Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 17th, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Order, please.

Our meeting will now begin with the motion by Mr. Karygiannis, that the government put a moratorium on deporting undocumented workers until the committee holds hearings and reports to the House with its recommendations.

Is there debate?

Mr. Karygiannis.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Chair, over the last year and a half, we have found out that the government has taken an aggressive approach to deporting undocumented workers in Canada who are trying to get on with their lives—and they've been in Canada for five to six years, and they present a need for trades that are thirsty for their skills.

Since we're going to be discussing undocumented workers in the upcoming few weeks, or in the fall, and we're going to have witnesses testify in front of us and we'll be making a report, I would ask that the minister put a moratorium on the deportation of these workers until this committee has a chance to fully hear what is happening. Over the summertime or fall, when we're in hearings, the minister can certainly put all of the resources they have used in the past year and a half to deport these people into making Canada a home for these folks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Is there any further comment?

Mr. Devolin.

[Barry Devolin, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

I will be opposing this motion for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that it's open-ended. I don't think it's the appropriate role of this committee to try to tie the hands of the government indefinitely. This kind of moratorium could actually have a counterproductive impact by creating a perception that people who come to Canada, for whatever reason now, can live under some sort of a moratorium on being deported. I don't think it would be appropriate to put these handcuffs on the people who are implementing the policy in Canada.

We've had this discussion before. We as a committee are dealing with it, and I know that the government is dealing with it. The suggestion that somehow there's been some big change in the last year and a half, that everything was fine until a year and a half ago, is simply not true.

On the basis of those reasons, and others, I will be opposing this motion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Mr. Devolin.

I have a list, and am going to Mr. Siksay.

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

Thank you, Chair.

I agree with Mr. Karygiannis that this is a very important issue, and one that affects many people here in Canada. It affects many families in Canada; and it affects our economy, because we know that undocumented workers play a very valuable role in the current economy in many parts of Canada, and to lose them would put serious hardships on business and industry, and cause serious problems for families.

Mr. Chair, we have already passed a motion similar to this almost a year ago, on June 21, 2006, and it's currently being debated in the House in the form of a concurrence motion, beginning last Friday, having been moved by the member for Trinity—Spadina. That debate will continue, I believe, the first Friday that we're back after the break week, and then the House will have an opportunity to vote on that motion at that time. So I think it's very timely that the House has that discussion.

Given that, Chair, I'm not sure it's important to reiterate this today. I was going to suggest to Mr. Karygiannis that we might wait to table his motion on May 31, when we are expecting officials of the department to come and brief us about the deportation of undocumented workers. After that meeting, it might be important to discuss the motion then. That timing or sequence would certainly sit better with me.

So I wonder if there might be some interest in entertaining that suggestion, that we table it until May 31.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I think I'll allow you to respond, Mr. Karygiannis, in case you want to cede to Mr. Siksay's request.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I want to thank Mr. Siksay for making that friendly suggestion. However, at this point I am not prepared to put this aside, because at the end of the day--be it today, be it at the end of May--we're not going to be dealing with this issue, having full hearings and hearing from stakeholders, until probably in the fall. Any time we waste between now...every minute, every second that ticks, I believe people are being aggressively deported, so the sooner the message goes out, the better.

Last year there was a motion brought forward. It was going to be debated in the House, but we've had no hearings from stakeholders.

This committee now has decided to have public hearings and stakeholders. A whole bunch of people have been invited to come up, and those people are the ones who need to tell us what exactly is going on out there. If we, for any reason, do not send the right message to the House and to the minister that this committee is seriously looking at this, I don't think we'll be taken too seriously, and I don't think the people who will be coming in the fall will think we're doing due diligence to them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Mr. Batters.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I found Mr. Siksay's suggestion to be somewhat intriguing. I am going to vote no to this motion, but I thought at least it would be good to have some officials come before us and brief us on the situation before I was to make up my mind. But if Mr. Karygiannis is going to proceed with this today, I'm going to be voting no. I think his assertion that people are being deported any more aggressively now than they were under the previous Liberal government is false.

As a new member of the committee, I look at this and say it's critical to maintain the integrity of the entire system. The government has already been very clear in stating that any regularization initiative for foreign nationals who have illegally remained in Canada is unfair to the hundreds of thousands of people who have applied for immigration to Canada through legal channels and have patiently waited for processing. I think we owe it to those people who have gone through the proper channels and made it through all of those hurdles to become permanent residents, to maintain the fairness and the integrity of the system.

Any foreign nationals, including those who currently live in Canada without legal status, can apply for permanent status; however, they will have to voluntarily leave the country before their application will be considered. There are several opportunities available to economic immigrants who wish to apply for permanent residence in Canada. These are the federal skilled worker class, the business classes, and the provincial nominee class, and over 130,000 people arrived in 2006 through one of these classes.

Mr. Chair, deportation is the responsibility of the minister for public security and emergency preparedness, and an effective removal program is essential, I say again, to the integrity of Canada's immigration system. A moratorium on deportations would simply act as a draw factor for others to come to Canada and remain without legal status. This both compromises the integrity of the legal immigration program and is unfair to those who are applying through legal channels.

Mr. Chair, and my fellow committee members, I think it's essential that those who are applying through the regular legal channels are respected. To circumvent this system and to have a moratorium, as is being suggested by Mr. Karygiannis, threatens the integrity of the entire system. I also note that this is being debated in the House through a concurrence motion.

So I won't be supporting Mr. Karygiannis' motion for those reasons, and I look forward to a thorough study of this topic, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you.

Mr. Telegdi.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Chair, I've been around this committee long enough to recognize bureaucratise coming from the department and the department speaking through members of Parliament. I'm going to touch on the integrity of the system.

The integrity of the system has been seriously shaken. We have a system that doesn't allow people whom the economy needs to come into this country through legal means. We've reached the point where we have a crisis. This whole issue has been kicked around for a long time. In the last Liberal government we were working on regularization. I dare say it was one of those things that didn't come to fruition because of the short term of the Parliament at that time.

But I can tell you, from the evidence we have heard, that we have something like 200,000 to 500,000—and nobody really knows the number—people, and that includes dependants, undocumented workers who are essentially working underground.

I'm going to give credit, and very much in public, to the government. About a year ago we had a situation in which immigration officials raided schools and used kids to trap their parents who were undocumented workers. The government--Stockwell Day--made a proper response and told the department this was no longer acceptable, that this was not to be done.

I'm really hoping the government will come to its senses on this, because I think we need common sense to prevail. The economy is looking for people who can fill positions that are vacant, and I dare say that if we got rid of all these undocumented workers by some magic tomorrow, our economy would go into a recession.

We have worker shortages across the country. I don't need to tell the Conservatives the problems they're having attracting workers to the tar sands. Just a couple of days ago we saw the case of a worker shortage in P.E.I. that threatens the survival of a fish processing plant because they cannot find workers.

This problem goes right across the board. The committee has travelled extensively. We had representations made to the committee by people in the Maritimes who said, send us all your undocumented workers; we need immigrants.

But we need immigrants who fit the system. What we need is people with trade skills that the present point system does not allow into the country.

I think this is an opportunity for the Conservative government to really take a commonsensical approach, and they will get lots of credit for it because it's a problem that has to be fixed. But maintaining the line put out by the bureaucracy has grown quite tiresome, because it's been the same line for many years. They want to maintain the integrity of a system that is broken.

It's time we exercised some political will, and it's time the government of the day exercised political will to fix a broken system.

This motion speaks to that. I am glad it's being debated in the House and I'm glad we're going to be studying the issue. This is a commonsensical solution to a problem.

The process of regularization is not a free-for-all in which everybody says, I'm an illegal and I get documentation. If it's done in an orderly fashion, the people who come out from underground, if you will, have to register; there's a criminal check done on them; then they're given a work permit, during which time there is a further investigation done—and the length of the work permit can be anywhere from two to three years—and if they're successful and have proven themselves to be contributing to Canada, then a process can be put in place to regularize them, and they can apply for permanent standing.

But the solution of the bureaucrats is a non-solution. It is sweeping the problem under the rug and creating very real hardship for the hundreds of thousands of people who are involved, who are essentially helping to build this economy, and I think it's time we stop being ostriches and started dealing with the problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Okay. I have Madame Faille, Mr. Karygiannis and Mr. Siksay, maybe then we can go to a vote on the motion.

Madame Faille.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

This is not the first time that the committee has dealt with this motion. My colleague's premise is that these people are in Canada illegally. True, their documents are not in order. But, in reality, if a number of them had access to a more helpful program that would allow them to renew their work permits, among other things, without having to leave the country, they would perhaps have chosen that solution in order to remain in good standing.

We are told that these people are all in Canada illegally. Their documents are not in order, no question. On the other hand, from a practical standpoint, employers are presently begging us to make the process of work permit renewal easier so that their employees, people they really need, can stay in the country and keep working.

Sometimes employers are prepared to do anything to protect their employees so that they can stay in Canada. There have been several cases in Montreal in the past few years. We cannot take it for granted that these people all came here illegally. Most of them arrived with work permits, or as visitors, and they found the country to their liking. Yet none of our rules allowed a transition when they got the guarantee of a job.

The points system has also been modified to favour better-educated people. At the moment, we need the people who are subject to rules designed to expel them. Last session, to help the committee in its work, we asked the department for briefing notes to show us the amount of money and effort expended from 2004 to the present on expelling people, precisely to find out if there have been more expulsions in recent years.

I feel that there are more cases, because the problem is much more glaring. Employers are begging us to come to grips with the matter, but I am not ready to say that there are more expulsions. I will say that, since 2004 as a member of Parliament and beforehand as a volunteer working with immigrants, I have been in a position to see that there were a lot of unjustified expulsions. We could have regularized the situation of these people quickly. These were workers we needed, with families who were integrated, and who spoke French.

In Quebec, we have a special situation. When an immigrant speaks French, it is more difficult to send a little family away. The way in which we forced people to leave the country was also unacceptable. Using children as bait to lure their illegal parents into the open seems unreasonable, certainly in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

I think the committee must address this question. We have already asked the department to provide us with detailed information. The matter will be debated in the House. I am inclined to accept Bill's request to put off study on the motion until later. I believe that the committee is aware of the importance of the matter, but if we deal with the motion after the debate in the House, after hearing the evidence from the people from the department, we will be in a better position as a committee to make an enlightened decision.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you.

Mr. Karygiannis and Mr. Siksay.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Chair, I would urge members of the committee to deal with this motion today. Whether we table it for another 10 or 15 days or we deal with it today, it is a matter of urgency. The stakeholders we are bringing in need to know that we're serious about this matter; they need to know that this committee is looking at it very seriously.

With no disrespect to our colleagues on the Conservative side, but some material that's been prepared by the department and trying to tell us why we shouldn't be supporting this motion certainly flies in the faces of the individuals who have been in Canada for the last five or ten years, some people even longer than that. They have been underground and they're trying to regularize their standing in Canada.

Certainly we've seen overwhelmingly the aggressiveness of this government and the department. Last year they took children out of schools to use them as bait for the parents to come out of asylum. I'm sure that my good friend Mr. Batters has seen this and read this. I know that he is a new member on the committee, but certainly this needs to be addressed and needs to be addressed immediately.

So I would urge all members to support the motion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you.

Mr. Siksay is our last speaker, then I will call for the motion to be voted on.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Chair, as I say, I don't disagree with Mr. Karygiannis that this is a very urgent issue. That's why, as I said, the NDP member for Trinity—Spadina has this on the agenda of the House as a concurrence issue at the moment, but I do want to put forward my suggestion to the committee about tabling this until May 31, when we've heard the briefing from officials on this.

The clerk informs me that the best way to accomplish that is to propose an amendment to the motion. The amendment would read, at the very beginning of the motion—

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Is this an amendment to the motion?

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

We would add at the very beginning of the motion that, “At its meeting of May 31, 2007, the committee consider...” and then continue with the rest of the motion as Mr. Karygiannis has submitted it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

So the question then would be on the amendment. And the amendment is that before the motion--

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Chair, do I have to accept the amendment?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

No.

Okay, read out the amendment, Mr. Clerk.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Mr. Samy Agha]

It would read: “That at the meeting of May 31st, 2007, the Committee consider the following motion”.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

All in favour of the amendment, please raise your hands. All opposed to the amendment.

(Amendment negatived)

All in favour of the main motion.