, at the cost that will accrue to us in health care and other things.
Thank you.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative David Tilson
Thank you, both of you, for your presentations. Members of the committee will have some questions.
Mr. Menegakis.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
Costas Menegakis Conservative Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you so much for your presentations today and for being here. It is very nice to hear from people with your experience.
Your Excellency, it's always a pleasure to have you here with us, as it is to have you, Mr. Kurland.
In the debate on immigration and on backlogs, we often focus on the quantity, and not enough focus is put on the quality. I'd like to talk a little bit about that today.
To me and to many of us, it's not just the sheer number of people we let in; it's making sure that the immigrants who come here can properly integrate into Canadian society and that they're able to join the workforce and participate in our economy and become viable, contributing members of the community.
I know that the integration of new Canadians is a key goal of our government. I believe it's what Canadians want and what Canadians would certainly welcome seeing. Would you agree? And perhaps you can expand on what the practical limits are as to how many people Canada can welcome in a given year.
12:50 p.m.
Policy Analyst and Attorney, As an Individual
There should be a limit on the number of people Canada admits every year as permanent residents. We need to hear more from our consulting partners. Section 95 of the Constitution Act equally divides immigration and agriculture between federal and provincial jurisdiction. The point is well taken, because perhaps more provincial upload of information into this process is required to answer your question.
But I want to leap on the quality of the flow, which is an often overlooked point, particularly when it comes to parents and grandparents. Prioritizing single parents or those who are elderly and alone overseas should be a humanitarian and compassionate objective, which would reduce the total number of cases in that parent and grandparent flow. That's quality.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
12:50 p.m.
As an Individual
I share your concern about the quality. The fact of the matter is that many studies have shown that the immigrants who have come since 1990 are not doing well. Many of them are living below the poverty line. They're not getting the jobs. A part of that is because of the pressure of numbers. To take a quarter of a million every year, and add to that an equal number of temporary workers and foreign students who all have to be processed, means that very few of the immigrants are even being interviewed by our visa officers now. They're not being seen. It's being done by paper. If you're an immigrant who applies in Bangladesh, you fill out your paper, and it's sent to London, where an officer inspects it or looks at it.
My view is that we have to see these people, interview them, and talk to them. Quite apart from quality, we find that many of the people who come with qualifications cannot get employment. We've all heard the story of doctors and engineers driving cabs, and there's some truth in that. The other part of the truth is that we shouldn't be letting professional immigrants in until they are able to meet the provincial licensing requirements.
If you're a medical doctor, an engineer, or an architect, you don't get into Australia until you have proven that the state government will accept you and allow you to practise, and you must be fluent in English.
We allow professionals in who may have had 12 or so years of education, but we don't know the quality of that education. We give it the equivalent quality of someone from Oxford, Columbia, or Harvard. That's the basis of the problem with a professional who comes here and can't get work.
There's also the problem of provincial regulations and the professional requirements, but the base of it is we're letting in a lot of people who simply are not qualified. In my view, we were successful prior to 1990 because immigrants were not only interviewed and selected, they were counselled. They were counselled about what was expected of them when they came to Canada, what they could expect, what the union requirements were, and what cities they should probably go to in order to match their occupation.
That's all gone by the boards, and now it's a question of numbers.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
Costas Menegakis Conservative Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you.
One of the suggestions we keep hearing, particularly from the NDP, for one of the ways of dealing with a backlog is to drastically increase immigration levels. Would you agree that drastically increasing immigration levels would severely impact our ability to be able to integrate immigrants into Canada?
12:55 p.m.
Policy Analyst and Attorney, As an Individual
Just on a purely non-partisan basis, increasing the size of the pie may be a quick fix. How big do you want to make that pie? Five percent more? Ten percent more? It's something for elsewhere, and the province pays.
12:55 p.m.
Policy Analyst and Attorney, As an Individual
The province has to be consulted. It is one factor to consider. I don't think it's far off-base to consider both dessert and a poison pill. Increase the size of the pie somewhat to alleviate our challenge with the backlog, and as poison pill, cap a category or two. So it's a sweet and sour solution.
12:55 p.m.
Conservative
12:55 p.m.
Conservative