Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to be here in the House to discuss Bill C-283, an act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations.
I accept the spirit of creative problem solving which the member says is his intent. His bill would essentially allow any Canadian or permanent resident over the age of 18 to apply to sponsor a visitor from overseas by posting a bond or guarantee provided he or she has not sponsored an individual within the last five years who has failed to abide by the terms of his or her visa. That sounds reasonable.
The idea of making it easier for more people to visit this country on the surface is something I think all of us could support. Many of us have friends or relatives in far-flung parts of the globe whom we often think about and wish to see, especially at times of crisis or celebration. The same is true for many of our constituents who are often forced to leave behind loved ones, close friends and business associates when they choose to put down roots in Canada.
Today the mechanisms we have in place that allow foreign nationals to visit, allow Canadians to be reunited with their loved ones, or allow people to welcome business associates or other visitors works well, but we know that there are problems. Canada's visa offices routinely issue more than 500,000 temporary resident visas each year in addition to processing many other types of applications. By comparison 150,000 applications on average are rejected each year, suggesting that there are in fact compelling reasons to do so. Therefore I am deeply troubled by several aspects of this bill.
Canada's experience with the use of bonds to ensure individuals comply with the terms of their visas is spotty at best. Many of us remember the disappearance of an entire boatload of illegal migrants in 1999 after bonds were posted to ensure that they would report for the hearing process, yet they disappeared.
Investigators from Citizenship and Immigration Canada subsequently said that many of the individuals who posted these bonds had connections to smuggling organizations and that the migrants made their way to the U.S. It is fairly safe to say that bonds alone in this case provided an ineffective deterrent to flight. Such is the reality of a world where individuals are willing to pay smugglers tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the chance to come to Canada to find a better life. For a bond to be effective it would have to be high enough to prevent that counteractive smuggling bond that is posted. In doing that we immediately discriminate against families with low incomes. We do not allow for those families to post that kind of bond that would make it effective.
Under the terms of Bill C-283, today's practice of requiring bonds at ports of entry under certain circumstances and for certain individuals would therefore essentially have to be extended to overseas visa offices. This would result in a much heavier administrative burden and the need for substantially more resources. Currently we have huge inventory backlogs because of those resources, which are not able to deal with the heavy backlogs.
Bill C-283 would require more resources to deal with and investigate each sponsorship application to ensure that the financial resources were not linked to organized crime. It would require more resources to assess a sponsor's credit worthiness and to confirm his or her identity and status in Canada. More resources would have to go toward processing applications. Canada would have to introduce an exit control system to ensure that persons complied with the bonds. That would take more processing, more paperwork and more resources. Application processing times and delays would therefore increase and not decrease.
Other departments such as the Canada Border Services Agency and Foreign Affairs Canada would also be negatively impacted. All this would happen with very little return in the form of a substantial increase in the number of visitors to Canada since visa offices in most cases would not likely be swayed by the offer of a bond if the application for a visa had been found questionable on other criteria.
One aspect of the bill that I particularly want to point out and which I find very disturbing is its apparent lack of regard for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Canada's international obligations under UN conventions. Clause 5 would add a new subsection to the immigration and refugee protection regulations stipulating that a foreign national who comes to Canada under the terms of a visitor visa bond must leave the country at the end of that period authorized for that stay even if the person applies for refugee status while in Canada.
Such a clause could mean that they would have to leave Canada before their refugee claim has been assessed on the merits of a fair and impartial tribunal.
Such a provision appears contrary to section 7 of the charter which talks about the risk of harm to the person if they go back and, therefore, the need to follow through on a refugee application. Moreover, it could lead to violations of Canada's obligations under UN conventions not to return anyone to a country where they face torture or where they have a well-founded fear of persecution. That is because that section stipulates that once the period of their stay has ended they must return. That is a stipulation under the bond. We would therefore be in complete contravention of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Canada has the appropriate mechanisms in place today to allow individuals from all over the world to visit. We also have a system that allows for ministerial discretion in cases where there might be a compelling personal reason for someone to be allowed to visit who would not normally qualify and under extenuating circumstances.
Our present system works well and processes requests in an expeditious, fair and reasonable way, but all of us still say it could do better. We know we could do better. The way to solve a problem with a system in which we are not only looking at visitor's visas but also looking at permanent resident status, is not to cherry-pick pieces and fix it by fixing the cracks. The way to solve the problem is to look at how we can make the whole immigration system, and the parallel system of refugee processing, work better. We have to look at the whole system and make that system more effective and efficient. Cherry-picking does not allow for that to happen.
I cannot nor will the government be able to support Bill C-283 or any other such proposal that contains these kinds of serious flaws and that has the potential to do more harm than good to undermine the stability and sustainability of Canada's current visa program and that also violates our domestic laws as well as our international obligations.