Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 26th, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Good morning. This is the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, meeting number 49, on Tuesday, May 26. This meeting is televised. We are here today to study the main estimates.

We have as our guest this morning, the Honourable Chris Alexander, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, and his colleagues. Mr. Alexander will be with us for the first hour and his colleagues will be with us for the second hour.

Mr. Minister, I trust you have a presentation to make to us.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration]

I do.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the chance to be here again. I apologize for the early hour, but I must say you all look fantastic underneath the Fathers of Confederation who are watching us all.

I'm delighted to be here today to present my department's main estimates for the fiscal year 2015-16, which is already upon us, obviously. I want to focus on some of the notable allocations contained therein that will help our department meet its goals.

I am very pleased to report that CIC's main estimates have an overall increase of $79.3 million from the previous year. As you know, immigration plays a key role in Canada's long term prosperity and our competitiveness on the international stage. Without strong and targeted immigration, we would not be the Canada we are today, and we would not have all of the opportunities and economic growth we enjoy.

The government is continuing to manage Canada's immigration system in an efficient and responsible way—making it faster, more flexible and more responsive to our country's changing needs, while protecting the safety and security of Canadians. This year we expect to introduce new measures aimed at making the system even faster and more flexible.

To ensure our immigration system is meeting the needs of Canada's current business landscape, as you know, this past year we introduced a new immigrant investor venture capital pilot program. The introduction of this program also required the elimination of the long-standing backlog of applications in the federal immigrant investor and federal entrepreneur programs, legacy programs we've had since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively.

Eliminating this backlog of applications will allow the department to focus resources on immigration programs bringing maximum benefit to our economy, but to refund the balance of approximately 9,000 fees for returned applications, we are requesting $16.5 million in additional funding. I think this literally reflects the fact that we're able to refund faster than was initially anticipated.

Of course, a crucial part of our immigration system was rolled out this past January with the successful launch of the new Express Entry system. Express Entry is already proving to provide significant benefits for our country and newcomers. That is because we are only selecting immigrants who are best positioned to succeed, instead of those who are first in line with their application.

For the first time we have the opportunity of comparing immigration candidates before even receiving and processing their application. Also, employers can now meet their labour needs directly via this system, when there are no available Canadians or permanent residents already in Canada to do the job.

Let me underline that point. For employers who have sought recruits across Canada, who have tried to find someone for a specialized job across Canada and who cannot find that person in the country, there is the possibility to get a labour market impact assessment free of charge without the $1,000 fee and to use that labour market impact assessment in the context of express entry to ensure an immigrant is recruited to do that job. Some employers have already taken advantage of this.

Applicants invited to apply for permanent residence under the new system can expect processing times of just six months in the majority of cases. This is a significant improvement over the former system, of course, which took several years in many cases to process applications. We've started to see the impact of express entry in very concrete form. In April, the first three landed permanent residents to Canada through express entry joined some of us in Toronto to share their experience. Two of them had been students in Canada and gone through the Canadian experience class; the other came through the federal skilled work program.

Just last week two more express entry permanent residents in British Columbia were part of an event that we did at a very exciting business in Gastown, in Vancouver. One of them was the first landed permanent resident to be nominated under the provincial nomination stream. I pay particular tribute to British Columbia in this respect, because they've started to use provincial nominations with an express entry more than any other province so far, although Nova Scotia is doing quite well for their size too. It's clear that express entry is successful in serving labour market needs of employers and provinces alike.

To continue the success, our main estimates request funding of $5.7 million in 2015-16 to ensure we can meet our six months or less service standard for processing applications. Zoe, the Irish woman who was with us in Vancouver, a software engineer, had been processed in two weeks. That is an extraordinary record that I don't think we expect to imitate in every case, but we really do want 80% or more of express entry candidates to be processed in six months or less. This funding will let us achieve that.

The department's main estimates for this year also include an increase of $15 million for the electronic travel authorization, eTA, which we're implementing under the Canada-United States perimeter security and economic competitiveness action plan.

As you know, Canada's electronic travel authorization, or eTA program, will require citizens from countries who do not normally need a visa to obtain an online authorization before applying to Canada. Of course, our neighbours in the United States—who have already successfully implemented a similar system in their country—will be exempt from this new eTA requirement.

Canada is making every effort to ensure that eTA does not inconvenience affected travellers. On the contrary, we want it to facilitate more legitimate travel by tourists, visitors, families. Applications for eTA will be made online through the CIC website. The eTA application process is quick and easy, at a low cost of only $7 Canadian, and will often be granted within minutes. It will also be valid for up to five years. As we prepare to launch eTA, this funding will help support program integrity measures, communications to prospective visitors, and implementation support to ensure a smooth transition to the new system.

To further help facilitate travel and trade to Canada through the eTA, our budget this year, economic action plan 2015, is allocating $12.4 million over five years and $1.1 million in ongoing funding. With this new funding we will work to expand eTA eligibility to low-risk travellers from Brazil, Mexico, Romania, and Bulgaria, to be launched after the initial eTA initiative has been fully implemented in March of next year.

What does that mean? We're proposing to extend eTA not just to those countries outside of North America that already are free of the visa requirement, but also to some very large countries—Brazil, Mexico—as well as our two remaining partners in Europe who are not yet visa free: Romania and Bulgaria.

The entry/exit initiative is another commitment with the United States under the perimeter security and economic competitiveness action plan. Under this initiative Canada is developing a system to exchange land traveller information with the U.S. to establish a record of land entry into one country as a record of exit from the other.

It seems common sense that we would record entry into North America in the United States and have that record of entry and exit shared between partners that are as close as we are with our main economic partners, but to date we haven't had this system, so entry/exit is extremely important. This increase of $1.4 million, mostly reprofiled funds since 2013-14, will be used for IT system requirements and to develop reporting tools and governance with our partners. Funding will also be used for upfront residency checks, analysis, ongoing reporting, and corporate support.

The passport program was transferred, as you know, to Citizenship and Immigration in July 2013. Our main estimates are increasing by $52 million due to changes in the planned volume of passports as well as adjustments to the passport business plan. Because the amount is going up, I think it means the number of passports is going down slightly.

In the 2013 Speech From the Throne, the Government of Canada committed to contributing to the success of the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan American Games that will be held in Toronto this summer.

CIC's role is to ensure the applications for entry into Canada by athletes and spectators are processed in a timely manner while we continue to uphold the safety and security of Canadians. I can confirm that our work in this regard is very advanced.

Our commitment is to waive the application fees for athletes who require visas or temporary resident permits, which will result in approximately 7,780 multiple entry visas. Our main estimates are increasing by $1.6 million to process these applications.

Finally, there is an allocation for $20.6 million in additional funding to meet our obligations under the Canada-Quebec Accord on Immigration. As you know, this accord gives the Government of Quebec responsibility to administer settlement and integration services, with an annual grant from the Government of Canada.

Mr. Chair, our government is committed to improving the immigration system by reducing backlogs, improving processing times and meeting labour market needs.

I am happy to answer any question the committee may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Minister.

There will, indeed, be questions.

Mr. Leung is first.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Minister, for appearing this early in the morning.

I wish to go a little bit into our Canadian immigration successes of recent times. Immigration plays a very important role in Canada's long-term prosperity and our competitiveness in the international marketplace. I am an immigrant who came here initially as an international student in the 1960s. While the previous government under the Liberals had cut immigration by 32% in the first five years in office, we have welcomed the highest sustained level of immigration in Canadian history.

From what you have told us here today, we're moving into this express entry system. The express entry system will move away from the cyclical temporary immigration designed to meet short-term needs and to redouble our efforts to permanent immigration that will attract skilled workers who will make real contributions to the Canadian economy.

How do you see this express entry truly benefiting Canada in terms of meeting our labour manpower requirements with our economic needs? Are all of our immigration streams going to be facilitated through this express entry? Interestingly enough, the way the program is designed in express entry, there's a computerized background to it which we call...you know, when you want to search for a record, in computer science there's a technique called bubble sort. The bubble that is the greatest, the best, rises to the top at a much faster rate, whereas compared with the old sequential or random search method, you don't get that type of efficiency.

Perhaps you could go into this aspect of our new system.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Let's look at the context in which we're rolling out express entry. What has changed for Canada in the field of immigration?

First, we have reduced backlogs. They're not totally gone. We still have a parents and grandparents program where we've reduced the backlog enormously, but it's not gone. On spousal sponsorship there's still some work to do. On the humanitarian program there is work to do. But in our economic programs, we have eliminated our legacy backlogs. The system was already working faster, attracting more people, and comparing very favourably with the United States, where it's very hard to become an immigrant reliably in anything less than a decade, depending on the stream, and certainly, comparing with our European and Asian partners that don't have permanent economic immigration programs on the same scale.

Second, Canada's economic fundamentals, since the crisis especially, have called attention to the strength of our economy. We have created 1.2 million new jobs. We have had a relatively low unemployment rate. We have had growth when other countries have had anemic growth at best, and some have even slipped back into recession. That has meant more people are interested in coming to Canada for the size of our population than probably ever before.

What does express entry do? Instead of just obliging us to process applications as they arrive, it allows us to look at this larger group of people who are interested in coming to Canada and evaluate them on the basis of merit. How do we decide who comes to Canada as an economic immigrant? We have always operated on the basis of merit in one way or another. We've tried to select people based on their skills and their suitability for what the Canadian economy needs, and since the early 1960s we've had a point system. Now we're able to apply the point system in an updated, modernized form to a large population of interested candidates, find out early on before the application is submitted who ranks highest, and give priority to the people who rank highest.

I think that is an extremely defensible approach. It's one that Canadians strongly support, but it's also very attractive for immigrants because the best ones will benefit, the ones with the best education, the best skills, the right age, and the language profile for Canada based on our point system. For those who don't make it, we'll see how close they are and what they need to do to rank higher next time. It's not only faster and more flexible, but it is also fair in that there are objective criteria by which people, as you say, rise to the top. It also helps us continue justifying large-scale immigration. As you say, 280,000 this year is our target. We've only had an immigration level that high half a dozen times, I think, in Canadian history, once earlier under our government, once under Diefenbaker in the late 1950s, and then in that formative period before World War I when we had very high immigration under Prime Minister Borden.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Okay. I was hoping to come to another point.

Minister, I see there's also some money allocated for refugee reform. On January 7, 2015, you responded to the UNHCR's latest appeal for 100,000 spaces by expanding our commitment to help Syrian refugees and resettling an additional 10,000 Syrians over the next three years. This brings Canada's total commitment to helping Syrian refugees up to 11,300, after successfully meeting an initial commitment to resettle 1,300 Syrians. As well, you also pledged to resettle an additional 3,000 Iraqi refugees by the end of 2015. This will bring Canada's total Iraqi resettlement community to 23,000 refugees by the end of 2015. Perhaps you wish to comment on that.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Yes, I had the opportunity to meet with our sponsorship agreement holders in Winnipeg yesterday and to see the office in Winnipeg where Citizenship and Immigration processes private sponsorship applications for refugees from around the world. It's a very impressive operation and there's a lot of enthusiasm on the part of these private sponsors. I think the support for the Syrian initiative is growing. Let me give you an update in that respect.

We met the target we had set for 2013-14 earlier this year, but already we have 3,336 Syrian refugees that have received Canada's protection. Some 526 of them are government assisted, and fully 1,166 are privately sponsored. This does include the 1,300 from our previous commitment, but you can see the numbers are rising beyond 1,300 very quickly. Eleven are blended visa office referred cases; 110 are dependents abroad, and 1,523 are asylum seekers. More have been resettled as refugees than have come as asylum seekers, and the number of applications is many thousands now.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Minister.

We have Madame Blanchette-Lamothe, and then Mr. Sandhu.

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for being with us this morning.

Minister, your opening remarks focused on certain categories of immigration that are beneficial to our country's economy, and that is very important. However, I would like to talk about a category you did not mention this morning, and which is in my opinion as beneficial to Canadian society and our economy in a certain way. I am talking about family reunification.

I would like to know precisely what there is in the current main estimates to improve family reunification application processing times, in all categories.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

We have nothing in the budget in regard to that challenge but we have not lost sight of it, quite the opposite. It is part of our priorities for this year. Why has there been an increase in backlogs and processing times over the past few months? Unfortunately that is because the number of family reunification applications, especially for the sponsorship of spouses, was far greater than we expected. So we have to find resources to process a larger number of applications than we had forecast.

In order to meet this challenge, we determined rather quickly at the end of last year that work permits had to be issued more rapidly to the spouses whose applications were still being processed. This year we are trying to find new resources in order to tackle those backlogs and see to it that the processing times for reunification cases and spousal sponsorship do not go beyond their current levels.

That said, we must not forget that sponsorship through the parents and grandparents program was enormously successful in the course of the last three years. We had to process 75,000 applications in three years, which was unprecedented in our history. The principle of family reunification remains absolutely essential in our programs.

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you.

That is indeed an essential immigration category. However, if it were a priority it seems to me that the budget that is being presented to us today would have allocated funds to it. The good intentions have to be accompanied by resources.

You referred to the parents and grandparents program. There have been a great many discussions to determine whether this is really a success or not. A lot of people who are not included in the figures cannot even apply. But we can set that issue aside since in my opinion it is not central to today's debate.

As opposed to what you seem to be saying, the 2015-2016 report on plans and priorities indicates a drop of 12 million dollars in budgets and staff. In addition, that decline is going to continue in the years to come. When we recognize that on the one hand there is a...

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

I'm sorry, I did not...

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I'm talking about the family reunification category.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

I see.

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Whether we are talking about spouses, children, parents or grandparents, the situation is concerning because some people wait for a very long time. For instance, the time required for processing sponsorship applications for the spouses of Canadian residents has gone from a few months to more than two years. However, you say that your objective is to see to it that these waiting periods do not increase further. I think the objective should be to reduce these processing times rather than maintain them. Not only do the estimates we are studying today contain nothing on this, but the 2015-2016 report on plans and priorities indicates a further decline in the budgets.

I think that my colleague Mr. Sandhu has more questions to ask on the family reunification categories, and so I am going to yield the floor to him.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Do you want him to comment first, or do you want to carry on?

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll carry on.

Thank you, Minister, for being here this morning.

I'm perplexed by the last statement you made. You said that your government is committed to improving the immigration system by reducing backlogs and improving processing times.

You've had nine years to do this. I remember back in 2005-06, the processing time for spousal applications was about three or four months. That was the top. I can attest to that because in 2003, I sponsored my own wife and it took three months. Nowadays, it's taking up to 16 or 17 months for some of the countries in Southeast Asia, and there are different times for other countries.

I have two questions. First, how can it be reducing backlogs when the actual times have gone up? Second, why is there a discrepancy? In some countries it's only two to four months, while in others it takes up to two or three years.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

First, congratulations. You were lucky. My wife took 18 or 19 months to come through the spousal sponsorship program, and that was in 2009-10, so yes, the number has gone up slightly, but why is that the case? There are three reasons.

Demand has outstripped our capacity to process. We project every year how many spouses, how many dependent children, how many parents and grandparents we expect to have coming into our programs. Sometimes the number of applications exceeds. That is what has contributed to this growing backlog, and we will attack it and we will bring it down. I think the reasonable time for the processing of spousal sponsorship cases should be much lower. We've shown across the board our ability to reduce backlogs. We will do it in this area as well.

What are the alternatives? To reduce other backlogs, we have eliminated them by legislation, or we have ranked and sorted them on the basis of merit. Obviously in the case of spouses, we're not going to do that.

Every application is important. Every application will be processed, but we need to find the resources to do it on the scale where it is required now. We are getting these applications because of the strength of our economic immigration program. Because of the strength of Canada's economy, people want to come here, and they want to come here with their spouses.

We also need to attack some of the vulnerabilities in the spousal program. There is an issue of marriage of convenience. There is an issue of forced marriage, which we're dealing with, we hope, through Bill S-7. There is an issue of fraud and misrepresentation in the spousal program.

As we have tightened up the integrity of other programs, we have seen some people—

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

We're going to have to wind up, Mr. Minister.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

—a small number who are trying to get to Canada for the wrong reasons trying to do so through the spousal program. We really want to make sure that doesn't happen.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Minister.

Mr. McCallum.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Minister, for being here.

I would also like to talk about processing times, and I'd like to start with some data from your own department.

If you take the average processing time in the first year we have data for, which is 2007, the second year of your government, and compare it with the latest 12 months, we see for parents and grandparents it has gone from 11 months to 68 months. For spouses, partners, and children—and I see this in my office very day—it has gone from 11 months to 19 months. For refugees, it has gone from 25 months to 29 months. For economic immigrants, it has gone up by several hundred per cent for the various kinds of skilled workers. For live-in caregivers it has gone from 23 months to 42 months. The two most favourable components are those for which the federal government has the least control: Quebec skilled workers at 19 months and provincial nominees at 15 months.

After nine years of government, I think you would agree this is a deplorable record, and you cannot every year for nine years in a row see demand go up unexpectedly. I think you have to take responsibility for the full nine years. It can't be an unexpected shock every single year.

How do you explain this deplorable record, and what do you propose to do about it?

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

First, those numbers are completely inaccurate. For refugees from Iraq and Syria, the fastest growing portion of our refugee population, on average, we are processing applications in less than one year. I heard that from sponsorship agreement holders yesterday. They are amazed by this performance. For caregivers, we are reforming the program. A backlog of 60,000 will be eliminated in only two years, cleaning up a record of Liberal neglect in this area that really needed to be dealt with—

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Excuse me, Minister. How can you say these numbers are completely inaccurate when they come from your own department?

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

I don't know which numbers you're cherry-picking from the website in 2013, or 2007, or 2008—