House of Commons Hansard #102 of the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was changes.
The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill C-50, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on February 26, 2008 and to enact provisions to preserve the fiscal plan set out in that budget, as reported without amendment from the committee, and of the motions in Group No. 1.
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
Mr. Speaker, thank you for that lovely compliment. It is rare to receive compliments in the House. I very humbly accept it.
It is my great pleasure to rise to speak to Bill C-50, particularly part 6, which would introduce immigration measures that I find somewhat unusual because they would give significant additional powers to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.
The government is trying to bring in these measures as part of a budget bill. If we agreed with the bill, we could let it go through, no problem. However, we do not agree with it, because it does not meet our fellow citizens' needs. As everyone knows, the people asked us to request a number of things for Quebec, and we submitted those requests.
What is even more unacceptable is that the government is trying to include these measures in bills that are not intended to change procedures within various departments. That is what part 6 of Bill C-50 attempts to do: change the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act significantly. This bill would give the minister the power to give some people priority over others. The minister would also have the power to refuse entry to some people without having to justify his or her decision.
This is troubling, particularly since we have a government that is known for breaking its promises to people. It broke its promise to women on equity and equality; it broke its promise to seniors on the guaranteed income supplement; and it broke its promise to veterans. Spouses and widows of veterans do not all have access to various programs offered by Veterans Affairs Canada to returning war veterans. All in all, this government was elected because of promises it made on major issues—promises that, for the most part, it has not kept.
We have to wonder what would happen if these measures in Bill C-50 were passed. Imagine for a moment that the ousted minister of foreign affairs became the minister of citizenship and immigration. Who would he give priority to? Who would he deny entry to? Many worries come to mind, even more so given that the minister would not have to answer any questions or provide any justification.
Conservative Party members have also made disconcerting statements about immigrants of certain ethnicities. What would happen if one of these members were appointed minister of citizenship and immigration? I would be worried about giving a minister the sweeping power to decide the validity of an application from someone who wanted to immigrate to Quebec or Canada. I find that very serious.
I even find it a bit immoral that these measures were introduced as part of a budget bill, and I wonder how many others feel this way. At the very least, we know that all of the organizations involved with newcomers, be they refugees or immigrants, are opposed to these measures, and with good reason, I might add.
We know that the committee has also made its views known. It is important to remember that the committee is not necessarily against amending the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
But if amendments are to be made, they must be done properly, through the usual channels. This means introducing bills, having them examined in committee, and hearing witnesses in committee to explain different parts of the bill. This did not happen here.
This amendment to the Immigration Act was sneakily included in Bill C-50, in the same way that a censorship measure was included in Bill C-10 without anyone noticing. We can see the effect that one has had, and the shock waves it has sent through the film community, in terms of copyrights and so on. Members must remember all of that and be very careful before passing Bill C-50 if it contains part 6. Giving a single person the authority and power to determine who will have the right to enter the country is inconceivable. The same thing happened with the Minister of Health with respect to public safety and quarantines. The government did not even keep its promises to those suffering from Hepatitis C. People are dying every day without receiving a cent from the government. This is a right-wing government if ever there was one.
That scares me. When a government that is so far to the right wants to introduce such measures in a bill, I believe that there is more to it than meets the eye. I do not want to have any part of it and I do not accept it. My party does not want to say yes to that. We will definitely vote against the bill. We cannot allow ourselves to give such rights to a party that has already shown its bad faith and ill will.
That was the case for Insite, in Vancouver. They prefer to let people die rather than helping them to obtain services in a place where they felt safe, where they could make important contacts and get help. They would rather let people die. And now they would like us to believe that it would be a good thing to give the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration the power to decide who can enter Canada. They should not take Canadians or Quebeckers for fools. We see the government's game plan very clearly. We know that the only reason this government wants to introduce this amendment to the Immigration Act is to have even more power and to decide what kind of immigrants will build Canada.
Some 900,000 men and women have been waiting for years to become Canadian citizens. They have been waiting patiently. They have gone through all the steps. They are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect by a government that follows the rules, not a government that changes the rules to suit its ideology and philosophy or to please voters of the same bent.
Libby Davies NDP Vancouver East, BC
Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Laval because I know she holds the same views that we do on this bill, which is that it should be defeated. I know she speaks with compassion. I thank her for using the example of Insite as another example of how callous the Conservative government is toward people.
One of the disturbing things in Bill C-50 are the immigration changes and the way it escalates the use of temporary foreign workers.
Working with the labour movement, we in the NDP have been very concerned with the rate of exploitation that is taking place. People should be coming to Canada as permanent residents. A proper process should be in place.
The idea that the government is trying to deal with the backlog is not correct. What it is doing is shifting the system from the reunification of families and is creating a whole new class of temporary foreign workers, which makes it open season on exploitation.
I would like the member's views on that. I think it is something we need to monitor carefully. We know there are workers who have had a serious loss of rights and some workers who are being paid less than the minimum wage. We also know that some workers are being exploited by their employers and some workers have died because they are not aware of health and safety provisions.
This is a very serious situation that is taking place. It started with the former government and it is escalating with the current government. It is an indication of what is taking place in our immigration system.
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her question.
As the member is fully aware, we have been fighting for some time on behalf of women who come from the Philippines and work as live-in caregivers. Women who work in this field are often faced with many problems and difficulties, and we have been trying to help them for many years. The government, however, does not seem to want to listen to reason. Of course it changed a few of the rules, but that is not enough to give these women what they need.
One thing is sure, as my colleague from Jeanne-Le Ber so aptly put it: any legislation concerning immigration must be debated in committee. That is why I think his position is the soundest and the fairest.
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Mr. Speaker, the New Democratic Party has very serious concerns about Bill C-50 and in the way it is being brought through the House.
The issue of an immigration policy and how we will move forward as a country is a crucial debate and discussion that needs to happen with all parties working together. It is not the kind of issue that can be slipped in through a confidence bill, in a budget bill, to basically stare down other members of Parliament, to try to sneak through, without proper scrutiny, and then to use the issue of the budget as a way to attack parties like the New Democratic Party, which is saying that this is an issue that needs clear and informed debate.
My family comes from the mining regions of northern Ontario and we were the multicultural society long before the urban centres were called multicultural. In those days, if a person was an immigrant, the person was brought over to Canada on short term work contracts to work the mines and to work the lumber camps.
It was well-known in the early days when my grandparents came from Scotland that they did not want to hire Canadian workers to work in the mines because of the accident rates and the pressures. They were having a 75% turnover at any given time in any of the hard rock mining communities, whether it was Kirkland Lake, Rouyn Noranda or Timmins.
During those times, short term work contracts were given to the Ukrainians, the Bulgarians, the Italians and the Croatians. These men were brought over separate from their wives. If they complained about conditions, they were deported. If they were sick because of their work in the mine, they were sent back to their countries to possibly die there.
The historic records in the north are heartbreaking stories of families, of men. The average life expectancy for a Ukrainian or Croatian man working in Timmins, Ontario up to the 1950s was 41 years of age. These men worked hard and they died.
At certain points in the history of the north, the immigration policies allowed some of the families to come over. We all understand that the immigrants who built this country played an important role, but it was their families who made Canada. It was the women coming over who actually built communities.
We have so many great people in our region. The immigrant women who came over could not speak English. Their kids went to school not speaking English or French, if they were in the Rouyn Noranda mining camp. However, they came here and learned the language. They became part of the community and they built the identity, the wonderful identity that we have in northern Ontario.
We have a long memory in northern Ontario of the exploitation that these families suffered. Anybody in Timmins will tell us about the mining widows, the women who were left basically destitute on the streets when their young husbands died in accidents. They were immigrants and could not speak the language. My grandmother, who was a mining widow, raised me and told me the stories of what they went through.
We are very concerned when we see a dramatic change to immigration policy in Canada that says we need to fast-track these temporary workers into Canada and get them into lower paid jobs so we can basically hyper-fuel an economy without a long term plan.
We all know that the government is here for one reason and one reason only. It is here to ensure that the Athabasca tar sands expands as fast as possible, as destructively as possible and with as much profit for the Texas oil companies as possible.
We are looking now at a shift where we are not talking about bringing in families and building immigrant communities that will actually develop the Canada of the 21st century. We are talking about the short term gain for the long term pain that our country will suffer and these immigrant families will also suffer.
We have a backlog of some 900,000 people who have followed the rules and who have gone through the process to prove they can be proud citizens like anyone else. These people will all be shunted to the side so that we can start to fast-track the workers coming into this country.
As an example, in my region, we are still very dependent on mining, forestry and long haul trucking. A trucker called me and told me that the federal government was bringing in foreign truckers, because with the rates they were being paid nobody could feed their family. Therefore, the government decides to create a special program and starts bringing in immigrant workers to undermine the long haul truckers in our country.
This is not the way we build an economy. It is certainly not the way we build community. That is how we undermine community.
We have seen the government use the threat of non-confidence again and again to bully its friends in the Liberal Party into submission, although I do not think it had to bully too hard. However, we will not bend on the issue of immigration. We will not simply roll over and play dead because the government huffs and puffs and tells us to.
There are so many fundamentally wrong things in the budget beyond this attempt to sneak the immigration bill through. For example, in my region I have two communities where there are no schools. We have a government that says “too bad”, that it does not have money to build first nations schools. This is a government that can buy helicopters to ship to Afghanistan. This is a government that can send money all over the world any time it wants. This is a government that when any of its friends ask for help, the help is there. Yet children of so many communities, whether it is Kashechewan, or Fort Severn, or Attawapiskat, or North Spirit Lake or Cat Lake, are going to schools that are held in former maintenance sheds.
Whenever I raise in the House, I always hear the chuckle of smug satisfaction from the Conservative members. They think it is absolutely absurd that this issue is raised, as though how dare we raise the issue of children in our country who are denied the most basic education rights.
Education is a fundamental human right. When I say it is a fundamental human right, it is not an airy-fairy concept. As defined by the United Nations, a country has to have a plan for education. Even third world countries have plans for education. Yet we see the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development's absolute disinterest in the issue of building schools. He cannot point to a school he has built. He has taken the money from the budget, a very underfunded budget for Indian Affairs, and spent it elsewhere. He tells 13 year old children that some communities are worse off than them, and that is supposed to be some kind of response.
That is not a response. A response is to say that there are 20, to 30, to 40 communities without schools and that we need a plan. That is what a leader does. A leader says how do we address this and a plan will be set up to do so, but not the government.
Dick Harris Conservative Cariboo—Prince George, BC
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order, which is on relevance. The member has strayed dramatically from the amendments to the budget. Not only that, his misrepresentations of what he is talking about currently are even further away from the amendments.
The Acting Speaker Conservative Royal Galipeau
I thank the hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George. I think the point he was making had more to do with debate than with a point of order.
In any event, the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay has two minutes left. I am sure he will stay close to the point.
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate you recognizing that the issue of how we allocate funding is what we are talking about. This is an amendment to a larger budget bill that is dramatically wrong for Canadians.
In response to my colleague, when it comes to misrepresentations, let us talk about misrepresentations. We have documents that were given to the communities of northern Ontario, which were signed under the office of the previous Indian affairs minister who said that the plans to build a school in Attawapiskat would go ahead. These were documents signed by the Conservative government, yet the present Indian affairs minister said that the government never made any promises, that it did not have any money. Not only that, it does not plan on having any money nor having a timeline.
Any government that has that much systemic disregard for children is a government does not deserve to have the confidence of the Canadian people. Therefore, we do not have confidence in the government. We do not have confidence in its underhanded attempts to rewrite the immigration act through threat and bluster.
We, as New Democrats, will vote against the bill and we will vote against it very proudly.
Dick Harris Conservative Cariboo—Prince George, BC
Mr. Speaker, I suppose one could determine that no matter what the member or any of his colleagues say, the fact that they will never form the government of our country kind of makes their statements pretty much unaccountable because they will never have to fulfill any promises they make. They do that very effectively, make promises which they know they will never have to live up to.
The member talked about fast tracking and allowing people to get in to Canada to perform certain duties. I understand he is from northern Ontario. He will know that all across the northern and rural part of our country there is a dramatic shortage of doctors, nurses and medical specialists who are critical to health care in that part of the country.
The member knows that on a regular basis doctors, nurses and medical specialists are allowed to come in to Canada to fill critical demands in health care, which not only apply to the northern part of my province but also to his.
Is he suggesting that we take away all of the fast track privileges and have people in rural and northern Canada go short on much needed health care? Is that what he is trying to say, or is he just, once again, trying to mix words to support whatever ideological straitjacket the NDP happens to be tied to at this time?
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Mr. Speaker, I am glad my colleague asked that question. Everybody back home will see the smug sense of entitlement coming from a government that has been in power for an embarrassingly long 18 months.
He says that we in the NDP have no right to ask him questions because we might never form government. We are elected by the people of our region. They have a right to have a voice, but he might not like to hear it. If he does not want to hear it, then he should go home. Maybe he should sit on a blog site with his other right wing friends and chat each other up.
I am here to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay. Whether I and my party ever form government makes no difference to me. I am proud to represent my communities. I will not sit for a moment in a House like this, when children on the James Bay coast are being denied basic services, and listen to the guff of someone who tells me I have no business speaking, or the 307 members of the House have no business speaking unless the Prime Minister tells them how to speak. The day we accept that principle, parliamentary democracy will be at an end.
In response to his question, the present rules make it possible to move forward when we need to bring in specialists. That is not a problem. I would invite the member to go to Toronto, ride in cab and talk some of the doctors who cannot even get their certifications through. We should start dealing with that issue.
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Mr. Speaker, the member is a very strong advocate for his constituency. In a poll of all the members in the House this year, he was recognized as the best constituency MP the House has to offer. That is a wonderful achievement on his part and it speaks volumes about what he tries to do in the House for his constituents.
I too am taken aback by the continued attack by the Conservatives and Liberals toward the membership of the New Democratic Party on the basis of our ability to achieve. Our ability to achieve is large in the House. I have been here for two years and I am been most impressed with the record of the New Democratic Party in making a difference for Canadians. Every day we try to do that.
How should we have handled the bill? How would that have given a better—
The Acting Speaker Conservative Royal Galipeau
The hon. member for Timmins—James Bay has 20 seconds to respond.
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Mr. Speaker, the simple way of handling this is not to make it a confidence motion. Let us debate this. We need to deal with immigration. We need to deal with bringing skilled workers in to all regions of the country. We need to have a long term plan for not just a strong economy but a strong community. We need to build a sense of citizenship in all Canadians, whether they are new or have been here for many generations.
This is a very important debate and that is why we will—
The Acting Speaker Conservative Royal Galipeau
It is with regret that I must interrupt the hon. member but his colleague, the hon. member for Ottawa Centre, has the floor.
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Timmins—James Bay spoke well and forcefully on some of the concerns he has about the budget and how it will affect his region and Canadians in general.
With our amendments to the implementation of Bill C-50, we have tried to put in front of Canadians exactly what is in the bill. It is important to recall that initially when the budget was put forward, Canadians found it was a bit thin, in terms of content, and that was remarked in the media certainly. This particularly had to do with the fact that the government had announced in its fall fiscal update over $50 billion in corporate tax cuts scheduled over the next couple of years. I think the government will regret that in the future, particularly when we look at the tight times in the economy. By the time it got to budget, there was not a lot of material to work with because it had essentially stripped the cupboard bare.
When the budget was introduced, people were looking at little finesses in it. Much to the people's surprise they found, I think, on page 106, of a document consisting of approximately 134 pages, the changes to the immigration act. Talk about non sequitur. The government has taken something that is absolutely critical, something that is the foundation of the future of Canada, and that is important facets of our immigration system, and has hidden them in the budget. We have been proud as Canadians to have had a fairly progressive immigration system.
What is so distressing about this is the government either is trying to be strategic to get this thing through and hope that no one will notice or it honestly does not understand how to make policy and where policy belongs in its formation.
If it were a case of trying to pull a fast one, the government clearly did not get away with it. If it were a case of the government wanting to take immigration changes and put them into the framework of the Department of Finance, hopefully it learned the lesson that it was not appropriate.
I will give the example of what happened when I brought forward the proposed changes to my community.
Soon after the budget was announced and it was discovered that the government was trying to pull a fast one, or maybe make policy through the Department of Finance, and either way we look at it, it is the wrong direction, in my opinion, I brought forward the proposed changes to members of my community. I called all the people who worked with immigrant communities, the Catholic immigration service in Ottawa, the OCISO, a wonderful group that deals with issues of resettlement, language training and foreign credential recognition, et cetera, the Jewish family services, which does an excellent job with integration and supporting newcomers, as well as other groups and individuals. I explained to them the proposed changes. The first question was, “Why didn't the government consult us?” I did not have an answer for them because the government did not consult anyone on the bill.
It was more than passing strange that the government would bring in such aggressive changes to the immigration act without consulting anyone. In fact, all it did was come up with this idea, its own brain trust, and popped it into the budget bill, the details of which I will get into in a minute.
However, let us stop right there and consider this. The government brings in these very aggressive changes to the immigration act without consulting the people who work day in and day out to ensure the people who are affected by issues of immigration and settlement will be represented. Many of them are volunteers and they do it because they care about immigration and settlement and want to ensure it is done right and done responsibly. It is more than bizarre. It begs the question, what is it the government is trying to achieve?
If we look at the provisions within the immigration changes that are in Bill C-50 and why we are proposing these amendments, we will find the direction of the government on immigration. The government wants to ensure the ability of the government to bring in temporary workers so that they can be used, and I use that word deliberately, for a short period of time and then get them out of the country.
We only have to hear the stories of people presently working in the tar sands, people who are working in agriculture in British Columbia and other places, people who are working in mining, to know that these jobs are extremely dangerous. They are ones that require robust health and safety provisions. They should have fair wages. What the government has been able to do is meet the needs, not of new Canadians, but of fairly substantive economic interests in this country that will benefit from cheap labour. They will benefit from the fact that the government will bring in people quickly, use them up and then not have them stay around much longer.
What is so distressing is that the government wants to make these changes, just after the government did what I believe is the right thing. We on this side of the House applauded the government when it actually made amends and apologized for the Chinese head tax. I remember well the speeches by members on both sides of the House, by the leaders and the Prime Minister. It was a good day for Canada. I remember going to the Yangtze restaurant in Ottawa's Chinatown. We had a great celebration party. I believe you attended that, Mr. Speaker, and I think you spoke in Cantonese. It was a great day.
It saddens me and it saddens the community in general that soon after that acknowledgement and apology, the government is replicating in the 21st century what was done in the 18th century, which is to bring in temporary workers simply to use them, and when it is finished with them to send them back. That is the problem with Bill C-50.
We have to consider what we could have done. Everyone would argue that we should deal with the backlog in the immigration system. People who work in immigration settlement will tell us to put more resources overseas to make sure that when people apply for landed immigrant status and go through the points system, they know exactly what the situation is going to be when they come to Canada. They will tell us to make sure that rather than having just websites, there be actual human resources deployed overseas to help people with the process. They will tell us to ensure that when people are applying for landed immigrant status, they have all of their background documents in place and to support them in doing that. That would shorten the time period. On the other side of the equation, we have to make sure that here in Canada we have the requisite resources to ensure that we can streamline the system.
As an aside, it is interesting that when the Minister of Immigration brought forward these proposals, strangely enough in Bill C-50, as this is the budget bill, she said that the government had made great progress in streamlining the application process. She said that the department was able to process 40% more of the applications. She said that on the one hand, but on the other hand, she said that the system is so bungled up and has such weight on it that extreme changes have to be made.
It does not balance to say on one hand that her department is making this great progress, lauding herself and her ministry, and on the other hand that things are so grave and awful that we have to make these extreme changes to centralize power in the minister's office. When we look at Bill C-50 and we look at this kind of doublespeak of the government, one has to look at what the government is trying to achieve here. It seems that the government is trying to achieve a fast one, as I said before.
In the end, these amendments we have put forward should be passed so we can make sure we have a fair system for all.
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Mr. Speaker, certainly we have a very unified position in this party about this bill and about the need to remove these onerous provisions from it.
I want to speak about the backlog of applicants. Is it the reality that there is no backlog for student visas, temporary resident visas and temporary foreign workers visas In Canada? Will Bill C-50 take away the rights of these applicants to be given a visa even when they meet all the qualifications?
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Mr. Speaker, if we look at the backlog that the government claims the bill will deal with and we look at these provisions in the budget and Bill C-50, it will not help anyone who is presently here. In fact, the government has admitted that.
The government says there is a backlog of 925,000. Earlier today it was calculated at close to a billion, but I understand that was corrected. We are talking about a backlog of close to 925,000 people. The government says that is the case and we will take the government at its word on that. The legislative changes will only affect applications submitted after February 27, 2008. It will have absolutely no effect, zero effect, on the backlog of 925,000.
Not only does this bill not help the people it purports to help, but the government has a problem with acknowledging there is a backlog and it is bringing in these changes to streamline the system. The government should have consulted with the people who know about the system and who work in the system every day. The government would have found that there are other ways of dealing with the backlog that would be less onerous and would actually open up the system and get the people we need to the places where they should be going.
As an example, there is a challenge here in Ottawa to find a family physician. We also know there are 500 foreign trained doctors right here in Ottawa. That study was put together more than a year ago.
The other rationale the government puts forward is that we need to bring in skilled labour, medical professionals, et cetera. Tell that to the people who are driving taxis here in Ottawa, who have their foreign credentials to practise medicine, but sadly they cannot because the government has not figured out how to streamline the system.
My point is that if the government is making the argument that it needs to streamline the system for the backlog, it is not going to work for that, and if it is for skilled workers, we already have the skilled workers here. What is going to change with the system for them? The government simply says it will get more of them in. What happens when they get here?
Until the government deals with that reality, this bill has no place in this place and it has not been thought out. Those provisions need to be removed. That is why these amendments have been put forward.
Keith Martin Liberal Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC
Mr. Speaker, does my colleague believe that the government's significant mismanagement of the economy by eviscerating the financial and economic capabilities of Ottawa is somehow in keeping with its ideology? The Conservative government believes that its ideology is good for Canada. Some of us believe it is significantly damaging to Canada. The fact is the government leadership believes that we are simply the sum of our parts, whereas many of us believe that we are greater than the sum of our parts.
Does the member believe that a strong Ottawa working with strong provincial leaderships would enable our Canada to achieve its potential?
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Mr. Speaker, I would always support a strong Ottawa. It is something we should all support.
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Mr. Speaker, I am rising to speak to Bill C-50, the budget implementation act, and the amendments we put forward to try to bring some rationale to the situation and the future of immigration in this country.
I come from a part of the country which in the past may not have been the prime destination for immigrants to Canada, but over the last number of years that has changed quite dramatically. Immigrants are coming to communities throughout the Northwest Territories. In many cases they face completely different living and climatic conditions. They work really hard to integrate themselves into Canada and into the burgeoning economy in the Northwest Territories. We are grateful that people are coming to contribute to our economy, to live in the north, to work and to support the development of our territory. That is a great thing. In Yellowknife right now there are 27 different ethnic groups. Clearly this is a result of this immigration movement.
It is difficult for people as they have to fight their way through the process to get into the country. We seem to have created a system in which immigrants have to spend much of their time and energy on paperwork, rather than focusing on their goals as immigrants and accomplishing things, like reuniting their families in this country.
My constituency office handles many cases every year. Many of those cases reference the particular hardships that individuals have experienced in establishing their lives in Canada because they cannot get through the system. They cannot accomplish their goals within the system in a reasonable time. The bureaucratic structures are not adequate to give them the support they need to make proper representations in the immigration system. In many cases that leads them to the member of Parliament's office for assistance.
In the Northwest Territories there is only one immigration officer and that person has other duties to fulfill in terms of enforcing other parts of the act. That person cannot act only as a guide to the immigrants within the country who are trying to move forward with their lives. We suffer from a huge shortage of manpower required to make the system work better. That is the case in my riding where we have a total of 43,000 people. Community groups do their best to help out with the situation. We have a structure which I think in some ways is more amenable to supporting individuals, but the fact that this is the situation in my riding suggests to me that it is even more of a problem elsewhere in the country.
Therefore, when we want to propose changes to the Immigration Act, I think it is incumbent upon everyone to get all the evidence. This process that the Conservative Party has foisted on the House to deal with immigration is simply not correct or appropriate for making that happen. It is a back door approach to making changes.
It was outed very early once the bill came forward because of course these things are scrutinized fairly closely. It did not work quite the way the Conservatives wanted, but the opportunities to then work on this legislation were sorely limited because it was handled in this particular fashion.
The changes to the act that in many cases we find most repugnant as Canadians are that we are taking away the democratic nature of the system as it exists now. We are not trying to improve the efficiency of the system or properly build up the resources needed to make the system work.
As well, we are not dealing with the problems we have in many of our embassies in other countries. Rather than utilizing Canadians who are used to dealing with our system in the same democratic and useful fashion, we find that in many cases we are utilizing nationals from the countries where the embassies are located. In my time as a member of Parliament, that has noticeably impacted on the ability of immigrants to acquire visas and move forward in a smooth fashion through the many hoops and stumbling blocks that exist for people who are applying for a visa or trying to be reunited with their families.
These problems are not going to be solved by this bill, because it is going in the wrong direction. At the same time, when we stand to ask for these issues to be removed from this bill, we are by no means suggesting that there is nothing wrong with the Immigration Act. It is just that what is being proposed here does not fit the Canadian model. It does not address the resource issues that are quite clearly dominating many of the problems and leading to these huge backlogs in the system.
The Conservatives, in their few years here, have not been able to even make a dent in that backlog. In fact, the backlog has gotten larger.
Their solution, especially the idea that there will be yearly quotas and at the end of the year all the applications that are not part of the quota will be rejected, is a really bad thing. It will discourage people from coming to this country. It will discourage people from making applications. There will be constant intrigue in the department in regard to trying to find out where these different classifications or directions are going to go.
All of this is going to lead to a complete breakdown in the system and take us away from the values that Canadians have so much pride in. In fact, idealistically, we send our armed forces around the world to try to uphold those values in other countries.
What this bill is doing is creating an arbitrary, authoritarian potential within the department, although it does not necessarily have to be that way. We could argue that the minister could be a most altruistic and wonderful individual who would not use the difference between “may” and “shall” in many of these points to discriminate against applicants. However, human nature being what it is, I think we have found in Canada that the best way to avoid discrimination and maintain a democratic system is to have rules that match up to that.
It is a phenomenon that I see so much in Canada: we do not jump queues in this country. We take our time. We fill the time we have available to us--
The Acting Speaker Conservative Royal Galipeau
I am sorry, but the hon. member is taking somebody else's time, so we will have questions and comments. The first question comes from the hon. member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca.
Keith Martin Liberal Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC
Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my NDP colleague in regard to getting back to the economics of our country. This is so central to the ability of Canadians to have the life they want in order to provide for their families and to us as a Parliament and a government to have the assets to serve our citizens.
Does the hon. member think the Conservative government has made serious errors in what it has done to eviscerate the financial capabilities of the federal government by putting the finances of the Canadian government on the brink of a deficit situation?
Does he think the dropping of two percentage points on the GST was an abysmal mistake? Would it have been preferable to put moneys directly, through a non-refundable tax credit, to the poor and the middle class? Would that have been a much more preferable way of getting money into the hands of those of modest means in our country, those who need it most?
That would be much more preferable than the blanket drop in the GST, which actually preferentially helps those who are most affluent, because the more we spend, the more we can benefit from a drop in the GST. As well, we know that those who are least fortunate in our country are spending money on rent and food. In other words, they are spending their money on items that are GST exempt.
Does he agree that the government has taken quite an immoral position and has been quite cavalier and damaging to our country by affecting the finances of our nation in such a negative way?
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Mr. Speaker, we spoke endlessly in the fall on our feelings about the changes in the tax system that were initiated in that mini budget in November. We are not in favour of them, especially the corporate tax cuts that were made. They were wrong-headed and wrongly directed, because 50% of the corporate profits in this country are made either by the banks or by the oil companies. We saw a huge infusion to that group.
What has happened in the last three months in this country is quite serious. Now that the figures have come out, we see that we have a 0.3% drop in the GDP, but at the same time we have seen a huge increase in the price of resources in the resource industries. We know that our gross domestic product has been inflated by the very high prices of oil and gas, fertilizer and all manner of resources. At the same time, we are seeing a drop in the total gross domestic product.
I would say that the situation is even more severe on that point. The only expansion in our economy is in areas where the resources are being exploited. In the areas where they are not, we are obviously underachieving.
The tax breaks have not interested a lot of people in the manufacturing sector because that is not what they need. They need strategic investment. They need incentives to do the right things. They need money to retool. Those are the sorts of things that industry really requires and that it did not get from the Conservative government.
The Acting Speaker Conservative Royal Galipeau
Questions and comments. This will be a 30-second question.