Mr. Speaker, things have quietened down a bit now and I am happy to participate and offer my comments on Bill C-50, the budget implementation bill.
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Pickering—Scarborough East.
Imitation is often mentioned as the highest form of flattery, so Canadians are now experiencing a strange sense of déjà vu with the minority Conservative government's 2008 budget.
It seems that the Conservatives lack any ideas of their own and instead have decided to present a watered down version of our Liberal policies.
Perhaps if the finance minister was not so busy bashing his home province and my home province of Ontario, he would have had more time to come up with more original policies, some of his own policies, rather than recycling ours and trying to pass them off as new policies.
Some of the many excellent Liberal initiatives that the finance minister repackaged are: making the gas tax transfer permanent, as we had committed to in February 2007; providing direct support to the auto sector, as we called for in January 2008; creating jobs and improving public transit through additional investments in infrastructure, as we called for in February 2008; providing funding to hire more police, as we committed to in March 2007; reversing some of the Conservatives previous cuts to university granting councils and the indirect costs of research programs, which would have grown substantially under the Liberal economic update of 2005; replacing some of the funding from the Liberal 2005 update for student grants; and modernizing the Canada student loans program.
That is quite a list of Liberal accomplishments. I could go on further with more Liberal achievements and more of our exceptional policies, but I will go back to minority Conservative government's budget implementation bill.
I am glad the Conservatives really and truly appreciated those policies and those ideas that we had and went forward to implement them because they could see they were very good policies as well.
I certainly would have preferred it if the Conservatives had not already spent the cupboard bare with their previous budgets and fall economic and fiscal updates, leaving a razor thin surplus to protect Canada's economy should it continue to falter.
The next six months will be very important in Canada's economy and we can only hope that Canada will come through this without finding ourselves back in a deficit position again.
All the Conservatives are looking for is a boost in their poll numbers, continuing to demonstrate to Canadians what their priorities are. By focusing on the election that it is so desperate for, the government has again showed its incredible shortsightedness and total lack of ability to build our great nation.
Everything is built on polls and more polls. There is no planning for next week because everything is being done on the fly. The Conservatives have wasted a major opportunity to address Canada's infrastructure deficit by not acting on the Liberal proposal to use $7 billion of this year's debt paydown to fund infrastructure projects across the country. The investment of that $7 billion in infrastructure across Canada could clearly have protected us against what many of us fear is a possible recession here in Canada.
Nevertheless, we did not vote against this budget as there was nothing in the budget that warrants an election that Canadians clearly do not want, particularly at such a difficult time for the Canadian economy.
People that I speak to tell us to be patient and give it more time and that they are watching what everybody is doing. Clearly the polls are showing that because frankly nobody is going up and nobody is going down.
However, now that the minority Conservative government has very sneakily slipped legislative changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act into the budget implementation bill, it really gives us cause for concern.
These changes would give the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration unilateral authority to determine priorities for the processing of immigration application requests. These measures could potentially reduce the number of new immigration applications that the federal government accepts each year, particularly in the number of family class applications.
All of us need to be concerned about family reunification, as well as the whole issue of filling the needs through our skilled trades and economic requirements.
We have never seen any compassion from the government and I am certainly not expecting it to start now by exercising humanitarian and compassionate grounds on any application, but I am also appalled at the Conservative approach of shutting the door on immigrants by simply reducing the number of applications the federal government accepts.
Does it really think this is an appropriate way to address the immigration inventory? This bill puts far too much discretionary power into the hands of the minister to cherry-pick the type immigrants that the Conservative Party would like to enter Canada.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada's mission is to build a stronger Canada. Let me read the mission statement for Citizenship and Immigration Canada. It states:
Developing and implementing policies, programs and services that:
Facilitate the arrival of persons and their integration to Canada in a way that maximizes their contribution to the country while protecting the health, safety and security of Canadians;
Maintain Canada’s humanitarian tradition by protecting refugees and persons in need of protection; and
Enhance the values and promote the rights and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship.
That is a very important mission statement and I am not sure the minister has had time to read that herself. Perhaps the immigration minister should take a few minutes to try to familiarize herself with that because the mission statement very much clarifies and illustrates exactly what Canada is all about.
Possibly she is too busy selecting what immigrant she is going to fast track as she moves forward or perhaps she shares the view of the Prime Minister when he wrote in the 1988 Reform Party platform that immigration should not “radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada”.
Using the budget implementation bill is an outrageous way to deliver promises made by the Reform Party 20 years ago. Immigration reforms should simply not be buried in a budget implementation bill.
If the government wants to table these changes, it should put them forward as a separate piece of legislation that can be studied by the appropriate House of Commons standing committee, as any other critical piece of legislation would be.
If Parliament is to work effectively for all Canadians, regardless of the fact that we are in a minority situation, we must have a full and honest debate on all critical issues, certainly including immigration reform.
I consider immigration to be critically important. It is a part of moving Canada forward. It is very important that we have an immigration system in Canada that will help to build our country in a positive way. I believe that requires all of us, not in a partisan approach, to sit down in a committee, maybe a special legislative committee if the government does not want to send it to the current citizenship and immigration committee. We need to have an opportunity to fully debate the reforms that the minister is talking about.
There are areas that I am sure we would all agree on to move forward and there are other areas that possibly we would not but on something as important as immigration in Canada, I do not believe we should be doing it while it is buried in a budget bill.
It has been suggested that we are having a debate today but it is not. We are dealing with a budget implementation bill. We need to spend many hours going over exactly what it is the minister wants to achieve. It should be done in a non-partisan manner at either a special legislative committee or in some other manner, where people with experience in dealing with immigration files could come forward. We could work together to bring forward some reforms to the immigration bill that would benefit all Canadians and not simply be done in a partisan manner in a budget implementation bill.
That is not the way we do things in Canada. I do not believe it is the way that we can build a country any more than I believe we should be pitting one province against another. I continue to see the politics of division happening across the way by the government. It is pitting communities against each other and provinces against each other. That is not the way to build a nation.
While the government is so busy throwing the “nation” word around, clearly that is not how to build a country. I call on the government to work much more cooperatively with us as we try to move our great country forward.
Many other issues were mentioned earlier, things that Liberals are concerned about. Picking and choosing who comes to Canada is not the Canadian way, nor is it the way that we should be moving things forward.
I want to thank the House for allowing me the opportunity to comment on Bill C-50. There are many issues in the legislation, but the immigration one concerns us on this side of the House a lot as we move forward to build a strong country together.