Thank you.
I think maybe we should just cut the baloney.
You are sitting here, Minister, in an invented position with bureaucrats who don't report to you, but who, nonetheless, have the misfortune of working with you. We are in the final days of a Parliament where we've seen your government purposefully go out—again, regardless of your opinion on the American president—and poke the Americans in the eye with #WelcomeToCanada, then allow 40,000-plus people to illegally enter the country and claim asylum, while saying that the safe third country agreement upholds...and then putting in place a permanent tent city, establishing bussing programs to the GTA and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on hotels for people who likely, by your own colleagues' admission, don't have valid asylum claims.
Then you proceeded to vilify any Canadian who said that maybe people who are in upstate New York have not been subject to the same level of persecution as somebody coming from northern Iraq. Maybe we shouldn't be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on hotels and creating pulls into our system that result in years-long backlogs.
You've vilified anybody. Your colleague, the Minister of Immigration, and the Prime Minister himself tried to score cheap political points with #WelcomeToCanada and then calling people un-Canadian and racist if they questioned this, which has inflamed tensions. You sat here and you blustered that we can't call it illegal, and then you proceeded to spend hundreds of millions more dollars on this program. You ramped up the rhetoric until we started to get close to an election.
Then, all of a sudden, we have division 16 in the budget implementation act that includes measures that have been routinely panned by virtually every immigration professional in Canada and not likely to hold up to any sort of court challenge whatsoever. Frankly, people will testify during these hearings that these are likely to result in even more of an administrative backlog in and burden on the system.
You and your colleague then proceeded to blame this situation on Stephen Harper. Good on you; you've got to do what you've got to do, being paid to be a communicator. But the reality is that you inherited a 10,000-case backlog, which of course had been reduced from a massive backlog at the IRB under a previous Liberal government. We're now at a 71,000-case backlog at the IRB according to the Auditor General.
You said that the system is fast. Fast is five years-plus to have a refugee claim hearing.
You also added to the backlog by lifting the visa requirement on Mexico when your government had not done a formal review of the system. We've now seen, I believe, over 1,500 claims from Mexico in the last two months. We know that the about 22% of those claims will be determined to be valid. The average case load right now, or the average level, is about 55%, so we know that many of these are bogus claims.
I believe that we should have a strong asylum system. We should be allowing people into the country who have legitimate needs from persecution, but you've managed this system like it's a joke for votes. Fast? Come on, really? It's Stephen Harper's fault? When we form government in October, we're going to have to clean up a 120,000-case backlog left by you.
Now, in the dying days of this Parliament, when you have seen polling showing that your mismanagement of this is unpopular because people are saying this isn't fair, all of a sudden you now throw something into an omnibus budget bill. I had a colleague on this committee who had to fight to get it parsed out to review here—we only had one piece of legislation come through this committee in the entirety of this Parliament—and it's not even going to work. It's probably illegal and unconstitutional.
You haven't even picked up the phone to the Americans. Your department literally sat here and we asked them if the government had given them any direction to close the loopholes in the safe third country agreement. The answer, Minister—in case you weren't briefed—was nope. That's because you guys didn't even pick up the phone, saying that you don't know if the Americans can.... You didn't even pick up the phone and say that we have a problem here and maybe we should deal with this.
No. You had your foreign affairs minister go sit on a stage in the middle of a trade negotiation with the American president—again, regardless of how you feel about it—and compared him with Bashar al-Assad and the North Korean dictator. That's maybe not the best thing to do in the middle of a trade agreement while you're trying to negotiate asylum system reform.
This is incompetence. I've seen a lot of incompetence, but this is incompetence that has a human face, because the hundreds of millions of dollars that you've spent on the baloney you're peddling is costing Canadian taxpayers. It's costing people who are trying to come into this country legally, because you're redirecting resources to people who are abusing our system, and you're raising taxes on Canadians. This is not how to manage an immigration system.
Then, the government, to add insult to injury, hires you. They hire you to be a communicator on the file. You don't have authority over any of these bureaucrats. You don't have the ability to bring a memorandum to cabinet or instruct the RCMP on this sort of thing. You're a glorified mouthpiece for the Prime Minister on this stuff.
This has real implications. You guys have bungled so badly—so badly that it's embarrassing—and you should be held to account for it in the fall. We're just tired of it. This is a sham. This is a joke.
My question for you is this. Are you comfortable with your personal legacy—you've had a long career as minister—breaking Canada's immigration system for your, and the Liberal Party's, political gain?