Mr. Speaker, I anticipated this opportunity because of the response that I, like a number of other members of my caucus, have received as we have taken these proposals to our constituents and the citizens of Canada more generally.
It was interesting that as we all came back we were comparing our experiences, having reached out to the community in this fashion, of the very similar responses that we got. I have to say that it was one of those occasions when as members of Parliament we were deeply touched by the sensitive nature and expressions that we got from family members.
Two categories stand out in my mind. One was the number of parents, and I have to say mothers in particular, who talked about the need that they had to reunify their families. It often was a situation where the family had come but one of the children, being an adult child, could not be sponsored under the definition in the act. Therefore they would bring two or three of their children but one had to be left behind with other family members in the country of origin. It was telling, the number of times parents broke down in tears when they told of having to make that decision, but for the good of the whole family they came.
The other category where we heard these expressions of sorrow in many cases were the siblings of those children who had been left behind. This situation that I am talking about is not an isolated case. This has occurred numerous times with families who are here, who are citizens and good, solid members of our communities. It was just very emotional.
I have to say that when I hear some of what I will call the nitpicky rationalizations that we are hearing from the government and from some of the speakers in the opposition, I wish they would go out and listen to some of those stories. They may then set aside some of these almost technical arguments that they are producing and say that we have a major problem with the reunification of families in this country.
To suggest that the existing provision in the act says that if they do not have any family here, they can bring somebody, does not answer the issue at all and, in fact, does not address the issue of reunification whatsoever in those situations that I have described.
The other indication, which we have heard both from the official opposition and the government, is that this just is not workable. The reality is that this was looked at very extensively by the immigration committee back in 2002.
In the spring of 2002, albeit it was a definition of extended families that was smaller than what we produced and proposed, we were proposing in an amendment before the committee, as we were moving to amend the bill, that grandparents and brothers and sisters would be defined as family members and could be sponsored. That vote, after a great deal of discussion and analysis by the committee, failed by only one vote. It was moved by the NDP and it got the support of six of the members. Seven voted against it, and, of course, at that time all those members were government members.
I believe the proposal we are making addresses some other issues that badly need to be addressed, such as the backlog, which has been mentioned by a number of the other speakers. We are well aware of it. However what is being ignored in the debate, particularly from the government's side, is that a good number of the people who are in that backlog now are family members as we would define them, that is, they are brothers and sisters and children of people who are already citizens and residents of Canada.
If in fact we move them into the sponsorship category, that is, they could be sponsored once in a lifetime by a family member, we actually would reduce that backlog. We also would reduce the amount of work that would be needed, because the sponsorship process is a faster one. It requires less work on the part of our civil service to process the application. I can give an estimate that somewhere between 25% and 50% less time is spent on the sponsorship program than is spent on the regular applicant.
So there would be a substantial reduction in the backlog and there would be a substantial reduction in the amount of time that our civil service would have to work on these applications. That would go some distance to then reduce the amount of the backlog for the rest of the people who have been waiting for their applications to be processed, as we have heard, for as long as five years, oftentimes successfully at the end of that period of time.
There is another point I would like to make this evening. It is something that I do not think we had anticipated, but it came out regularly at the sessions that we held across the country when we were speaking to family members who would be interested in taking advantage of this sponsorship program. That was the number of times that family members stood up and said that there is also a dollar issue here, not just the humanitarian issue of reunifying siblings or parents and children. There is also a financial issue, because the reality is that in many cases the family members who are here are sending money back to that country of origin. In a great many cases, the family members who are left behind in that other country are in very poor financial shape and need the assistance that flows from the family members who are here.
We know about this. It came up recently at one of the G-7 meetings. We know about the amount of money that is sent out of the country for family members.
I can recall one man at the session we had in my city of Windsor. He was the first one to mention this. He indicated that he was sending back in excess of $5,000 a year. As he said that, it was interesting to see the number of other hands that went up for people wanting to say the same thing. This was not a large crowd. We had about 100 people at that meeting. There were at least 10 families in that room who were sending back in excess of $5,000 a year. There were several who were sending back in excess of $10,000 a year.
That is money that is flowing out of Canada. We can multiply that by the tens of thousands because of the responsibility that the family members who are here feel for those family members who are back in the country of origin. That is a substantial drain of cash out of this country, which would not be occurring if Parliament took advantage of the proposal that we are making to reunify those families to bring them here.
Another point has been missed by the government. We are finding that the number of people who have been coming here in the last decade shows a significant difference in regard to the two patterns we can look at. If we look at the new immigrants or newcomers who came here between 1981 and 1991, they were hired into employment situations that were in keeping with their experiences and their academic backgrounds at a much higher rate than those who came between 1991 and 2001. The reports on this are out there. It is a well established fact now.
This is one of the reasons I would suggest that we could move to deal with that problem. If we did reunify families, if we did allow them to sponsor, that rate of people not being able to find appropriate employment would drop dramatically because the family would be here in the country to back them up and to provide them with assistance.
There are numerous reasons why the bill should be accepted at second reading and passed on to committee so that further investigation can be made and we can move dramatically in a direction that will reunify families in this country.