Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand in the House of Commons and support the Liberal opposition motion. It states:
That, in the opinion of the House, immigrants to Canada and persons seeking Canadian citizenship are poorly served by this government.
We could substitute that students are poorly served by the government and that the homeless are poorly served by the government. We could substitute low income Canadians, middle income Canadians, farmers, cities and municipalities. I guess the only ones we could leave out are the big oil companies. We could leave them out because they are not being poorly served.
I want to speak specifically to the issue of this particular group that is poorly served. They are persons seeking Canadian citizenship and immigrants.
I am not going to go into all of the various things we have heard today. A lot of my colleagues and others in the House have spoken very eloquently to this issue. I want to focus on two things: first, the issue of process, which is a huge problem in removing backlogs and how we deal with process; and, second, the issue of immigration itself and workforce issues which are directly and completely linked to immigration.
Let me talk a little about processes. How does the government not serve the process well? We know that there have been huge backlogs. When this particular party was in opposition, it brought it to the attention of the Liberals. It said there were backlogs. People were waiting for temporary visitor visas to come to see their children who were having babies or people who were dying, and we needed to speed it up. We talked about students who were here with a desire to get a job. Those were all the things that were brought to us, including refugee claims.
The Liberal government provided $700 million purely for one reason, and that was to target the backlog, to bring in more personnel, and to help the process work so that we could deal with the problem that everybody pinpointed.
I have a question. Where is that $700 million? We cannot find it. The government will not commit to leaving that $700 million to get going on this issue. This is an ongoing question. Where is the money that was put in by the Liberal government? Where is it? Is it gone? Has it disappeared into the ether? Is it helping to increase a surplus that the government has chosen somewhere?
We know there are obvious cuts, if I might add, on the backs of all the vulnerable in our society, but there are some moneys that are not there and then reappear as a brand new program, sometimes with less money, sometimes with the same amount of money. There is a kind of smoke and mirrors thing going on and we still cannot find lots of money that was put into programs by the Liberal government. We do not know where the money is. The $700 million is one example. I want to know where that money has gone.
The Liberal government also provided $20 million to upgrade the Citizenship Act. The Citizenship Act is what we are talking about here. There are huge problems with people obtaining citizenship, people suddenly finding out that they are now required to have a passport, people who thought were citizens and find out they are not. The Liberal government provided $20 million to deal with that. What happened to the money? Where is it?
We see huge lineups for passports all of a sudden. The government knew that it was going to be dealing with the passport issue. The Liberal government fought it, but the Conservative government agreed with the United States that a passport was a good thing. It knew it was doing this. When it decided to do it, surely it could have provided money to speed it up.
There are people working for airlines, crews and flight attendants, whose passports may have expired suddenly and they needed it in 24 hours in order to work, which they cannot do because there is a huge backlog.
By the way, Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine.
I am talking about the process and I want to know what is happening to it. I also want to talk about probably the single most important thing relating to immigration. Canada is a small country that has 32 million people living in a global economy. We, among many of the OECD countries including the G-8 and G-20 countries, are suddenly finding that we do not have a workforce to allow us to be productive and competitive.
The fact is that we are not having enough babies. The birth rate is falling. The number of seniors is increasing. They are getting out of jobs. We do not have the ability to have people in the workforce. We know that Statistics Canada tells us that by 2011, which is four years from now, we will be dependent for 100% of our net labour force on immigration.
We needed to be able to move this forward. That is why we put $20 million into it, to review the Immigration Act with the provinces and to talk about how we could meet the needs of Canada for a productive workforce. Without a productive workforce in a global 21st century economy, skills, training, intellectual property and education are going to be key to be a competitive nation. We are just not dealing with this.
Are we going to wait until it happens? It is happening. We know that it is happening. We can go anywhere and ask small and medium sized businesses about labour. We do not have a workforce in this country to meet the needs of the trades.
What do we do? We need to be talking about how we deal with that problem. We need to look at our immigration processes, work with the provinces and try to deal with that today. It is key and core to Canada's competitiveness and Canada's ability to be a productive nation, but of course this takes vision.
Vision means that we look forward, that we do not just keep plugging the holes as we see them just for today and hoping that if the next election is four months from now, we will get away with it and nobody will remember. Vision is what a government is tasked to do. A government is tasked to look to the future and ensure that it is on top of the challenges that the country is going to face.
The government has not even considered any of this. This is not on its agenda at all, a vision for Canada's competitiveness and productivity in the 21st century global economy. Key to that is going to be immigration. Key to that is going to be immigration that is done in an ethical manner, so that we are not raiding the developing world of its own brains.
We have to think about how we do this. This is not an easy task, but I would suggest that there are productivity projections out there that show that if we even imagined that we could double our workforce within the next 15 years, that we could suddenly have 64 million people, and the United States to the south doubles its workforce and has 750 million people, and the European Union doubles its workforce and has almost a billion, and China doubles its workforce and has 3 billion, we would still be a tiny little nation. So, we must do something about it.
If we are going to maintain a quality of life and be competitive, we have to do this, and I want to know where the government is on this issue.
We now also know that we have people who are living in Canada, whom we talk about a lot regarding this issue, people who are trained and capable of doing the work. We need to deal with the challenges they face. Those challenges are not simply getting their credentials okayed. Some of them are language challenges. Some of them have to do with experience in the Canadian workforce, for example, until they have a job they cannot get experience, and if they do not have experience, they cannot get a job.
We have a huge number of difficulties. Under the last government, I was tasked with the job of going around this country. I spoke to rural municipalities and provincial people. I spoke to labour, trades councils and the private sector. I spoke to universities, colleges and non-governmental bodies, and we talked about how to come up with an integrated plan.
We started to put money into this. We had the beginnings of a plan. We put $236 million in and we targeted the critical areas first, which were health care professionals, health care providers. There was the IMG task force set up by physicians, which was International Medical Graduates. It made clear recommendations. Our government started to address the issue and was on the way to fully addressing those recommendations.
Where are they? I go to committee and I ask ministers what they are doing about this. Where is the internationally trained worker initiative that our government put forth as a project to be phased in? It was an initiative to help the people who are here, who are looking for work, who are underemployed or unemployed with regard to their training, to get jobs. It was to help those who would come in the future, to be able to get jobs before they get here, to get their credentials updated, and to get their experience and language and all of that updated.
We had a portal that we had launched that was going to be doing that. Where is that portal? I keep asking the questions. This is a whole initiative that disappeared into a hole in the ground somewhere. No one can answer this question for me and yet, we hear the government talking about how much it cares about this issue.
What has been the government's answer to date? It says that it will set up some kiosks around the country where people can get information. That does not address the complexity of this issue, nor does it address the $20 million we put into expanded language training. It does not address the projects that we had set up with universities to move forward to help people to get language and competence--