The Canadian Police Association said that band aid solutions would not work any more. Our system is hemorrhaging and nothing less than radical surgery will restore it to health.
There is the question of balance and there is the issue of protection. I want to address one final issue upon which this entire discussion turns. That is the issue of priority. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration and all the costs associated with settlements and so on approach $3 billion each year. It costs $1 billion alone to process refugees. They teach English, settle immigrants and do a host of other good things. They also enforce the provisions of the Immigration Act.
However the priority placed on enforcement is the real barometer of the government's real concern for these law and order issues. The government can talk all it wants about protection, but all this is just talk unless the government puts its money where its mouth is. Only $50 million each year is spent on enforcing the act, and that is compared to total expenditures of $3 billion.
If my math is correct-and I think it is because I checked it on this side of the House and not with the finance minister-that amounts to 1.6 per cent of total expenditures. Less than 2 per cent of the money we spend on immigration is spent on protection and for that matter protecting recent immigrants as well. How much is spent on salaries alone at the Immigration and Refugee Board? I am sure you could guess, Madam Speaker. In salaries alone the IRB costs the Canadian taxpayers $58 million each year. It is an outrageous abuse of taxpayers' money and an indication that the government places less priority on protecting innocent Canadians than on pleasing its fat political friends at the Immigration and Refugee Board.
Reformers do not suggest that the government spend more money on immigration. Far from it. Reducing immigration flows as we have suggested would reduce expenditures and free up some of the taxpayers' funds to be placed where the priority should be, on the protection of Canadians. Changing the priority
from an Ottawa based bureaucracy to a front line bureaucracy would save additional millions.
While the government announced a reduction in immigration rates last year, as a York University professor argued today in the Globe and Mail : ``Mr. Marchi imposed only a symbolic reduction. He has buckled to the pressure of ethnic lobbies''.
Bill C-44 is just talk and it will remain empty talk until the government gets busy and makes real and not just symbolic changes to the immigration system.