Thank you, Mr. Chair and colleagues.
I am pleased today to present to the Committee my department's supplementary estimates (B) for fiscal year 2010-2011.
I think the supplementary estimates are self-explanatory, but if you have questions, of course, we are here to answer them. Perhaps in my opening remarks I can provide a brief summary of new developments within the Department, our operations and our policies.
Last March, as you all know, we introduced Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act, which received Royal Assent on June 29, 2010, of course after receiving the unanimous approval of both Houses of Parliament.
I would again like to thank my colleagues from all parties who worked on this.
This act will make Canada's refugee system more balanced, ensuring quicker protection for those who need it and quicker removals of those who don't. It will help deter those who would seek to abuse our immigration and refugee protection systems.
As part of these changes, Canada will also increase the number of resettled refugees by 20%, or 2,500 refugees per year. This includes 2,000 more spots in the private sponsorship program and 500 more government-assisted refugees. In addition, we will increase funding to the refugee assistance program. We've already started that work. This will give the refugees we resettle the support they need to begin their lives in Canada.
To promote these increases, I travelled across the country this summer to encourage individuals and organizations to become private sponsors, to become more involved in a revitalization of the private sponsorship refugee program. In particular, I urged them to become part of our humanitarian tradition by helping to provide a new beginning for victims of violence and persecution around the world, such as those forced to flee the cruelty and brutality of the Ahmadinejad regime in Iran and religious persecution in Iraq.
I should also mention that we've begun--or more than begun, we're well into--the hard work of implementation of the Balanced Refugee Reform Act. In fact, I've appointed, I believe, all of the additional IRB decision-makers for the refugee protection division who are necessary as part of our commitment to begin the process of backlog reduction.
Canada remains committed to protecting those who are most vulnerable. The Government of Canada is equally committed to upholding our laws and to protecting the integrity of our immigration and refugee systems.
That's why we've introduced legislation to crack down on crooked immigration consultants who promote fraud in our immigration program and victimize those who dream of immigrating to this great country.
I'd like to acknowledge Ms. Chow's advocacy that this initiative had to be twinned with our efforts on refugee reform.
As was the case with Bill C-11, this spirit of compromise and cooperation surrounding Bill C-35 has spoken, I think, very well to all parliamentarians on this committee.
We also introduced legislation that would strengthen the value of Canadian citizenship by making it easier to lose citizenship if it is improperly obtained, and we hope to begin debate upon second reading in the House in the near future.
But for Canadian citizenship to be meaningful, it also is essential that new and established Canadians alike share a common understanding of our rights and responsibilities, our institutions, our democratic traditions, and our history. That's why, just over a year ago, I was proud to launch Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship, our popular new citizenship study guide, which is required reading for anyone seeking to become a Canadian citizen. In fact, the demands for the publication and tens of thousands of downloads from the website, as well as the very positive feedback, have been extraordinary.
This past March, my department began administering a new citizenship test based on Discover Canada. We expect new citizens to know about our country, so we've made the material and guide more comprehensive in scope. We strongly encourage citizenship applicants who want to do well on the test to study the new guide and familiarize themselves with their new country's history, symbols, values, and institutions.
To become a Canadian citizen, you also need to have knowledge of English or French. That obligation is set out in the Citizenship Act. Discover Canada is available as an audio version to help applicants who are still learning English or French study.
And since 2006, we have tripled funding to settlement services, including free language classes, after it had been previously frozen for years. That's meant an additional $1.4 billion over five years to enhance services that help newcomers integrate into Canadian society.
While the government helps immigrants integrate into our society, including through the provision of language training, we expect newcomers to take advantage of this support. What concerns me is that only about 25% of newcomers who qualify for free language classes have enrolled in federally funded classes. To ensure that all immigrants are able to fully integrate and participate in society, this is a number that we would like to see increase.
I'm very pleased to report today that we are well on our way to achieving this goal, as a result, in part, of a pilot project that we launched last fall, where we mailed language training vouchers to 2,000 randomly selected permanent residents. The preliminary results of the vouchers show that more than twice the number of immigrants who received vouchers enrolled in language classes than those who did not. We'll being seeing the final results of our assessment in the spring, and if they continue to be positive, we'll look at options to expand this approach.
We've also updated the multiculturalism program's objectives, placing a much greater emphasis on integration. Through its new objectives, the program will help build an integrated, socially cohesive society, and improve the responsiveness of institutions to the needs of a diverse population.
The Government is committed to improving the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to protect foreign workers and live-in caregivers from potential abuse and exploitation.
To this end, we proposed improvements to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, including penalties for employers who fail in their commitments to their employees.
We also made changes to the live-in caregiver program to better protect these workers and make it easier and faster for them and their families to obtain permanent residency in Canada.
In addition, Mr. Chair, we have introduced important legislative amendments to Canada's immigration laws, which would help protect vulnerable foreign workers, such as exotic dancers, who could be victims of exploitation or human trafficking.
The government is committed to maintaining our tradition of welcoming newcomers from around the world, Mr. Chairman. In fact, it's likely that this year, we will see the largest number of newcomers landing in Canada as permanent residents in more than five decades. In 2011 we intend to welcome between 240,000 and 265,000 permanent residents. I understand my officials were before you last week to discuss the planned levels.
The Government of Canada also remains committed to using immigration in a way that best serves our economic needs.
That's why I'm pleased that Canada was able to lift the visa requirement for travellers with ordinary Taiwan passports. This is something we announced, I believe, just a week ago. This is the eighth visa that we've lifted since 2006.
As you know, I spent time in September visiting our principal immigration source countries—India, China, and the Philippines—as well as having discussions with my colleagues in Europe and Australia. We focused on working together to combat abuse of our immigration system, and human smuggling and trafficking.
We are taking steps to address this challenge. Regulatory changes have been introduced to clarify the authority of the government to refuse applicants on the basis of marriages of convenience. The changes provide visa officers with a better tool to prevent people who have entered into phony marriages from undermining the integrity of our system.
This fall I also held a series of cross-country town hall meetings on the issue of phony marriages. I want to personally hear people's stories, as well as their opinions and ideas about how to best address the issue. While we obviously want to keep the doors open for legitimate spouses, we also want to make sure the doors are not open for those who would break our laws and exploit Canadians.
Mr. Chair, in closing, let me just address human smuggling. This represents an assault on our country's borders and generosity. It clogs our immigration system by diverting resources away from other areas where they ought to be focused. That's why our law enforcement agencies need the tools to be able to combat human smuggling, whether on a small or large scale. Bill C-49, an act Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System, will enable us to crack down on the despicable human smugglers who prey on vulnerable migrants.
Canadians expect strong actions, but actions that are also balanced with our humanitarian and legal obligations. We believe Bill C-49 achieves that objective.
In closing, these are just some of the ways we are working to make immigration more responsive to our economy, and make our refugee programs more fair and efficient.
Thank you for this opportunity to address the Committee, and I would be happy to respond to your questions.
