Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank the witnesses for being present for this important report, especially the Auditor General.
Oftentimes when I deal with work related to Immigration, Refugees and Canadian Citizenship, similar to the situation with Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations, it's categorized with disappointment, anger and frustration.
This department in particular is famous across the country—particularly to those who need the service most—for being a ministry of delay, a ministry of mismanagement and a ministry of systemic racism.
You failed to make mention of what was a very important call and remarks by the Auditor General this morning. It was related to systemic racism in the service and ways that the anti-racism strategy can be implemented in a way that's concrete but also garners trust. It is a tremendous fact that this ministry continues to harm those persons in my community and across the country.
It's no secret that throughout this very difficult time, especially during the pandemic, there were real people who had to actually pick up these files. In the absence of IRCC doing that work, we had real people who had to do this work. They had to take phone calls from people. They had to listen to them in their time of need. They're a secret public service that no one ever talks about.
Those are the people like Kristina and the people like Elias, who's from my office here. He came from Edmonton because of this important work. He deals with hundreds of these folks. A former refugee himself, he knows the system and he knows how painful the system is. He knows how violent the system can be and how much change is truly required.
To make the commitments made in our treaties between where I'm from in Treaty No. 6.... This is a matter of treaty implementation. When we agreed that Canada would have jurisdiction over settlement, we agreed that they wouldn't be doing the kinds of settlement processes that they are today, which leave families worse off at times than when they came and leave them in limbo, wondering where their children are going to be.
Colleagues, these are families. They are real people. It's really difficult for me to try to humanize these systems at times, because we talk about people as if they're numbers or people in a queue or people in a line. These are real families. These are kids by themselves. Elias and I dealt with a case in my office of a 12-year-old girl who was overseas by herself.
This is unacceptable, simply unacceptable, especially given the fact that we have a government that's committed to an anti-racist strategy that in itself has not committed to understanding how that can be implicated in their own systems.
My question will be specifically on what the Auditor General has mentioned in her remarks. She said,
The department committed to addressing systemic barriers to applications under its Anti-Racism Strategy. However, it had yet to take any steps to collect demographic information about applicants and monitor and correct disparities in processing applications. This is critical to identifying and removing systemic barriers across government programs.
Deputy minister, you've served this government for a long time. Your service to this government far predates, in some ways, the anti-racist strategy.
How do you find yourself, as a deputy minister for many departments, with the reality that the anti-racist strategy exists and you see a report like this that suggests these barriers still exist? What are your words to those families who have had to endure these barriers and who have suffered from these barriers? What is your commitment to actually addressing the systemic barriers in a real way that demonstrates you understand what racism is? Trust has been lost, and now the work of rebuilding that trust to get to where we need to be is far harder.
What is your commitment to those people when they find themselves in applications...particularly the sub-Saharan office, where they find barriers like this very consistently? What are your words for those families who are in my office, and offices across the country, who continue waiting and are told to have trust in the system that our Auditor General has found to be non-compliant with our anti-racist strategy?
