Mr. Chair, the Liberal government appears set on hiding significant changes to Canada's refugee determination system within an omnibus budget bill. The finance committee as we know, prior to the our recessing for the two-week break, wrote to the committee. In that letter, it clearly outlined that the finance committee would only be inviting the immigration committee to study part 4, division 15 of Bill C-97. What is explicitly omitted in that letter are the significant changes impacting the immigration refugee determination system. Mr. Chair, I think that's wrong. In fact, I think it's wrong that both of these immigration-related bills are stuck in a budget bill to begin with.
Bill C-97, as we know, contains a serious overhaul of how refugee claims will be handled in Canada. If the Liberals on the other side of the table and their colleagues in caucus and cabinet actually stood behind these changes, then I would have thought they'd be willing to have tabled this as a stand-alone piece of legislation so that it could be democratically debated and studied in our parliamentary system. Instead, it is clear that they lack the courage, frankly, to have these changes examined closely, in broad daylight, by Canadians and by parliamentarians.
If you look at the bill itself and what the implications are, I suppose I can't blame them. I wouldn't be proud to put this out there. I would want to hide under a rock and hope that nobody notices. I think that's what the government is trying to do.
If you look at the bill, you will see that eight pages of changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act are embedded within a 392-page omnibus budget bill. This is an affront to the Liberals' promise to end the use of omnibus legislation. It's an affront to the Liberals' promise of sunny ways and real change, and it's an affront to claims of “Canada's Back”. This is an affront, frankly, to our democracy.
To make matters worse, they are trying to limit the study of part 4, division 16 even further by having the finance committee explicitly omit the referral of this portion of the bill to this committee.
Mr. Chair, for us to understand the context of these changes, we need to examine the actions, arguably, and more importantly the inactions, that led the government to believe that these changes are necessary. We need to look back at how we got to a place where the government thinks these actions are appropriate and justified in some way. In the full context, what we see is a government that lacked the courage to stand up for the principles and values to which it claims to hold. It is now caving to political pressure from the increasing anti-refugee rhetoric that they have lacked action in addressing.
As I've been saying for some time now, Mr. Chair, this is a problem of the government's own making, and now they've doubled down on a terrible solution to it, or what they think is a solution.
First we have the problem of ramming through this significant legislation in an omnibus bill. In its 2015 election platform, the Liberal Party announced that there would be real change and sunny ways. On omnibus bills, here's what they said:
Stephen Harper has...used omnibus bills to prevent Parliament from properly reviewing and debating his proposals. We will change the House of Commons Standing Orders to bring an end to this undemocratic practice.
The Liberal government changed the Standing Orders, but the issue is that they don't seem to find it necessary to follow their own rules if it suits them otherwise. The new standing order, specifically section 69.1, states:
(1) In the case where a government bill seeks to repeal, amend or enact more than one act, and where there is not a common element connecting the various provisions or where unrelated matters are linked, the Speaker shall have the power to divide the questions, for the purposes of voting, on the motion for second reading and reference to a committee and the motion for third reading and passage of the bill. The Speaker shall have the power to combine clauses of the bill thematically and to put the aforementioned questions on each of these groups of clauses separately, provided that there will be a single debate at each stage.
This is the definition of an omnibus bill according to the third edition of House of Commons Procedure and Practice:
In general, an omnibus bill seeks to amend, repeal or enact several Acts, and is characterized by the fact that it is made up of a number of related but separate initiatives. To render an omnibus bill intelligible for parliamentary purposes, the Speaker has previously ruled that such a bill should have “one basic principle or purpose which ties together all the proposed enactments”.
It is my hope, of course, that the Speaker rules in favour of the point of order I made to this effect on April 10, 2019. I think when I left the House, he might have been bringing forward that ruling. I had to come to committee, so I am not quite sure what happened there.
Having said that, given the very serious nature of what is at stake should the government be able to ram through these changes, I feel it is my obligation as an elected official to raise this issue in every avenue I can. Despite these changes, the Liberal government has continued to ram through omnibus budget bills so large that former prime minister Harper's omnibus bills look like light bedtime reading. After all, who could forget last year's 582-page budget bill that snuck in the deferred prosecution agreement provisions that led to the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Prime Minister's top adviser, and an other minister's office adviser all stepping down and two cabinet ministers being thrown out of the Liberal caucus? We know that this government has utterly failed in its promise to stop the use of omnibus bills to ram through those measures and avoid debate. That is not new.
Then we have the problem of what led this government into thinking that these changes were the appropriate solution. On the refugee determination system, we know that it is not new that they failed to show leadership on this as well. In January 2017, following the election of President Trump in the United States, I was granted an emergency debate in the House of Commons to discuss what we are now expecting to see from our neighbours to the south, as the new president ran on a platform of xenophobia, fearmongering and aspects of blatant racism. He ran on a vow to immediately implement a Muslim travel ban. He vowed to slash refugee resettlement and he was going to build a wall. Latin Americans fleeing violence and persecution were “bad hombres”.
By the time this emergency debate occurred, Canadians knew the story of Seidu Mohammed. He and his friend Razak Iyal crossed from the United States irregularly into Emerson, Manitoba, on Christmas Eve. Seidu was outed as a bisexual man while on a trip to Brazil by his soccer coach as he pursued his dream of becoming a professional player. As Seidu is from Ghana, that put him in immediate and potentially life-threatening danger.
This is from Amnesty International's 2017-18 report:
Consensual same-sex sexual relations between men remained a criminal offence. LGBTI people continued to face discrimination, violence and police harassment as well as extortion attempts by members of the public. In February the Speaker of Parliament stated in the media that the Constitution should be amended to make homosexuality completely illegal and punishable by law. In July he also stated in the media that Ghana would not decriminalize homosexuality as this could lead to bestiality and incest becoming legalized.
Fearing for his life, Seidu fled from Brazil and made his way to the United States. He travelled through nine countries by plane, bus, boat and foot. He told us, when he appeared here in July last year, that he had seen people who had died attempting to make the same trip he had. When he arrived in the United States, he followed the rules and he made an asylum claim. He was put in maximum security detention. He told us how he spent nine months locked up with murderers, drug dealers and other felons. He did not have access to an attorney for his bail hearing. Aware of the policies that then president-elect Trump was championing, and based on his experience to that point with the United States asylum system, once finally released, Seidu felt he had no choice but to make his way to Canada.
The safe third country agreement prevented him from being able to arrive at an authorized border crossing. The safe third country agreement denied him the dignity and respect he deserved to be able to present himself at the border and say, “I need protection.”
Instead, he made his way north and paid a cab driver $400 to get him and Razak as close to the border as the driver could. In the dead of night, with a wind chill of -30°C, they walked through waist-deep snow across farmers' fields, trying to find Canada.
Were it not for a good Samaritan named Franco, both men would have died that night. Instead, they suffered only from severe frostbite. Seidu had to have all his fingers amputated.
It was clear to me during the emergency debate that the only real option in the face of the Trump presidency—which vowed to institute a Mexican travel ban, to build a wall to stop asylum seekers from entering and to dramatically reduce any refugee resettlement, which gave a safe space for white nationalism to grow —was for Canada to suspend the safe third country agreement. Instead, the Liberal government opted to do nothing. There was nothing to see here, no need to take any action. In fact, at the end of January, the Prime Minister vowed, now famously tweeted:
To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada
I was proud of that tweet. I thought it was another thing that the Prime Minister so famously espouses: #RealChange. I thought, “Good on him for standing up.”
I thought that meant that asylum seekers would be treated with dignity and allowed to arrive at our borders to make their claims, and that we would stand up and speak out against the unacceptable policies being enacted in the United States. However, like so much of this government's talk, it was just that: talk.
There would be no action, and there would be no change—just a tweet—so I continued to raise the issue both in the committee and in the House. This government ignored me and the experts, to its own detriment, as it continued to refuse to show leadership.
The government members of this committee continually and in public voted to suspend debate on my motions to study the impact that these asylum claims would have at the IRB. They lacked the courage to examine the issue out of fear that it would make their government look bad and might force the government to take action. However, they also lacked the courage to stand behind their inaction, so they didn't vote the motion down, but hid it, voting instead to adjourn debate time and again.
It wasn't until August that the government even began acknowledging that there was something happening, that there was a significant increase in irregular crossings into Quebec at Roxham Road, primarily by Haitian nationals who were living in the United States, were in fear that the Trump administration was ending temporary protected status for them and were coming to Canada to claim asylum.
The Liberal solution? Just have the military throw up a tent city to temporarily shelter them. Move some of them to Toronto and Cornwall. Stay the course of doing nothing to address the border situation.
Then, in the fall of 2017, the Liberals decided that the best course of action to deter irregular border crossings wasn't to eliminate the incentive to do that, that is, to suspend the safe third country agreement so that asylum claimants could arrive at an authorized border crossing to make a claim. Instead, it made more sense to send government MPs to the United States to speak with communities to try to convince them that it wasn't worth trying to come here.
They also sent the minister to Nigeria to attempt to dissuade Nigerians from entering Canada to transit through the U.S. on visitor visas.
What Liberal government approach is complete without a task force or a period of consultation? Certainly not this one.
Also in the fall of 2017, the government announced that the ad hoc intergovernmental task force on irregular migration would finish with 20,593 asylum claims made by individuals crossing irregularly into Canada out of the total of 50,390 inland asylum claims—about 41% of all claims. The numbers would fluctuate, but the trend of increased asylum claimants crossing irregularly would continue.
The lack of political will to lead on this issue and take the necessary steps to actually back up—