Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak today on the matter of immigration and citizenship in Canada.
The motion before the House states:
That, in the opinion of the House, immigrants to Canada and persons seeking Canadian citizenship are poorly served by this government.
I have only been here two and a half years, but I think this may be the poorest worded motion that I have seen yet. There is no substance to it. It does not suggest anything, it is not specific and it is shallow. It is actually a pretty accurate reflection of the level of discussion I often hear on this issue from members in the Liberal Party.
I have learned a couple of things in the few months since I have been on the committee. First, issues of citizenship and immigration are very important. I visited the offices of Immigration Canada out in Vancouver. When I went in the back room, I saw all the files, I realized that every file represented a person. These are not changes to tax laws or other technicalities. There are real live people on the other side of those files, and it is important those be dealt with fairly and quickly.
It seems to me that the challenges facing the department are administrative and management in nature. These are not ideological issues. These are not partisan issues. I think every person in the House, in fact, every person in Canada understands we are a nation built on immigration. We need immigration and we will continue to need it in the future. This is the reality.
How do we manage this process? How many a year come into Canada? How do we ensure that we get the people our economy and nation needs? At the same time, how do we deal with those people fairly so when they get here, they are able to contribute to life in Canada?
As I think has been said already, there are several chapters in terms of Canadian citizenship. From 1867 until 1947, there was no Canadian citizenship per se. It was not until after the second world war, after 1947, that we had Canadian citizenship. In 1977, 30 years later, there was a re-write of the Citizenship Act and the rules around citizenship changed. Now we find ourselves 30 years later, in 2007, discussing the same issue again.
One of the issues that has been in the news recently is the notion of lost Canadians, people who have lost their citizenship or, in some cases, lost proof of their citizenship. The reason this exists for some people is because some of the rules have changed and have not been very well understood by many people.
Recently, the necessity for many Canadians to get passports for the first time has brought many of these problems to light. They are not new problems, but they have come forward for the first time.
One of 450 cases before the minister now is in my riding. A Canadian born in Ontario moved to Australia in the 1960s. He played hockey there and was asked to play on the Australian Olympic hockey team in 1968. His citizenship was quickly rushed through. It was 30 or 35 years later, when he moved back to Canada, married and worked here. When he went to get a passport, he discovered he was no longer a Canadian citizen. We have been working on that situation and we are going to get that resolved.
The other day when the minister was at committee she said that she had a two track process. The first track is to deal with the cases as they come forward. When individuals think they should be a Canadian citizens, but for some reason are told they are not, she will deal those one on one and assign a staff member to each case to get those cleaned up. At this point there are about 450 of those cases.
I was shocked recently when I heard other members of the House say that the number of lost Canadians was not in the hundreds or even in the thousands, but possibly in the tens or hundreds of thousands, even possibly one million. Those are crazy numbers. I do not know what the answer is, but I do know the minister has made a commitment that she and her staff will deal with them individually to resolve those cases.
The minister also said when she was at committee the other day she recognizes that some changes are needed within her department. She also recognizes that there is a vast amount of experience sitting around the citizenship and immigration committee table. She expressed a willingness and an interest in working with us moving forward and not to act unilaterally. That is the right course of action and is responsible on her part. I go back to my first point which is that this is neither an ideological nor a partisan issue, that is the appropriate way to go forward.
What I find frustrating is that I regularly hear members of the Liberal Party suggest either directly or through innuendo that somehow the Liberal Party is the party of immigration and by extension that other parties are not parties of immigration and even may be anti-immigration. This is patent nonsense.
The Liberals want to move into this top line number of admitting 250,000 or 280,000 or 300,000 people. We can pick whatever number we want as a target, we can set the bar as high as we want. The bottom line is we have to fix the management of the department so that these cases are dealt with more quickly and we get rid of the backlog. At that point we can have an honest discussion about possibly increasing the number of immigrants coming to Canada.
My staff and I actually looked at the number of immigrants who have landed in Canada from 1980 through until 2005. We made this simple little graph that I will table. The graph shows how the number of immigrants has changed from year to year.
What is really obvious when we look at this graph is that starting at about 1984-85 until about 1993-94 there was a dramatic increase in the number of immigrants coming into Canada every year. After 1993-94 it went up and down and up and down. Last year it finally got back to the level it was at in 1993.
I said that immigration is not a partisan issue but I cannot help but notice that it was under the last Conservative government that the number of immigrants coming into Canada grew consistently year after year after year and that during the 13 years of Liberal rule, it dropped and then it went up, and then it dropped some more and then it went up, and finally after 13 years, it probably got back to where it was.
If I accomplish nothing else here today, I would like to tell Canadians and I would like to remind my colleagues on the Liberal side that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. When the Liberals want to turn this into a partisan issue in terms of the Liberal Party being a party of immigration, that is patent nonsense, number one. Number two, my colleague, the parliamentary secretary, talked about the fact that we cut the landing fees in half. He said that after 10 years of resettlement fees being frozen in Canada, it was this government that increased it by over $300 million in the budget this year.
I believe that this government and the minister are making a good faith effort to deal with these issues, to try to expedite these processes, so that when people come to Canada, they can quickly start to make contributions not only to Canada and to our economy but to themselves and their families. Whether we are talking about foreign credentials recognition or whether we are talking about not putting people in a $1,000 hole when they get here, we are taking concrete steps to actually improve the process so that the department works better and we can bring the immigrants into Canada and we can treat those people fairly.
Today's motion suggests no remedy. It does not say we should do x, y and z to fix this problem. It just says that immigrants and persons seeking citizenship are poorly served by this country.
Immigrants coming to Canada could certainly be served better and people seeking Canadian citizenship could certainly be served better. Those are things this government intends to do and are things on which the minister is working. When people want to make the point that our system is not perfect and could be improved and if we work together we can improve it, I will buy that. But for members of the Liberal Party to suggest that somehow management of this file and dealing with immigrants and citizenship issues in Canada is one of the Liberals' strong suits and something they are proud of, as my colleague the parliamentary secretary said, three times the Citizenship Act got to the cusp and then there was an election, and two of those three times it was a Liberal majority government that dissolved itself.
I look forward to answering questions people have. I look forward to working on this file. I look forward to improving the situation for all Canadians.