Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to the budget from the perspective of the senior immigration critic for the official opposition. I will be addressing the immigration measures in this budget, such as they are.
To recap, the budget provides $300 million over five years for settlement and integration, $100 million over five years to “take the next step toward an integrated client service delivery strategy”, and $75 million over five years to accelerate the integration of health care professionals educated abroad. There is an additional $25 million over five years to enhance the multicultural program, $56 million over five years for an action plan against racism, and $25 million over three years to highlight the contribution that ethnocultural groups have made to Canadian society. In addition, refugees will now be eligible for Canada millennium scholarships.
With these figures we will notice that there is about $475 million over five years on practical measures to assist newcomers and $106 million mostly over five years essentially on public education.
I have five points to make in my brief time. The first point I would like to make is that the spending on these measures is pretty much back-end loaded. That means that most of the spending announced in this budget will take place down the road four or five years from now, if ever, I might add.
Think about it. Could any Canadian say today what he or she will be spending five years from now? We do not know what rents or mortgage rates will be in five years. We do not know what food costs will be. We do not know what electricity and heating costs will be. We know that insurance costs keep going up. We do not know how much they will be. There are so many unknowns five years from now. Yet the government presumes to promise Canadians that certain money will be spent five years from now. I would take that with a grain of salt. It reminds me of the old song Promises, Promises . Very little of these millions will be spent this year.
The second point I would like to make is that unfortunately there has been very little realistic assessment or evaluation of previous spending in the areas of settlement and immigration, service delivery and integration of professionals into the Canadian workforce. In fact, the only assessments that I have been able to find are the annual reports and departmental reviews that come from the department itself. Naturally, these are very glowing and positive because they are the people responsible for the money. They are certainly not motivated to be critical, and perhaps are not even very objective about themselves.
Sometimes the Auditor General has the resources to do an independent audit of a particular program or spending, but there are so many. Oftentimes money has been spent and we really have no clear idea of what bang for the buck has been delivered. Because there is no reality check on past spending, it is very hard to know how we should spend the present dollars. In fact there is no clear or communicated plan on how best to spend the new money or even sometimes a clear objective that it is supposed to meet.
For example, let us talk about the $75 million over the next five years, if that in fact ever gets spent, to “accelerate the integration of health care professionals educated abroad”. When I asked how many health care professionals were expected to be reintegrated because of this program and exactly what the cost would be for each professional even in rough terms, the answer was very vague. It is very difficult to find out if there is a clear plan to integrate internationally educated health care professionals. Yet this is an important program for Canada.
To me it is very difficult to get excited and to be positive about millions of dollars being thrown out on the table without knowing exactly what we are going to get for it. I submit that no company that budgeted in this manner would possibly survive.
The third point is that all of this, the lack of planning, the lack of specifics, the lack of even clear objectives is very troubling and unfortunate for newcomers themselves. Their future success may well hinge on the quality and the clearly demonstrated effectiveness of settlement programs and integration initiatives. If we do not know what we are trying to achieve with these programs in very specific terms, who loses? It is the newcomers themselves.
For example, I can talk about the $100 million to take the next steps toward an integrated client service delivery strategy. I am not sure what that means. I would submit that there are hundreds of thousands across the global community who are pleading for any kind of reasonable standard of client service. In fact, most would settle for a modest increase in service levels, rather than some grand scheme of an integrated client service delivery strategy being developed over five years.
The funding for it is over five years. We know it is not going to come any time soon. Yet people are languishing in the queue waiting for their file to be processed. That is not happening. The best the government can do is throw out more money over the next half decade for some kind of new strategy.
This is no professional businesslike way to serve people, especially people that we keep saying we need to come into this country.
The fourth point is that in spite of the big numbers that the government throws around, immigrants and settlement providers see little progress in the area of recognition of credentials, in the area of settlement initiatives. In fact, they often see things getting worse.
More and more people come to this country and are unable to use their skills and experience. They take jobs that do not allow them to make their full contribution to the Canadian economy. They see the waiting lines get longer. The processing times for files get longer and longer. Service providers see their funding cut back or it is short term at best. That is a real problem.
The government has been promising for over a decade to fix the problem of recognition of international credentials and experience. If we look at the throne speeches and budgets from years past of this very government, we see promises and promises to fix the credentials problem. It is no closer to being fixed today than it was a decade ago when these promises started.
The committee heard recently from representatives of the engineering, dental and medical professions who said that the ball is in the government's court. In fact, one of them said, “We are waiting for the government to do a labour market study so that we can decide how to allocate our resources”. There is not even a study being done in some of these key areas of Canada's needs. I cannot believe it. Money is being thrown out as if it were the way to fix all these problems and the problems are getting worse.
The last point I want to make is that the true priorities of the immigrant community are not being met by the Canadian government and certainly not by this budget. There is still no clear process, as I mentioned before, for the recognition of international credentials and experience. This is the number one issue for newcomers to Canada.
The settlement program funding is short term only and keeps being pulled back and forth. The applications backlog is now up to 679,000 people in the queue and that was as of last October. It has probably grown since then.
People are telling us that parents' and grandparents' sponsorship applications are just going nowhere. They are not being processed.
There are so many down to earth, fair, practical measures that are needed to address these key needs and they are not being delivered by the government, so our party has put together a national consultation on Canada's immigration system.
Our MPs will be travelling across the country to talk to immigrants themselves. For a strong plan to get some real results in these critical areas, we want to work together with the people most affected.
This budget is a failure, but we hope we can move forward with new initiatives and leave this government behind, because it does not seem to be getting with the program.