Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 27th, 2012

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

I want to move on to settlement funding. The estimates reveal a $6 million cut to settlement funding. That's on top of cuts made in the last years. I want to give your government credit in this year for increases to settlement funding several years ago. I know that immigrant settlement service organizations appreciated those funds, although they all reported that they still operate with too few resources.

Minister, you have recently spoken about the disparity in income standards of immigrants versus established Canadians, and of course recognizing the importance of employment, language, housing, and settlement services to close that gap. How does removing funding to immigrant settlement services square with your stated concern to raise new Canadians' economic conditions?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Well, in fact our government has substantially increased funding for settlement services. The federal funding for settlement services outside the province of Quebec—which is sort of a separate arrangement—was $200 million in 2005. In this fiscal year it is about $600 million for outside of Quebec. That's a tripling. It's not a reduction.

We did have a problem, in that when the funding was increased in 2005 it was based on the settlement patterns at that time, which have since changed. Substantially fewer immigrants are going to Ontario and substantially more are going to other provinces. As a result of the change to which you refer in this year's budget, we are actually increasing the funding allocation for settlement services to nine provinces and territories, and only decreasing it in the province of Ontario, now based on the new funding formula that allows for roughly a per capita funding level of $3,000 per immigrant per province.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Mr. Lamoureux, go ahead.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I appreciate the minister's openness to coming back to the committee in order to have more questions and answers. I think it speaks volumes when we talk about spending somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.5 billion in immigration and citizenship. Unfortunately, as a political entity here we get maybe five or ten minutes to try to go through both questions and answers on such a great expenditure, which really is quite difficult. Unfortunately, we have to generalize. I suspect that a number of questions I may have over the coming weeks I might have to put in writing, and maybe the minister's office can respond to that.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

I'd be happy to.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

The biggest question that comes to mind right offhand is in the area of citizenship. There is a cut to the citizenship branch. Yet it seems that's an area where there has been an increase in the length of time it takes for someone to be able to get their citizenship. I wonder if the minister can provide more clarity on how much of a cut there is actually on the front end where it is impacting the waiting times for citizenship.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

I'm not clear on what cut in the citizenship grant you are talking about. I am advised that there's a $291,000 employee benefit adjustment.

Amipal, could you supplement that?

[Amipal Manchanda]

There's a reduction to the citizenship program of $291,000. The total funding for that program is $41.8 million. That is just a technical adjustment that has been made for the employee benefit plan done on an annual basis.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

The biggest concern that we have, of course, is the length of time it takes a person to acquire their citizenship after they've actually qualified. To what degree is the budget—because we don't have that kind of detail here—for that front-line service being cut?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

It's not being cut. But you put your finger on a very serious problem, which we are aware of. It's a big stress point operationally, and people are waiting too long to get their citizenship grants, there's no doubt about it. Quite frankly, the challenge is that we have obviously limited resources, limited tax dollars to spend in general and in our department, yet the volumes just keep going up. The volume of visitors and permanent residents has gone up, as have the number of citizenship applications.

First of all, there's a big program of modernization in the citizenship branch being led by Madame Deschênes, which makes better use of technology. They are increasing their productivity, so we're getting through more grants with the resources we have.

Quite honestly, Mr. Lamoureux, one thing we need to look at—and I encourage the committee's suggestions in this regard—is perhaps better pricing the fees relative to the cost. Right now the fees we charge are producing revenues much lower than that cost of offering the service, and I think maybe we need to align fees and costs.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Okay.

The other thing is that when we're trying to recognize the jobs that are in demand and we talk about those skilled workers, there are tens of thousands of workers—as the minister knows—across this country today, and Canada as a country has recognized these workers as valuable contributors to our economy. Does the minister see the value in terms of expanding the opportunity for workers who come under visa to be able to become landed at some point? And if so, does he have some projected numbers that he would like to see, or is a separate category going to be created?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Well, no, the numbers are included in our levels plan, which this year is 240,000 to 265,000 permanent residents. I anticipate that this year we will be towards the higher end of that range, as we have been pretty much at about 254,000 on average for the past six years. Our operations budget overall and for each mission is based on that global target as it's allocated in each mission. So we do allocate the resources based on where we see the higher volumes of permanent residency. I'll give you an example. Philippines in last three years has emerged as the top source country, so we've shifted additional processing resources to the Manila office.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Okay. So let's say for the sake of argument that we have 100,000 workers today in Canada. Can the minister give any indication as to what we could assume? Is he going to set up a new stream that would allow them to stay in Canada, work in Canada, and ultimately maybe become landed?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Well, the answer is that we have already done that in part with the creation of the Canadian experience class, which does allow mid- to high-range temporary foreign workers, who have worked in Canada for two years, to apply for permanent residency through the Canadian experience class. I think we're planning for up to 14,000 admissions through the CEC this year.

There are also other streams of temporary foreign workers who have access to permanent residency and who are in our levels plan, such as live-in caregivers, and I think we're planning about 10,000 admissions under that program. But if you're talking about increasing by orders of magnitude, the number of temporary foreign workers who could access permanent residency, that would require a huge shift in how we allocate in our overall immigration plan. To maintain the current overall limit at about 265,000 while substantially increasing the number of temporary foreign workers who can transition into permanent residency would require offsetting cuts in programs like the federal skilled worker program. Our view is that we get more bang for the buck from the highly educated and skilled workers who come in than we would from large numbers of low-skilled temporary foreign workers taking those permanent residency spots. It's a trade-off.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

You have to take a breath, Mr. Minister.

You have the floor, Mr. Weston.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you for your enthusiasm, Minister, in being here, and even more for your enthusiasm in coming back. I think we like being here, and we appreciate your vote of confidence in this committee. Thank you for your officials joining us as well.

There has been some emphasis in your remarks on the use and the effectiveness of ministerial instructions, and I understand that the department has been reviewing the use of ministerial instructions. I'm wondering if you can let us know what the result was of that evaluation. Furthermore, what might have been the consequence if the opposition parties had succeeded in opposing your use of ministerial instructions?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Thank you.

If I could just supplement the answer to Mr. Lamoureux, I'm reminded there's a third pathway to permanent residency for temporary foreign workers that's frequently used, and that's the provincial nominee program. So between the PNP, the LCP, and the CEC—not too many acronyms here—we are admitting about 40,000 temporary foreign workers as permanent residents per year. That compares to about 180,000 work permits that are issued to TFWs. The large number of those work permits go to students and young people on the working holiday program who aren't necessarily looking for PR.

I would like to ask Mr. Linklater to respond on the question of the assessment we've completed on the application of ministerial instructions.

[Les Linklater, Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic and Program Policy, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Sure.

We had an interesting review of the implementation of ministerial instructions within the department, which initially focused on the implementation of the first set of ministerial instructions. But as the work progressed, we actually put in place the second set of ministerial instructions. We were able to learn from the first set, in terms of adjustments with the second set.

What we found with the first set, using an occupational filter alone, was that by limiting the number of occupations under which individuals could apply to come to Canada we did have the intended effect of lowering the number of new applications we received. However, there were a couple of occupations on that first list where we found that applicants were able to tailor their credentials to meet the requirements of the occupation and we saw the numbers of applications grow quite exponentially.

This led us, with the second set of ministerial instructions, to imposing hard numerical caps. It's 20,000 new applications under the second set of ministerial instructions, with a subcap for each of the occupations underneath that, initially at 1,000. Then, with MI3, we've moved further to restricting new applications to 10,000, with a subcap of 500 for each application.

With these hard numerical caps, we've found the progress on backlog reductions and working through the first set of applications received under ministerial instructions one will be accelerated.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you very much for that answer, Mr. Linklater.

What would have been the consequence if the opposition had succeeded in opposing your use of ministerial instructions?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Had we not begun applying the limits to new applications through ministerial instructions in 2009, I think the last estimate I saw was that the backlog in that particular program would have grown from 640,000, as of 2008, to well over a million by 2011. You could see every year that we were warehousing 100,000 to 200,000 new applications in the backlog.

If we never used that tool there would be a constant growth, moving up into the 1.5 million range just in that one program. With the backlog of 640,000, which was where it peaked, we were already looking at wait times of seven to eight years.

I will give you a general estimate that had we not used ministerial instructions, by the end of this decade we would be at about 1.5 million backlogged applications in that program, taking—I don't know—10 to 15 years to process.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Ultimately the person you get as an immigrant isn't the person who initially applied.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Well, the person who applied at 40 is now 55. That person, who was young, just starting their family, keen to move, had given up hope of moving to Canada and gets this letter ten years later saying, “Oh, by the way, we've got around to your application. You're now welcome to come to Canada.”

I mean, it wasn't working for them; it wasn't working for us.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

You have been passionate about the integration of new immigrants into Canada—both economic and social. The recent story of the Shafia girls and things like that is the wrong end of integration. Can you tell us about how we're working on improving the integration, both economic and social, of new immigrants?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

That's actually a great question, and I spend a lot of time thinking about it.

I would invite the committee, maybe at some point in the future, to get into that whole issue of cultural and social integration. We've looked a lot here, at this committee, at programmatic issues like settlement services, but there are more difficult issues of social and cultural integration.

One way we've addressed these is to be very blunt with people. Frankly, we've dropped the political correctness of the past, which I think was informed by a kind of relativistic view of multiculturalism, that certain cultural practices could be justified by our openness to diversity. We've just said that that's passé.

Clearly, there are certain so-called cultural practices, as we say in the new citizenship study guide, “Discover Canada”, that are barbaric, that are condemned, that carry the full force of the law in Canada. I think it's important for the Canadian state to be explicit about that--explicit, to quote former Prime Minister Blair, about “the duty to integrate”, and that multiculturalism and our tradition of tolerance and diversity do not extend to all culturally based practices.

But ultimately, Mr. Weston, I think that the best pathway to cultural and social integration is successful economic integration. When we look at western Europe, the failure of integration of immigrant communities in those societies is in large measure because of the economic exclusion of newcomers, who are typically invited in as people with low levels of education, into low-skill jobs, with limited European language proficiency and therefore limited social mobility and limited educational opportunities for their children. Ghettoization followed and in some instances became breeding grounds for extremism and radicalization.

Thankfully, we have largely avoided that in Canada. By focusing on inviting typically more highly educated people with higher levels of language proficiency, who do better economically than in Europe, I think we can and should do better.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Madame Groguhé.