Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members.
My name is Karen Kobussen. I'm the chief executive officer of the Saskatoon West Business Association. We represent and advocate for businesses on the west side of Saskatoon. We work to address issues that affect business owners, their customers, their employees and those who live and work in the neighbourhoods that surround them. These issues include business attraction and retention, community safety, housing, public services and the overall health and vitality of the area.
I'm not here today as an immigration lawyer or a constitutional expert but as someone who works closely with local businesses and our community partners, including NGOs and CBOs. I see the consequences of these federal policy decisions on the ground.
The motion before this committee is focused on efforts to relocate asylum seekers to other provinces. From the perspective of Saskatoon, I would urge the committee not to mistake redistribution for a solution. Moving asylum seekers from central Canada to Saskatoon does not fix the broken system. It simply moves the pressure from one place to the other. We heard earlier that Saskatoon is overwhelmed, and that is true. I am here today to support that. The real issue is that our asylum system is overwhelmed, backlogged and no longer functioning in a timely or credible way.
When claims take years to resolve, people remain in limbo. That is unfair, and it creates uncertainty. During that time, they need housing, health care, schooling, income support, legal services and other community resources, and these pressures are not carried by Ottawa or the federal government in any real, day-to-day sense. They are carried by citizens, provinces, schools, hospitals, shelters, local organizations, serving agencies, businesses and neighbourhoods.
Saskatoon is a generous city. We have welcomed newcomers for generations—including my family. Our businesses understand the importance of immigration. Many newcomers have started businesses, filled jobs, paid taxes, raised families and made our community stronger. However, there is a vast difference between orderly immigration and an uncontrolled asylum backlog, and there is a major difference between welcoming people successfully and transferring this federal system onto communities that are already stretched thin.
Saskatoon currently faces a serious housing crisis. We have residents who are struggling to find affordable places to live. We have less than a 2% market rental vacancy rate, and that's just in Saskatoon. We have extraordinary homelessness encampments. You heard earlier that we welcomed the displaced persons from the northern wildfire season, and we have shelters and community organizations dealing with the growing demand. We have employers who are concerned that their workers cannot find housing they can afford. Simply adding more people into that pressure cooker without first fixing the system will not help these asylum seekers, and it will not help Saskatoon.
We know health care and education are under strain. People cannot find family doctors. Exploding school classroom sizes, complex-needs students, language barriers.... You name it. Saskatchewan and Saskatoon are not in a position to increase this capacity right now. This matters.
For this reason, I believe this committee should focus on the root problem, which is that the system needs to be fixed. The solution is not to spread the consequences of failure across the country. The solution is to stop the failure.
Canada should continue to protect refugees who are genuinely seeking asylum for legitimate reasons—that is a very important responsibility—but we need to restore the basic principle that our immigration and asylum systems must be effectively and efficiently managed, not through backlogs, loopholes and unmanaged pressure. Relocating asylum seekers to Saskatoon is not compassion. It's downloading, because it asks communities to absorb the consequences of a federal policy failure.
Thank you very much.