Thank you, Madam Chair.
It's a good bill. The five-year duration is excellent. The insurance aspect is a red flag. We may want to scrutinize Canada's international obligations to ensure the free flow of goods and services, so we may not be able to limit or restrict the selection of an insurance product to only a Canadian product. This is a heads-up for that.
There are unintended consequences that will flow from Bill C-242. In theory, it's a nice portrait. However, the practical reality is that after a five-year period, we're going to see extraordinary numbers of parents and grandparents stressed and anguished at the thought of forcibly being returned to the homeland after half a decade with their family in Canada. That's cruel. Unless there is a kind of consumer protection waiver signed at the front end, this is a titanic and compassionate humanitarian disaster in the making. Here is the cure.
Canada, annually, has a target or a quota, if you will, of parents and grandparents who will be allowed to remain or to enter Canada's permanent residence. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem we have now, which will be sorely exacerbated if we bring in a five-year super visa framework, is that every year people submit their expressions of interest to sponsor a parent or a grandparent. What used to happen every year was a lottery was held and the inventory was emptied.
We can't proceed along this path anymore. What should occur is that when there is an inventory of expressions of interest—right now, there are close to 100,000—and we know that we're only going to select a range, let's say 30,000 to 35,000 individuals, you should not be emptying that inventory annually. Instead, when you are in the inventory, the floodgates should close, no new expressions or interests will be allowed to be uploaded into the system, and then you diminish the inventory every year by the number of parents and grandparents you wish to select every year.
What's the difference for Canada? Zero. It's the same number of parents and grandparents. What's the difference for IRCC? Zero. They're going to process the same number, operationally. The difference is in the humans in the inventory. It is no longer a question of “if” I can sponsor my family member; it is a question of “when”.
If you're going to pop a five-year matrix, and you know that people are going to be stressing about being forcibly removed from Canada, you keep them in this inventory. The floodgates open. They enter if they wish to seek permanent residence, and not all do. They know that over the three- or five-year period, there's a high likelihood of being processed for permanent residence, and then you open the floodgates again and take the next batch.
I'll leave that for now.
In terms of the eligibility on minimum income, here is something creative. We don't need to.... We can lower it—there are no problems with that—but what we should be doing is giving a $5,000 credit on that minimum income threshold for every child 12 and under in that family, because we need to reward the homemaker, the person raising the children.
We need to understand the economic value of having a parent or grandparent take care of a young child, because it may free up the biological mom or biological dad to go into the workplace where they will be paying taxes to contribute to our economy.
Those are my five minutes, Chair—