Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 31st, 2012

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

As somebody who shares Canadians' deep concerns for human rights, I wonder if you would give some thought to what it costs in human rights because people have to wait for over a thousand days to have legitimate claims reviewed, and how frustration of the passage of Bill C-31 might—

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

That's actually a very good point.

What's lost in much of the debate on refugee reform is the fact that the new system will be massively better for bona fide refugees.

As I've often said, someone who steps off the plane from Tehran with the physical or proverbial signs of torture on their back is told by us to wait in the line for almost two years, for about 21 months, before they even get a hearing at the Immigration and Refugee Board. That is in large measure because the system has been clogged up by so many fake asylum claimants.

Don't forget that 62% of claims are abandoned, withdrawn, or rejected in our fair and generous legal system. Those people are taking up spots in front of the IRB, sucking up resources, and blocking the queue for the bona fide refugees who need our certainty, who need our protection. So the new system will allow those clearly bona fide refugees to get a hearing at the IRB in about two months, at which time they will get a pre-positive protection decision, permanent residency, and certainty for their future in Canada, together with the privilege of sponsoring in family members. There is, I believe, a humanitarian imperative.

I want to say as well, while it's not legislatively linked, the 20% increase in our target for the resettlement of convention refugees and our support for them is really tied to the whole asylum reform process. The idea was that if we can reduce the number of false asylum claimants abusing our country's generosity and using enormous resources, then we can do more to help bona fide refugees, victims of ethnic cleansing warfare and persecution waiting patiently in UN camps around the world for a chance to resettle to a country like Canada. The deal is to crack down on the abuse so we can open the door more widely to bona fide refugees.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Minister.

Our time with you as agreed upon has expired. We thank you for coming and spending some time with us. You are excused; your colleagues are not.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Okay. There's no excuse for them.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

There's no excuse.

Thank you very much, Minister, for coming and answering the questions of the committee members.

Mr. Yeates, our procedure gets a little vague at this point, and we'll see how it goes. I think we've agreed that you would make a presentation on the report on plans and priorities for 2012-2013, and then we would open the floor for questions on that topic or on the supplementary estimates. So we'll see what happens.

You have the floor to make your presentation, for up to ten minutes.

Mr. Yeates, thank you very much.

[Neil Yeates, Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

That's fine. Thank you very much, Chair. It's good to be here today.

As you know, the Government of Canada is committed to making necessary efforts to achieve a sustainable and prosperous economic recovery, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada will be doing that by supporting a balanced approach in immigration and refugee matters.

In the coming year we will be upholding Canada's long tradition of welcoming newcomers from other countries, while continuing to promote measures to increase economic immigration and to make the immigration system more streamlined and efficient.

In formulating our plans and priorities for this year, CIC is aiming to foster a more flexible immigration system that is reflective of modern labour market realities and of Canada's evolving economic needs. An important reflection of this commitment to economic immigration is our plan to welcome between 55,000 and 57,000 federal skilled workers to Canada in 2012. Altogether we anticipate welcoming about 157,000 immigrants under our various economic streams. That represents almost 62% of all projected admissions for the year.

In collaboration with our provincial and territorial partners, we're working to implement, as early as this fall, a multi-year approach to planning for the number of immigrants we will welcome into the country. This will increase the flexibility of Canada's immigration system and improve its responsiveness to changing economic conditions.

We will be modernizing our points system for federal skilled workers in order to place more emphasis on criteria that best predict success for newcomers to Canada, such as official language ability, youth, and educational qualifications independently assessed as comparable to standards in Canada. We'll also make improvements to the Canadian experience class to improve its responsiveness to labour market needs. Currently, to be eligible to apply, applicants under the temporary worker stream of the CEC must have 24 months of Canadian work experience. Under proposed regulatory changes, we will be reducing that requirement to 12 months.

We will continue to modernize our operations, and make them more efficient. As members of this committee are weIl aware, one of the main areas of focus in this regard will continue to be the reduction of backlogs that lead to long wait times and make it more difficult to implement needed improvements.

For the immigration system in general, and especially for the federal skilled worker program, one of the greatest challenges comes from the large backlog of applications that have accumulated in the system. The reason they've accumulated is that, very simply, in some programs the number of applications we receive each year far surpasses the number that can be processed within the annual levels plan. Not only this, but prior to legislative amendments made in 2008 under the action plan for faster immigration, the law required us to process every single application we received. The 2008 action plan helped us to reduce the backlog of pre-2008 applications by half, and we moved to limit the number of new applications we accept.

The fact is we still have a backlog of nearly 300,000 old federal skilled worker applications. The government, as you know, recently introduced legislation that will eliminate this large backlog of pre-2008 federal skilled worker applications that has afflicted our immigration system.

Going forward, Minister Kenney has spoken in recent months of the need to do more in future than just passively accept immigration applications, and instead, actively recruit people to come to Canada to fill specific skills shortages.

Like us, New Zealand legislated an end to its backlog in 2003 and put in place a system where prospective applicants with needed skills, experience and education can be selected from a pool. We want to explore with provinces, territories and employers approaches to developing a similar pool of skilIed workers who are ready to begin employment in Canada.

Another example of CIC's efforts in the area of backlog reduction is the new action plan for faster family reunification. By the end of next year, this plan will reduce the backlog of parents and grandparents by about 50% and speed up the process of reuniting family members in Canada.

The new multiple-entry super visa, as you know, allows parents and grandparents living overseas to more easily make extended visits with their Canadian family members. We plan to have a new and sustainable program for parents and grandparents in place by fall 2013. Our redesigned program will be designed to avoid the problem of future backlogs, while being sensitive to fiscal sustainability, bearing in mind Canada's generous taxpayer-funded health care system and other social benefits.

We will also prepare to collect biometric information from certain visa applicants as part of our temporary resident program. We will begin collecting this information in 2013. The use of biometrics in the process represents an historic development in security screening. While it helps to improve the integrity of our immigration system, it will bring our operations in line with those of many other countries. As we move forward on these initiatives, we are always aware of the need to uphold Canada's international obligations and humanitarian traditions.

Once implemented, refugee reforms tabled this past February as part of Bill C-31, the Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, will build on the reforms passed in the 2010 Balanced Refugee Reform Act and ensure that these refugee claimants who need Canada's help will get it even faster, while those who only seek to abuse the system will be sent home quickly. We will also toughen penalties against anyone involved in international human smuggling.

Mr. Chair, our settlement program helps newcomers maximize their potential and integrate into the economic, social, and civic life of the country as smoothly as possible. We will undertake a review of this program with the goal of strengthening our settlement processes. We will also continue to work collaboratively and cooperatively with other levels of government and with community organizations that deliver front-line settlement services in order to make the program more efficient and better coordinated among different stakeholders. This will ensure comparable outcomes for newcomers across the country.

Protecting and strengthening the value of Canadian citizenship remains one of the central concerns of the department, and we'll continue our efforts to crack down on citizenship fraud, to look for ways to improve the integrity of the citizenship program, to streamline case processing and to ensure that the legislation reflects the value of Canadian citizenship. We will also strengthen the language assessment of citizenship applicants to make certain that new citizens have the language skills that will ensure their successful integration into Canadian society.

Building on the introduction of a new citizenship certificate, CIC will work with our partners to further extend electronic validation of citizenship status. Also, a number of special diamond jubilee citizenship ceremonies have already taken place and will continue to take place throughout 2012, to mark Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's 60th anniversary as Canada's monarch.

Mr. Chair, through our Multiculturalism Program, we will continue to work with our many partners to celebrate Canada' s diversity and to address racism, discrimination and anti-Semitism.

Through our Inter-Action program, we will help fund initiatives that promote inter-cultural and inter-faith understanding, encourage civic engagement in young people, and work to remove barriers for Canadians of all origins.

Canada will also assume the Chair of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research in 2013.

I'm certain that our plans in the coming years will contribute to an even stronger and a more cohesive society, a sustainable economy, and in short a better Canada.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Yeates.

We will now have questions from the committee. It's open to estimates again, or the report on plans and priorities, which is Mr. Yeates's presentation.

Ms. James.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our guests for being here again, or a continuation from the first hour.

I'm going to talk specifically to the backlog issues and different immigration streams. Obviously this is one area the department has to deal with and report on in the report on priorities and planning.

We all know that in 2008 the government made the necessary decision to use ministerial instructions to help deal with the massive backlogs. This budget bill includes provisions that will allow the government to use ministerial instructions again in a few different ways, including the creation of temporary economic programs to respond to the rapidly changing needs of Canada's economy. I'd like to therefore ask you some questions in this regard.

When our Conservative government came into office in 2006 there was a backlog in our immigration programs of a whopping 850,000 people. With respect to the federal skilled workers program alone, can representatives from the department remind us of the number of people who were in the backlog of the pre-2008 foreign skilled workers program? I think the minister mentioned it very quickly. I would like to hear it again, because I didn't quite catch it.

[Neil Yeates]

The federal skilled worker backlog peaked at about 640,000 cases. As has been noted, the new ministerial instructions authority allowed us to use a number of measures to reduce application intake so we could focus on the applications we already had. The first thing we did there was to use an occupational screen. Applications had to meet what we called in-demand occupations. That was the first set of ministerial instructions. We refer to those as ministerial instructions one.

In subsequent ministerial instructions, we have subsequently basically imposed a cap within those occupational streams in terms of the number of applications we will accept in total, and the ones within each stream. It became clear that we were still receiving a lot more applications than we could deal with. That was the second type of approach that we have used.

Then, the third approach we have taken—you have seen this in the parents and grandparents program—is a pause on new applications while we focus just on those applications in the backlog. That's how we have used ministerial instructions on federal skilled workers. We did make very good progress in the first two to three years. We went from 640,000 and I think now we're at about 300,000 remaining in that group.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

We know that the opposition parties actually opposed some of the ministerial instructions back in 2008. I'm just wondering, had they been able to block it, or had we not been able to implement those instructions, what would be the estimated backlog right now for the foreign skilled workers?

[Neil Yeates]

We had estimated that if the intake had continued to be open-ended the backlog would have risen to about one million.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Could you speak a bit to how long you think it would have taken if that backlog had gone to one million? What would be the approximate wait time for someone in that backlog?

[Neil Yeates]

In excess of ten years, certainly.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you. It doesn't surprise me, but it is probably shocking for someone to hear that who is not familiar with that particular program.

Even with the ministerial instructions from 2008 alone, is it not true that it would still take until around 2017 for the backlog in the foreign skilled workers program to be reduced to an actual working inventory?

[Neil Yeates]

Yes, that's correct.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

So we would be looking essentially at another five years.

[Neil Yeates]

Yes.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you.

I have another question in regard to this. Before ministerial instructions were introduced, how long was the average wait time for someone who applied in the foreign skilled worker category? So before all of this.

[Neil Yeates]

We had gotten up to a period of about 60 months, five years or so, and increasing as the backlog continued to build. That's what happens when you develop a queue and the incoming volume is higher than your output. The backlog grows, and the processing time increases as a result. That's the track we were on.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Sitting here and knowing a bit about this program, I think the evidence certainly shows that ministerial instructions are very useful, and actually a necessary tool to ensure backlogs do no accumulate, and that applications are processed in a more timely manner. I think it's pretty obvious, but would you agree with that statement?

[Neil Yeates]

From the department's point of view, given Canada's attraction as a source country for immigration—so a lot of people want to come to Canada—we really cannot manage an open-ended application system. We have to control application intake, or we end up with unmanageable queues and really unacceptable wait times for applicants.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to pass my time to my colleague Mr. Menegakis, if he has a short question.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

No, I don't have a short question. I'm going to wait for my turn, I think.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you.

May I pass it to Mr. Weston?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Weston has a minute.