Thank you.
I will move the motion that I've given notice for:
That, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration undertake a study to review the adequacy of the federal government’s response to the impact of increased asylum seekers crossing into Canada from the United States; that the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship appear before the Committee for the purposes of this study; that this study be comprised of at least two meetings; and that this study be completed by no later than August 3, 2018.
I am moving this motion today because evidence has mounted that Canada's immigration system has taken a marked departure from the principle of being run in a planned, orderly, and compassionate manner. As parliamentarians, we have a responsibility to hold the government to account on this point for the sake of those seeking to come to Canada, newcomers to Canada, and Canadian taxpayers. I ask for your support on this motion. I will lay out my evidence for the statement I have just made, as well as the rationale as to why it's critical that we have these meetings as soon as possible.
I think that regardless of our political affiliation, I would hope we would agree that managing a compassionate and humanitarian system means ensuring that Canada is prioritizing the world's most vulnerable in our resettlement efforts. I also hope we would all agree that it means that those coming into Canada are encouraged and supported to integrate into the social and economic fabric of our country. This means ensuring that newcomers learn one of Canada's official languages so that they do not experience long-term inclusion issues; are able to overcome any trauma they experienced in fleeing their home countries; and are able to acquire skills, find gainful employment, and contribute as productive members of our community.
In all of these points, as parliamentarians we cannot allow long-term reliance on social supports to become the norm or an acceptable path for humanitarian immigrants. We can also not allow our humanitarian immigration system to become overburdened by those who will never have their asylum claims validated. If this happens, we will see an increased strain on Canada's social supports and decreased tolerance for immigration in Canada writ large. This is something that, again, regardless of political stripe, I would hope none of us on this committee would desire to occur.
In the context of a country with a generous social welfare system like Canada's, it takes a high degree of planning and budgeting to make this happen. It takes data and constant monitoring of the processes related to the selection, screening, and then support of humanitarian immigrants. The instinct of some of you, especially those of you in the Liberal caucus, might be to become defensive and suggest that Canada isn't at risk of this happening, that there is nothing wrong with Canada's system at present. But before you do, I would ask you to take a step back and reflect on some of the following data points. I ask you to do so with open minds. Parliamentarians do not have government appointments, and as such have a primary responsibility to hold the government to account for its decisions, regardless of political affiliation.
I will start my argument by providing some important context on the capacity of our system to successfully respond to the issue that is occurring at Roxham Road. Since early 2016, Canada has resettled nearly 50,000 Syrian refugees. This was a massive initiative that was well above the usual year-over-year humanitarian immigration numbers that Canada plans for in its immigration levels plan. In testimony to our committee in 2016, many people from the Syrian refugee cohort and those related to the settlement efforts stated that Syrian refugees came from primarily rural agrarian backgrounds, had literacy challenges in their first language, suffered trauma from war, did not have large amounts of formal education, and as such would face more integration challenges in the context of Canada's developed economy than previous cohorts of humanitarian immigrants.
In short, this cohort of people have a lot of complex needs that require intense planning and budgeting to ensure that they successfully integrate into Canada. In 2016 this committee studied the needs of resettlement service providers following the Syrian initiative and heard from provincial and municipal leaders that the lack of additional resettlement services funding, or any transfers to the provincial health and education system, made it difficult to adequately plan for or monitor the integration of the Syrian refugee cohort into Canadian society.
Indeed, today federal Auditor General Michael Ferguson has expressed his extreme concern in the government's failure to provide transparent progress reports on the integration of Syrian refugees into Canada. We have no data on how many are employed, how many have learned one of Canada's official languages, or the cost of providing social welfare programs to these nearly 50,000 people. The last time the minister provided an update to this committee on this issue was well over a year ago, and at that time he stated that 90% of the government-sponsored Syrian refugees were unemployed. Since then, the one-year funding provided by the federal government has expired. Based on this data that he provided, it is reasonable to suggest that many of the Syrian cohort will be drawing income from provincial social welfare programs. Further, many IRCC staff were at the time redirected to processing applications of Syrian refugees.
This context is important to consider in relation to the motion at hand, because prior to the influx of asylum seekers who had already reached the United States, Canada's system was struggling to adapt to the processing and integration needs of the Syrian cohort.
You don't have to take my word for it. Many of you heard from resettlement services providers and from Syrian refugees themselves at this committee when we studied the issue in 2016. Then January 2017 happened. In January 2017, the Americans issued an executive order related to their immigration policy. In an unprompted response that has since been described by a National Post columnist as being “holier than thou”, Canada's Prime Minister sent out a tweet that prompted tens of thousands of people to use a loophole in an agreement we have with the United States, which prevents asylum claim shopping, to illegally cross the border from the United States into Canada and subsequently claim asylum.
Again, you don't have to take my word on this. Media reports have shown the flurry of memos between embassies and the IRCC showing that this tweet was viewed as an open invitation to come to Canada. The number of people who have made this journey since January 2017 is 31,377. This is the highest level of unplanned immigration in recent Canadian history. It is unplanned because it blows the government's predictions for asylum seekers, outlined in its immigration levels plan, out of the water. In no scenario presented to Parliament or to this committee has the Minister or the Prime Minister laid out a scenario in which there is a plan for tens of thousands of people to enter Canada via this method. Since then, we as parliamentarians have no idea how much the government at the federal level has spent on tents, RCMP and CBSA overtime, transport, accommodation, news staff, consultants, ministerial travel, and on and on related to the crisis at Roxham Road.
We also have no idea how much the provincial governments have been required to spend on welfare, subsidized housing, emergency housing, food banks, education, day care, health care, and other costs related to those crossing at Roxham Road. We also have no idea how much the government is planning to have to spend on the eventual removals of those found to have invalid asylum claims. We know that the Immigration and Refugee Board is at a crisis point with internal memos suggesting that it will take years for someone who enters Roxham Road today even to have their refugee claim heard, which make calculating the long-term impact on federal and provincial social program budgets that much more difficult.
We as parliamentarians have received no information from the government on the expected needs of those crossing at Roxham Road. Do they speak one of Canada's official languages? Are they capable of working? Do they have skill sets that will meet the labour market demands of Canada's economy, and if so, will they settle in regions where those skills are needed? How is the government planning to ensure that this will happen? Will this impact other immigration streams?
We also have no information from the government on how many people it expects to illegally cross into Canada from the United States and subsequently claim asylum in the coming years and months. Rather, it has begun to use language that normalizes having over 1,000 people enter Canada this way per month, which is an exceptionally large increase from the numbers in recent history. For example, the Minister recently tweeted out statistics that show an increase in June numbers year over year from 2017 to 2018 and suggested that this was a decrease in demand. At this point, it is becoming apparent to me that the government has done little analysis on the entire issue. This is even more concerning because the government has not expressed any desire to explore legislative options to close the loophole in the safe third country agreement, suggesting that it is content to allow the demand on our system to become a permanent phenomenon, and indeed today I would suggest that the government has made a policy decision to normalize this situation.
I know that we all diverge on policy approaches with regard to the safe third country agreement, and I respect that. I will, however, say that I find it unacceptable that we are allowing people who have already reached the United States of America, one of the freest democracies in the world regardless of who occupies the White House, to claim asylum in Canada via a loophole in an agreement that by the government's own admission and by the Prime Minister's own admission in the House of Commons is still valid. I believe that by failing to close the loophole in the safe third country agreement, the government has made a formal policy decision to normalize having tens of thousands of people illegally crossing the border from the United States, and this has not been reflected in any immigration levels plan or formal budgetary process.
Regardless of how you feel about this decision, as to whether or not it is right, it has been made, and Canadians now need information on how much this will cost them and how people will be integrated into Canada. The situation has been occurring for over a year and a half. It is irresponsible for us as parliamentarians to allow the government to allocate piecemeal hundreds of millions of dollars outside of the budgetary cycle when it has known for 18 months that this is an issue and it hasn't addressed it in a federal budget or estimates process. It is irresponsible for us to allow it to spend this money, piecemeal or not, without understanding the assumptions the government has based these decisions on as I've outlined above. It is irresponsible for us to allow it to spend this money without discussing the opportunity cost of this decision. The federal government is already running a deficit of billions of dollars, and this allocation of funds could be used to increase the processing efficacy of other immigration streams for those seeking to enter the country legally via the PSR stream, family reunification, and others methods. These funds could also be used to provide social supports for Canadians.
Canadians need this information, because if they don't have it, then they will lose faith in the ability of the government to run an immigration system that benefits the country and those who are most in need. They also need this information right now before hundreds of people are turned out of homeless shelters on August 9 and before the House sits again in September. We're months away from the estimates process, and the government is making significant unbudgeted funding announcements without any of this information being provided to Parliament while it knows that this has been an issue for over 18 months.
I would like to thank Mr. Maguire for requesting that the Parliamentary Budget Officer conduct a system-wide review of the federal government's expenditures on the Roxham Road crisis, and it's my understanding that the Parliamentary Budget Officer has agreed to this request. Given that departments like the CBSA and IRCC have been late or delinquent on questions raised by parliamentarians in committee in this regard, I would also like the opportunity to ask the Minister whether he intends to direct his department to fully comply with the PBO's inquiry.
We also need to learn how the government intends to prioritize those crossing at Roxham Road after they have already reached the United States, in the context of the ethnic cleansing happening to the Rohingya people, persecuted minorities languishing in UN refugee camps in the Middle East, and so on. There are many demands on us from agencies such as UNHCR to take more government-sponsored refugees. Now that the government has made a policy decision to normalize what is happening at Roxham Road and not to close the loophole in the safe third country agreement, we need to understand how this is going to affect other resettlement requests of our system.
We also need to understand directly from the provinces what their needs are and what their expectations are for federal government support before we can assess whether or not the federal government's response is adequate. Based on what happened in Winnipeg on Friday, I don't think the government's line that this is a team effort and that it expects the provinces to just pick it up without understanding this data and seeing a long-term plan reflected in both the levels plan and our budgetary process is going to cut it any longer. In fact, I think it's irresponsible with regard to both the people who are entering Canada and Canadian taxpayers.
According to a recent poll published in a Canadian newspaper, 70% of Canadians are saying that they don't feel that the federal government has an adequate plan to address this issue. We need these meetings now, not in September, and the Minister needs to be here. Asking these questions of a government and ensuring that it has a plan that addresses all of these unanswered questions is the most Canadian thing that any of us sitting around this table can do.
Look, Canada is unique in that all of our political parties support immigration. We diverge on how that happens, but the reality is that in Canada in the last 18 months we've seen a marked departure from normal immigration processes, and the government has made—by default or by ignoring it or whatever—a significant policy change by refusing to look at legislative options to close the loophole in the safe third country agreement. #WelcometoCanada has changed our humanitarian immigration system. We do not have any of the data that I have outlined here, and that fact is starting to bear very negative fruit.
With regard to all of the concerns I have raised, we can differ on policy options, but the government needs to respond to these questions now. In the last few days I've seen some really disappointing things come out of the Prime Minister's Office, such as calling an Ontario cabinet minister who is in charge of women's services alt right because she's asking this question. Look, we can disagree on policy. We're not disagreeing on whether there should be immigration. We're just asking questions on how the government intends to do it. It's not going to cut it for us to meet again at the end of September, because we know this Minister is going to have to commit a significant amount of money to the provinces in order to just cover some of the concerns that are being raised by Mayor John Tory or Mayor Watson.
As parliamentarians, we don't hold executive positions in government. Our job is to hold the government to account. I know it might be difficult for Liberal colleagues to do that, but I ask, in order to get back to what we're supposed to be doing with the immigration committee, that we have the Minister here and that we really subject him to some rigour on these questions. The government's response even in just providing information has been completely inadequate. We also now need to hear from the provincial governments. Many of our provincial governments are in significant deficit situations. Many of our provincial governments are in a position of having had to raise taxes.
I'm really worried about that 70% figure, because it is something that could easily translate into a loss of social licence in Canada for our humanitarian immigration system. As someone who has argued for the government to bring refugees to Canada, I don't want to see that happen. I would hope in the next week that at a minimum we could have the Minister here, that he would comport himself with dignity and with the respect of parliamentarians to answer some of these questions, and that there would be the opportunity for our provincial counterparts to do the same. Then, over the summer and over the fall session, we could start to hold the government to account for the need to have a more cohesive plan to address these issues.
I don't find it fun to go out in front of a microphone in a scrum after the Minister goes out every second week and announces $50 million here and $100 million there. I had to respond to the Liberals' plan, to the government's plan, to “triage” people who had crossed at Roxham Road and to put them on a bus to Toronto, and, now that the homeless shelter capacity in Toronto is oversubscribed, to put them on a bus to parts unknown. These are people's lives. There are reports coming out of the IRB about it taking years for claims to be processed. That's wrong for so many reasons. A quick and efficient IRB process, if the demand on the system were lower, I think would prevent some of this from happening, but the reality is that the government has made a policy decision that is going to keep the demand on IRCC really high for a long period of time. We have to ask ourselves as parliamentarians whether appointing and setting up an entire expanded bureaucracy for people, many of whom will not have valid asylum claims, is the best use of taxpayer money. I might argue no, and others might argue yes, but we need to have that discussion if the government is not going to close the loophole in the agreement, which is where we are. I also think that type of a system is really detrimental to people who have come to Canada, because how do you put down roots and get a job if it's going to take seven years for you to have your asylum claim processed?
We've had the Minister before committee before. I questioned him for four hours in the committee of the whole, and we still don't have a plan. We need to do this right now. We can't wait for two and a half months. Through you, Mr. Chair, and to all of my colleagues regardless of political stripe, let's at least get the Minister here and let's at least have our provincial counterparts sit down so that we can start doing our job as parliamentarians and fixing the crisis situation we're in right now.
Thank you.