I'm going to read my statement today in the interest of time.
I'm not going to talk this morning about how terribly expensive our current asylum system is, or how it encourages human smuggling, or how it presents a serious security threat to Canada, or how it undermines our immigration system, or how it damages our bilateral relations with many friendly countries and compromises our trade and tourist industry. I'm not going to talk about why it's the primary reason that our southern neighbour, the United States, has in effect militarized its border with us and, finally, about how it undermines and inhibits Canada's efforts to help resolve global refugee problems.
For over a quarter of a century, every attempt to reform Canada's defective asylum system has met with failure. The primary reason has been the willingness of our politicians, from all sides of the House, to accept the arguments of the powerful refugee lobby that exists in the country, a lobby that has fiercely resisted every attempt to introduce even the most modest reforms in a clearly dysfunctional system. The lobby consists of, among others, immigration lawyers, immigration consultants, the Canadian Council for Refugees, churches, Amnesty International, and a host of other advocacy groups and non-governmental organizations. Many of these organizations receive substantial taxpayer funding for their operations, and many of them do an excellent job in helping the asylum seekers and refugees who get into the country. There's no question about that.
One might question their sincerity in posing as defenders of poor refugees against a malevolent big government trying to close Canada's doors against the persecuted of the world, but they have the right to lobby for a policy change that serves their interest, and I don't challenge that. What is more disturbing, really, is that this lobby has played a dominant role in the formulation of asylum policy for the last quarter of a century. It is almost as if Parliament has delegated its responsibility for policy-making in this area to the lobbyists. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration, for example, actually calls these lobbyists stakeholders, not lobbyists.
You will notice that I make a clear distinction between asylum policy and refugee policy. The refugee lobby does not make this distinction and it likes to mislead the media and the public into believing that all of the thousands of people who annually show up at our borders spontaneously and uninvited and claim to be persecuted are counted as refugees. Now, that is wrong. They are not refugees. They are not refugees until the IRB adjudicates their claim and makes a final decision as to whether they meet the refugee definition.
Since Canada allows everybody and anybody who shows up at our border to receive a quasi-judicial tribunal hearing, with, in most cases, free legal advice and access to the courts, the refugee board, of course, has always had and faced a serious backlog. The backlog now is around some 40,000 people waiting to have their claims heard, which means that if you come in today and make a refugee claim, you probably won't be able to get your hearing for two years or so. The longer it takes for the hearing, of course, the more difficult it is for anyone to decide to send them home, even when these people are not considered refugees. It's almost impossible to do so.
Take the two Tamil ships that arrived, one three years ago and one two years ago. There were some 500 asylum seekers, and to my knowledge, fewer than 20 have been sent home. The rest are still here and will be here probably for another year or two. They're not going home. You can be sure of that.
In 1989 when new refugee legislation was being prepared to address this new phenomenon of people suddenly arriving in Canada claiming to be refugees, Lloyd Axworthy was the minister, and he assigned a professor from the University of Ottawa, Edward Ratushny, to do a study and make recommendations on how Canada should handle this problem.
Ratushny recommended that in order for any quasi-judicial tribunal to be able to function properly, it had to ensure that not everybody had access to it. If you give complete and non-regulated access to any quasi-judicial tribunal, Ratushny said, it's bound to fail. It can't handle the volume and will be overwhelmed by numbers. Of course, that's exactly what's happened with the refugee board.
The legislation in 1989 indeed did include Ratushny's recommendation, which was to clear out very swiftly at the front end of the process anyone coming from a safe third country. There was no point in giving them protection. They already had it in the country they were coming from and, therefore, in Ratushny's view, they should not be eligible to apply, as they would just clutter up the system. He of course was right, but as usual he was not heeded.
Three days before the legislation came in that would have included the provisions for the government to decide the countries that were safe, Barbara McDougall, the then minister, announced that the legislation would come into effect but without enacting the safe country provisions. This of course meant that the board was already running into serious problems.
Two years later, in 1991, the number of asylum seekers coming into Canada had gone up to 67,000. A couple of years later, it was 55,000, then 58,000. It's continued at a very high level ever since because there are no means of screening out quickly those who are evidently not needing our protection.
The UN convention on refugees imposes one fundamental obligation on its signatories, and that is not to send those back to a country where there is fear of persecution. The convention does not mention asylum seekers. Why? It's because, of course, they're not refugees. They are looking for refugee status and claiming to be refugees, but many of them, as we know—60% at least, via our own IRB—are considered to be not genuine.
With this obligation in mind, surely it's Canada's right as a sovereign country to designate countries as safe for refugees. There is no point at all in not designating all of the European Union countries as safe for refugees. They have full protection through the European human rights tribunals.
The United States is a safe country for refugees. Its acceptance rate is very high, and it has have professional judges deciding these cases. Our safe country agreements should be reinforced there. The United States was not keen to sign that agreement and made sure that if anyone had even a distant relative in Canada, if they appeared at the border, the safe third country provision would not apply. The U.S. authorities knew that 50%, 60%, maybe 80% of the people coming from the United States were coming through the States into Canada to join relatives here.
Such a designation would not be in violation of the UN convention in any way. All of the European countries have safe countries and safe third country provisions. They all do, otherwise they wouldn't be able to cope with the volumes of people pouring into their countries. Germany in 1993 had 493,000 asylum seekers. The following year they changed their constitution to deal with it. We still haven't been able to make any changes in our law, in any attempt to reform it.
I support the bill that is now before Parliament, because in my view it is a modest attempt to make some changes. I don't think it's going to work, quite frankly, because we still don't thoroughly screen out people coming from Europe or the United States. They'll be allowed to make a claim. They don't have the right to appeal to the new appeals section of the board, but they do have the right to seek leave to appeal to the Federal Court.
The timeframes that have been set for them, I think, will be challenged by the lawyers and perhaps by the charter. I don't think they're going to work.