Mr. Speaker, Bill C-283 is a private member's bill which seeks to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations. The bill intends to allow a Canadian citizen or a landed immigrant to provide an enforceable guarantee or post a bond while sponsoring a visitor.
Sponsorship would provide stronger evidence of the potential visitors that they would return to their country of origin before the visa expires. The Canadian sponsor guarantees with money that the visitor would abide by the conditions of the visitor visa and would return home before the visa expires.
This bill arises in response to a big problem. While the government and the immigration department acknowledge problems, they are not prepared to do anything to improve the situation. I make that assertion because I have been complaining about these problems since I first arrived in this House after the 1993 election.
Since then, completely new legislation has been introduced for this department, but the basic problems remain. The system is not competent to figure out who should be allowed to visit and who should not. The bill attempts to add an additional dimension to the existing rules and processes that are in place to protect Canada from any abuse from visitors.
Canada must have an efficient and effective visa system that is able to handle temporary visitors. The bill would not minimize a minister's permit or inject political interference into the system. It would enhance fairness, not diminish it.
I would have hoped that the government speakers on the bill would have accepted more positively the spirit of creative problem solving which the bill's sponsor intends. The bill would essentially allow Canadians or permanent residents over 18 to apply to be an additional sponsor guarantee for a visitor from overseas by posting a bond provided that they have 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, does it not?
However, it does nothing to water down the current rules and protections that we already have in place. What it does is support the process and adds additional levels of trust, predictability and surety. The Liberals are wrong when they claim that the bill would make it easier for more people to visit this country. It would just help enhance the screening to ensure that the right people visit this country and fewer of the wrong ones do.
Many of us have friends or relatives in far flung parts of the globe. We often think about them and wish to see them, especially at times of crisis or family 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.
We know that these people, if they came to Canada, would not abuse a visitor's visa, but often they cannot get a visa because the system is poor, overstressed, sometimes biased and fraudulent, or just not capable with the available manpower to perform its screening job properly. Change begins with the recognition that a problem exists.
Canada's visa offices routinely issue some 500,000 temporary resident visas each year in addition to processing many other types of applications. By comparison, about 100,000 or more applications on average are rejected each year, suggesting that there are in fact compelling reasons to do so. Well, that is the government line.
However, talk to constituents and users who pay for this system and they will tell a different story. The system defenders say they are deeply troubled by aspects of this bill. Their main problem is that they might lose some of their complete and final control, and that the thought of community engagement, community accountability, and community reference is just outside the box of how system bureaucrats think. It is beyond them to think that a Canadian might know a lot more about who should come and visit than a foreign embassy worker who is often a foreign national employed by Canada just looking at a file.
Just because the department could not run a bond system before does not mean that the idea is unworkable. It is fairly safe to say that bonds alone do not provide safety. That is not what the bill is about. The bill is created in full light of the fact that we have a world where individuals are willing to pay smugglers tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a 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 smuggling, but it also places demands of transparency about who is posting the bond and for what kind of an individual is wanting to visit. The bill does not seek to eclipse all the other factors which go into the balance of probabilities mix for a decision.
Bonds were said to discriminate against families with low income. The system already does that by making sponsors provide back copies of income tax returns to show that they have sufficient funds to support an invited visitor. The system already requires applicants to demonstrate sufficient financial status to show strong ties to their country of origin.
The financial game is much of what the system is all about. Consequently, complaints of financial discrimination from a Liberal just do not wash. That party is the origin of the great historical discrimination stories in Canada, and the current poor immigration system is one of the Liberals' recent design.
The claim that 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 is absolutely spurious. It was said that it would require more resources to assess a sponsor's credit worthiness and to confirm his or her identity and status in Canada. It was said that more resources would have to go toward processing applications and that Canada would have to introduce an exit control system to ensure that persons complied with the bonds.
These arguments admit a lot about the poor system. If anything, providing additional levels of confidence by locals who are willing to put a lot of cash on the table helps the over-burdened system, not weight it down.
One of the most stupid arguments I have heard from a Liberal goes like this: “The bill creates an 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 the person would have to leave Canada before his or her refugee claim had 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 he or she goes 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 the person faces torture or where the person has a well-founded fear of persecution. We would therefore be in complete contravention of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms”.
What an argument. I must make the point that anyone who has a visa must obey its rules, which already says that the person must leave before the visa expires. That is already part of the rules and there is no charter violation. If someone makes a refugee application, it does not matter whether that person gets here legally or illegally because Canada has said that it will abide by the UN convention, and many legitimate refugees must come to Canada illegally in order to make their legitimate claim.
How many times have I heard Liberals mislead the House by saying something like the following, “Our present system works well and processes requests in an expeditious, fair and reasonable manner, but all of us still say we could do a lot better; we know we could do better”. That kind of talk is so disingenuous in view of the administrative history I have observed since 1993.
The next typical argument to facilitate doing nothing is that the change is piecemeal. This piecemeal argument is similar to what we hear about Senate reform and many other things. It goes like this: “We cannot cherry-pick pieces and fix the system 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 have been hearing that kind of shibboleth for years, but nothing changes.
The major problem with the bill is it reveals that the Liberals cannot manage even a basic system. The system defenders will never adjust because it would open the door to all the rest of the rot in the system.
We have to start somewhere. The first step down the road of repair and reform would be to pass the bill dealing with this narrow section and requiring the system to accommodate it.