Thank you.
I'm here on behalf of the Status Now! Campaign in Defense of Undocumented Immigrants. Our campaign includes various national, regional, and local immigrant refugee organizations, community organizations, trade unions, and agencies. We're extremely concerned about the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act as part of the bill for the federal budget, Bill C-50.
Throughout the past month, community groups have united across linguistic, cultural, and ethnic lines, with the Portuguese, South Asian, Arab, Hispanic, and Chinese communities working in partnership with trade unions and lawyers associations in a united campaign in opposition to the proposed immigration amendments. Our communities are extremely disturbed to see that such important changes to IRPA are being pushed through as part of the federal budget and are being reviewed by the Standing Committee on Finance rather than the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Specifically, we're concerned about the lack of transparency and the failure on the part of the government to conduct thorough community consultations prior to the introduction of these amendments.
Our recommendation is to separate the immigration amendments from the budget implementation bill, and to recommence the process by conducting in-depth nationwide community and immigration sector consultations, under the guidance of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.
I won't go into the issue of the backlog of over 925,000 cases, as my colleague Victor Wong has already addressed that. I'll just say that these changes will not speed up the processing of applications. In fact, giving the minister the power to discard applications that meet all immigration requirements is unfair, arbitrary, and open to abuse. We believe that if the minister wants to speed up the application process, she should hire more people to review the applications, and not simply refuse to look at the applications. People who have been waiting for years in the system deserve to have their applications looked at.
Our recommendation is to gear the budget allocations for the Department of Citizenship and Immigration towards strengthening the capacity within the department to effectively eliminate the backlog in processing family reunification requests and permanent resident applications.
Although the backlog is a justification used to push through these damaging changes, upon closer examination of the facts, it becomes evident that the real issue at stake is not the application processing times, but the low annual targets we have set for permanent residents entering the country. My colleague Mr. Wong has already addressed the numbers. Once again, to address this backlog, I'd like to reiterate the recommendation to increase the annual immigration target from the current range of 240,000 to 265,000, to 300,000 to 330,000, which is about 1% of the Canadian population.
The proposed changes will give the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration unfettered power to decide what category of immigrants will be allowed to enter the country each year. The minister has again and again assured immigrant communities that there will be no discrimination, as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms will be respected. However, without an open and transparent democratic process in place to oversee the minister's decision, certain groups of immigrants could easily be overlooked. Unfortunately, the charter does not help potential immigrants trying to come to Canada. If the minister's instruction is to fast-track temporary foreign worker applicants from Thailand, as opposed to parents coming from India or Iran, the charter cannot prevent her from doing so.
We have been told that the minister's instructions will not allow the minister to intervene in individual cases. However, by changing just one word in the act, from “shall” to “may”, applicants can meet all requirements, receive sufficient points, and still be rejected. This simple change in wording renders the entire point system and its objective, non-discriminatory criteria meaningless. New immigrants will never have an assurance that if they meet the necessary criteria to come to Canada as permanent residents, they will be granted entry. These new powers are dangerous. With no set criteria, there is far too much room for arbitrary or discriminatory decision-making.
Our recommendation is to implement an immigration strategy that is open, transparent, and accountable, with criteria for permanent residency that are clear and that do not grant unfettered power to a single minister.
We have tremendous concerns about the lack of transparency within these proposed amendments. Under this new system, annual immigration priorities and categories will not be reviewed and debated within the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, but will be made solely by the minister and her office and then be published in the Canada Gazette. The publication may occur after the instructions come into effect, which would prevent consultation.
The minister will have the authority to develop instructions that are not subjected to debate or approval in Parliament. In this scenario, elected members of Parliament and the House of Commons will have no say over these instructions. For many members of immigrant communities who have come to Canada to escape oppressive regimes that reject democratic involvement, it is very concerning to see that here in Canada we're debating measures that will serve to discard the democratic procedures and concentrate the power in the hands of a single elected official.
We have been told that the proposed immigration amendments will not affect families from being able to unite under humanitarian and compassionate grounds. However, even a cursory glance at the legislation demonstrates that the minister and her officials no longer have to consider applications under the humanitarian and compassionate grounds if the family member is outside of Canada. This will mean that the humanitarian and compassionate application, which is the only course for many refugees' families to reunite, will no longer be a viable option.
In addition, we're concerned about the current policy shift of the immigration ministry whereby immigrants are increasingly being understood and treated as cheap and exploitable labour to be brought here through temporary visas. In fact, the most prevalent argument made in favour of these amendments is that they will give flexibility to visa officers to bring in skilled workers to meet labour needs.
Employers claim labour shortages of both high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Much of this perceived labour shortage is occurring in the lower-skill sector. Under the existing point system, low-skilled workers will never have enough points to stay in Canada as permanent residents and never qualify as citizens or be able to bring their families to Canada.
Our recommendation is that the government needs to reform the requirements under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and bring workers to Canada permanently rather than rushing in these potential immigrants as temporary cheap labourers.
I have a couple more points, a couple of recommendations.
We need to implement a full, inclusive, and accessible regularization program to address the issue of undocumented workers, because we already have workers in this country providing the labour for many of these industries.
I'll conclude by saying that it is true that our current immigration system is broken, but if these amendment go through, the immigration system will no longer be broken but shattered beyond repair.