Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Apart from my fellow panellists, I think it's generally recognized that our current asylum system is seriously flawed and has lost public confidence. Its key weakness is it cannot distinguish between those who genuinely need our protection and those who use it to gain entry by avoiding having to meet immigration rules.
It has other serious flaws. It's terribly expensive, it's exploited by human traffickers and smugglers, it interferes with our tourism and trade, and it damages our bilateral relations with a number of countries. It also inhibits our ability to contribute to helping the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to resolve the enormous global refugee and displaced people problems that confront the world.
There are estimated to be close to 42 million people under the aegis of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. These are people who are in camps; 16 million of them are defined as refugees, and 26 million others are uprooted people who are under the responsibility of the UNHCR.
Canada used to be the leader in helping resolve world refugee problems, but now we've lost our leadership role by continuing to tolerate a dysfunctional system. We're also in danger of retaliation by the European Union if we continue to demand visitor visas for some of their nationals. The European Union has put us on notice that if we don't fix the system, Canadians will need tourist visas to go to Europe.
Asylum shopping by people who abuse the system is not unique to Canada. In the last 25 years, approximately 10 million asylum claims have been made in western countries; 800,000 of those have been made in Canada. Less than 20% of those who have made claims have been found to be genuine refugees, and the costs have been staggering: 400,000 asylum seekers each year in western countries costs an estimated $10 billion U.S. When you compare that to the annual budget of the UNHCR to look after some 40 million people, their budget is about $4.5 billion, so this consistent attempt to try to sort out the genuine refugees from the economic migrants is very costly.
Every attempt at reform in Canada has been met with fierce resistance by immigration lawyers, immigration consultants, and refugee activists. The challenge of any system is to design a program that works and sorts out the bogus claims before they can clog up the system. We cannot afford any longer to waste scarce financial resources on those who exploit the system, as they have been doing for years. The proposed legislation is a step forward. It attempts to balance fairness with the reality that asylum claimants coming from countries that respect the UN convention and the rule of law and are democratic do not warrant the same level of scrutiny as do those coming directly from countries known to persecute individuals.
In effect, it's a triage system, a fast-track system. It's practised in all of the European Union countries and it's sanctioned by the UNHCR. The proposal is an attempt to reform a broken system that has proven to be unworkable and damaging not only to Canada, but to the interests of genuine refugees. It deserves the support of this committee.
As I see it, there is a risk here that the change proposed in this legislation may be too little and too late. The key is whether the first level of decision-making can be made fast enough to make the system function effectively. If the first level doesn't work, the new system will be as bad as the current one, if not worse.
We are now faced with an enormous backlog of undecided claims, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 62,000 undecided claims waiting here. The costs of that are just staggering. The department has said it's $50,000 per refugee per year. Just do the figuring.
The work of this committee is going to go on for some time and the legislation may not be passed, if it is passed, for many months. In the meantime, human traffickers and smugglers know that the law is going to be tightened up, and I would suspect that we'll get a very high rush of individuals trying to get here before that deadline.
I think, and I hope, that this committee takes their responsibilities seriously here and makes this first rather timid step for reforming a system that has been broken for years.
Thank you.