I'm a lawyer. I have been practising law for 31 years. I spend a lot of time dealing with immigration files, particularly from Asia—Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China.
Mr. Chairman and members, if these amendments are passed, we are going to lose confidence. Somebody who is highly qualified can wait for years and then be told by an officer, “Sorry, thank you very much for your application; I just got instructions from the minister, and I'm going to return your file. Thank you very much.”
I don't think that is fair. I don't think it is the Canadian way of doing business.
We are highly regarded internationally, and to have this kind of a law adopted, and then for me to present it to my community and prospective immigrants overseas, you can see the negative impact Canada is going to face as a result.
Mr. Chairman, there are already powers for this; you have already heard evidence in the submissions to you that the current law, the act and the regulations, allow the minister to do what she has announced she wants to do. The previous government did that. You can identify certain workers, the IT workers, for instance, and speed up their applications and have a special project to bring them in. But it did not work. Why? Because there was no coordination between the various government departments. There are other departments that are holding you up.
Why don't you use the wide network that the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has worldwide? They know the overseas community well. We could tap into their expertise, their information, their intelligence. Work with them to find the immigrants we want. The minister has the power to do that under current law. Why don't we do that, and go out and actively recruit the skilled workers we need for our labour market? We don't have to fundamentally change the system. In 1976, when there was to be a big change to the system, a green paper was issued and there were wide public consultations. Everybody had input into this process.
So I submit to you, Mr. Chairman, that the proposed law is bad and the process is bad. We don't have to do it this way. It is important that we take this out. Let us have a proper proposal and draft legislation in front of Parliament and, more importantly, the draft instructions the minister is going to issue. Let us take a look at them and have input, and then we will come back with a very good Canadian legal framework for our prospective immigrants.