Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 19th, 2018

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Right.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

—but your department was preparing submissions in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Which is it? Were you not aware of what your department was preparing—

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

I am aware—

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

—or were you not being straight with this committee?

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

No, no. I'm answering your question. The response was based on what we were able to do at the time. What we were able to do at the time was redeploy resources. I attended the case processing centre in Montreal and saw first-hand the immigration officers who were pulled from other parts of the country to come and help meet the increased demand in Montreal because of the Lacolle border. That's an example of redeploying existing resources.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

In your response to a question from a Liberal MP, you suggested to the committee that handling the illegal border crossings could be handled within your budget, yet the supplementaries and the budget from a few weeks ago are asking for hundreds of millions of dollars more. I don't understand how you could suggest to the committee that you were going to work internally to handle it.

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

What I was referring to at the time was our ability to meet the influx at the time, and we were able to do that. As I said, in the Complexe Guy-Favreau in Montreal, we went from having a few eligibility hearings a day to needing a much.... The demand just went through the roof—

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

There were over 7,000 in July and August alone when you visited, Minister, at that one crossing.

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Some of those folks were receiving eligibility hearings at the border, but a lot of them were being sent to Montreal because we just couldn't process all of them at the border. In order to make sure that we met and eliminated that backlog, we redeployed immigration officers from other parts of Quebec and Canada to Montreal, and we created more space. We used more office space and we had more interviews, and that's why we were able to eliminate the 6,000-person backlog in terms of the eligibility hearings. That's an example of—

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Minister, when your deputy said that there was an urgent need to revisit the safe third country act and your department was suggesting costs of up to $3 billion, including social costs out to 2021, you were telling this committee that it could be handled by moving internally or being nimble. I would suggest to you that your department was preparing major budget submissions that contradicted your evidence to this committee.

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

I would suggest that you're conflating two different things. You're conflating our ability as a department to meet what, at the time, was an unusual influx of asylum seekers with the downstream costs projected over the next I don't know how many years to provinces, to social programs, and to—

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Minister, you've acknowledged that the provinces will bear the social assistance. There's a federal health interim and there have been increases to that, but fixing the gap in the safe third country agreement would save the provinces from this cost of up to $3 billion. Yet, in September, after visiting the Montreal border crossing, you said in the House that the safe third country agreement is working “fantastically well for Canada”.

How is that?

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

I'll tell you why I said that.

I continue to believe that the safe third country agreement actually has been really good for Canada, because it allows both countries to better handle asylum seekers. By that I mean that it is supported by the United Nations. The principle behind the safe third country agreement is that an asylum seeker, seeking asylum in either Canada or the United States, should not engage in asylum shopping by going from Canada to the United States or vice versa. In terms of the number of people who present themselves at a port of entry in both countries—

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Minister, if it's working fantastically well, why were you, Mr. Rodriguez, and other members of your caucus going down and speaking at the University of Minnesota and other places, discouraging people from coming—

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I'm afraid I need to end that round.

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Because those people are crossing between ports of entry.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you.

Ms. Kwan, go ahead for seven minutes.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you to the minister and his staff for coming to the committee today.

I have a number of different areas. Let me start with the resettlement services.

Budget 2018 was just tabled. The government, or the minister more specifically, back in the summer of 2017, would have received a letter from the B.C. School Trustees Association. They called on the federal government to provide increased, predictable, and stable funding to enable boards of education to provide essential support services for immigrant families and students. They noted that the funding for settlement workers in the school program and language instruction for newcomers to Canada continues to decrease in the face of rising immigration and immigrant counts.

In fact, for Vancouver they have noted a 17% cut, and this is not dissimilar.... Other school boards face the same thing as well. Langley, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey, Burnaby, etc. have all been faced with a budget crunch. In fact, the association for the school trustees stated that the lack of funding students are faced with is “alienating new families and, rather than [being included] in society, they become culturally isolated and disenfranchised and unable to realize their full potential.”

To that end, I would like to know whether budget 2018 has provided an increase to the SWIS program for these school districts.

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

I'll allow Mr. Manicom to answer that as he's in charge of settlement and integration services.

[David Manicom, Assistant Deputy Minister, Settlement and Integration, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Settlement funding in British Columbia for 2018-19 will be about 13% higher than it was three years ago. We've had increases across the board in most programs across the country. Certainly, in some individual programs, as the Syrian funding declined and other funding rose, there were adjustments. Overall, settlement funding in British Columbia is 13% higher than it was three years ago.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Specifically, though, I would like to know about the SWIS program.

If you don't have that data today for the committee to answer my question, then I would like to get the breakdown for the SWIS program and how much money was allocated for this program, not just in the Lower Mainland but across the country and on a per district basis. I would like to have this number dating back to when the federal government first took over the program from the provinces, so that we actually have a trend to illustrate whether the funding has increased or decreased. For 2018, I'm really interested in knowing whether or not that funding has increased. That was an urgent letter that was sent to the minister. We actually had a coalition meeting in the Lower Mainland at which some staff were present as well. They were going to meet with the Liberal caucus members around this. We're really hoping that there will be some good news for the school boards to try to manage and meet the demand and the needs. Nobody wants to see students and families fail in the resettlement process. The British Columbia School Trustee Association has indicated that this stands to alienate families. I think this is not an outcome we want.

[David Manicom]

We'd be happy to provide that information. The SWIS program is growing rapidly.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much.

Related to that, I received a copy of a letter from the Mayor of Toronto, who wrote to the Prime Minister around resettlement services. In particular, they noted that there is an increase, as we know, for immigrants and refugees. They say that currently their refugee population makes up 28% of the city's shelter system, which is well over the 10% expected in a typical year. In that letter, they ask for five specific things from the government. Most notably, it's all around increasing funding in support of refugees and immigrants, particularly in the area of affordable housing and shelter costs, and of course the integration program in terms of language training and so on.

I wonder if the minister can comment on the issue of the lack of affordable housing, particularly for newcomers. What is the government doing with respect to that?

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

I think the terminology here is really important. The folks that the mayor is referring to are asylum seekers. They're not refugees who have been determined, as far as I'm concerned—

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

I'm sorry, I'm going to interrupt for a minute. I know for a fact that this is not the case. I know that in Vancouver, for example, we have refugees who are not asylum seekers.