Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 28th, 2008

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

The chair has 5:30 down.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

I want to adjourn, Mr. Chair. We've had too many motions today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

What we passed in St. John's.... For the benefit of members, in St. John's the chair asked Ms. Becklumb to prepare recommendations applicable to an interim report on the study of immigration consultants and to have them sent to members before the end of the week so that members could read them and then discuss them on Monday, which is today.

So you're saying that we don't want to do that today?

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

Give it to the steering committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Why can't we do a couple of hours on it now?

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

On a point of order, it's 5:30 right now. Unless we extend the meeting....

I see that already three people have gotten up and left--well, two are leaving and one has left. I think they are using their feet to give you a message.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

So it's not your desire to go ahead with the draft report now?

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

No. If we look at Bill C-50, that will take us a bit of time from now until May 16, I think. I suspect we will not be able to deal with any reports or motions on other issues. Even though the consultants issue is very important, I suspect we would not be able to deal with it until we have dealt with Bill C-50.

I'm wondering if I could make the very friendly suggestion that we deal with all of issues that are in front of us only after we have finished Bill C-50.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

So is the committee saying to me that we're not going to deal with the interim reports? I want to get some clarification here, please.

We went across the country for 12 days. We met in nine provinces. Our analysts have worked overtime over the last short while doing reports. Are we just going to leave these in limbo and move on to other reports? What is the committee saying?

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

Mr. Chair, may I suggest that the members read the report on the consultants. We were eager to make sure we got something out of the travel that we could file as a report. I think you'll probably find that we can deal with that fairly quickly.

The steering committee should meet, Mr. Chair, to schedule some extra meetings so that we can do justice to the preliminary report on Bill C-50. It's important we show people that we're going to make good use of the extra time. It would be good if we could get that done.

The reason we said that is that in case there is an election, we don't want to see everything we did on the cross-Canada tour go down the tube. In terms of the consultants, it seemed as if we could get fairly easy agreement. That was the feeling. So if everybody could read the report on the consultants, that might be one thing we could deal with.

We probably won't be able to come to agreement on the other stuff, but with this one, there is a possibility of getting it done. At least we'll have something on record for having taken the tour.

Does that make sense?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Does that accurately reflect what we want to do?

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

May I recommend that at some point in the next 48 hours you have a steering committee meeting to reflect our travel, the reports?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We'll try to put a steering committee meeting together as quickly as we can.

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

So can we take this to the steering committee, and then have the steering committee come back to our next scheduled meeting with solid recommendations on where we're going to go and how we're going to do it?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We could do Bill C-50.

[Some hon. members]

Perfect.

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

Not only Bill C-50, but also the reports.

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

And we could look at that. Is that the only report you want to do?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We have immigration consultants, we have Iraqi refugees, and we have temporary foreign workers, which will take a long time to do.

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

Let's take it to the steering committee and then come back to this committee with some recommendations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Okay.

Mr. Carrier.

[Robert Carrier, Bloc, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Mr. Chairman, even if we had had the time to look at these recommendations, I do not think we would have been really ready to do that. Least we forget, this requires a serious effort on our part. We need to schedule another meeting, perhaps next Wednesday, to look at the recommendations. The steering committee should discuss this and come up with a suggestion for us. We need to take the time to look at these recommendations carefully. We must not be too hasty.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

It would be a terrible waste of time and money if we didn't do anything on this. There was a lot of effort put into it. There were 52 panels of people, and I was there for every single one of them. A lot of effort went into it. So to have this now just thrown aside--

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

We're not throwing it aside.

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

We're not throwing it aside. We're taking it to the steering committee, to come back with recommendations to this committee. Every party has a member or two in the steering committee. I think the steering committee can be trusted to come up with solid recommendations on how to proceed on both accounts at the same time.