Mr. Speaker, I rise today to ask the government for a third time to explain its lack of compassion and its discriminatory approach to visitor visas. Not surprisingly, my previous attempts to get an answer from the government were met with empty words. Instead of addressing the reality of our broken visa system, the minister claimed that the real issue is “the safety and security of those who are already here”.
The minister's deflection from the problem at hand is typical of the government.
Is the security of our country put at risk when a bride to be invites her parents to come to Canada for a visit to share the joy of her wedding day? Is the safety of Canadians threatened by a Nigerian grandmother who wants to come to our country to see her newborn grandchild?
Of course, invoking national security is a convenient tactic for the government, considering that no usable data are kept on the reasons for denying visitor visa applications. Even if security were the main reason for refusing visitor visas, we would have no way of knowing it.
The reality faced by my constituents and by Canadians across the country is that the decisions made by visa officers are often difficult to understand. Some visas are denied to people who have visited Canada many times under the previous government. Similarly, more than once I have seen cases in which an applicant was denied entry to Canada even after being granted multiple entry visas to both the United Kingdom and the United States.
One of the most tragic examples of the failure of the current visa system was laid bare in the August 21, 2007 issue of the Toronto Star. Nicholas Keung writes of how the body of Hu Xiu-hua, an immigrant to Canada who passed away last summer, lay unclaimed in a Toronto morgue for almost two months. As citizens of China, Ms. Hu's elderly parents were required to apply for a visitor visa to claim their child's remains. Their application was denied not once, not twice, but six times.
The ugly truth is that the vast majority of these cases involve applicants from developing nations. How can the government claim that the visitor visa system is fair and impartial when it so clearly discriminates against Canadians with families from developing nations?
I am not alone in my frustration with the visitor visa system. I am sure that my colleagues of all political stripes deal with many similar cases in their constituencies. The government must stop denying that the visitor visa system is broken and start working to find solutions that benefit Canadians and their families abroad.