Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to debate this bill. I commend my colleague from Trinity—Spadina for her diligence and hard work on immigrant issues, about which she is very passionate. I would normally say she is quite well-informed about those issues, however I cannot say that after having heard her speech tonight.
First, I register strongly with her comments about Ireland Park and the Irish immigrants of 1847, including my great-great-grandfather, the Irish and other European young people seeking employment opportunities in Canada and elsewhere right now. I agree entirely that our immigration system ought to be flexible and supple enough to respond to emerging developments like that, where we have a large number of skilled young people who could come to Canada, work their whole lives, pay taxes in our country and who could be not just an economic part of our economy, but also fully active citizens.
Let us be clear about this. Canada is maintaining the largest immigration program in the developed world. We welcome the equivalent of 0.8% of our population per year. Just to put that in perspective, the second-largest immigrant receiving country in proportionate terms is Australia at 0.5% of population. The United Kingdom, one of the most open countries in Europe with respect to immigration, is this year capping intake at 100,000 for a population twice our size.
To put it in perspective, by orders of magnitude, we are the most open country to immigration. It was not always this way. For example, under the Liberal government in the 1970s and 1980s, the maximum number of immigrants allowed in 1983, for example, under the Liberal administration at that time, was about 85,000 immigrants. During that Liberal recession, the Liberals slashed immigration rates in half.
This government decided to maintain high immigration levels during this recession. In fact, last year we welcomed 281,000 new permanent residents, the highest number of immigrants landed in Canada in 57 years and the second-highest number of immigrants landed in Canada in over nine decades. Let us put that on the record. There is not a heck of a lot of political debate about this. As a country, we are open. We are generous to economic immigrants, to refugees and to family members.
First, we have to acknowledge that there are practical limits to how many people we can put through the immigration process in a given year, with limited resources and so on. There are practical limits to how many people we can settle. People talk about the problem of homelessness. In my city of Calgary, counterintuitively, it is one of the most vibrant communities in the country economically, but there is a fair degree of homelessness because so many people are coming for jobs and there are not enough homes available.
We need to have an immigration program that is sensitive to our capacity to accept people, to ensure they get jobs. One of the biggest concerns we should all have is that newcomers have a disproportionately high unemployment rate. Do we really want to massively increase the overall rate of immigration only to invite people here to face unemployment? Do we really want to burden our provincial and local governments with newcomers above and beyond the current levels when there are challenges with respect to public schooling and health care?
I would suggest, as the minister responsible for the highest level of immigration in six decades, we need to be mindful of the limits. We should also be mindful of public opinion.
Last September Angus Reid did a poll that confirmed results from the year previous, which indicated nationally and in Ontario the numbers were almost identical. The member comes from Ontario so I will tell her that only 15% of Ontarians said that we should increase immigration levels, 36% said to stay the same, 42% said to decrease immigration. Therefore, 78% of her fellow Ontarians said that we should keep the same levels or to decrease them.
A moment ago, she implied the way we could accommodate both these young economic prospective immigrants from Ireland and all the potentially millions of additional family members she proposes through the bill would be to increase the overall levels from 265,000 in our current plan 1% of population, which would be 340,000.
Our ministry does not have the capacity to process anything close to 340,000 people. I am highly skeptical that our municipalities and provincial governments have the capacity to absorb that many newcomers in terms of social programs, health care, educational services and housing.
I am very concerned. Let me be blunt about this. We are unique in the democratic world in having a robustly pro-immigration political consensus among the political parties. We are one of the only democracies that does not have a xenophobic voice in our democratic debates in our politics. I want to keep it that way. I do not want these poll numbers to turn into a negative reaction to immigration.
I have a special responsibility as the minister, but we all have a responsibility in this place, not to make some of the mistakes that, for example, in western Europe have led to xenophobia and hostility to newcomers. This is why I would suggest that while we can keep robust levels, we need to be mindful of how many people Canadians think we can receive.
One thing I would like to point out as a pre-emptive rebuttal, in case anyone suggests that these 78% of Canadians are somehow closet xenophobes and anti-immigrant, is the public attitudes in immigration among new Canadians who moved here, who immigrated here, are the same as the general population. Immigrants to Canada say that they like immigration, but that we need a manageable program and that we should not increase by orders of magnitude. This is the real problem we have.
We have the largest program in the world, yet there are all sorts of competing demands for the scarce amount of spaces there. Let us call it 265,000 spaces for new permanent residents. That is the maximum in our planning range, as it has been for about seven years, under two separate governments.
How do we select who those 265,000 people are going to be? After all, we have a managed immigration program. We want to choose the right mix of people who will fuel our economic growth, pay taxes and help to manage the enormous unfunded future liabilities for health care, social programs and public pensions. We want people who will integrate successfully. At the same time, we want to recognize our humanitarian obligation to refugees. As the member will acknowledge, our government is increasing the target for resettled refugees by 20%. We also obviously want to facilitate reasonable levels of family-class immigration.
The member's bill would massively expand the family reunification program by allowing, essentially, anyone to come here. Based on the categories she defines in Bill C-566, my department advises me that we would be creating the capacity of “several millions” new prospective family-class immigrant applicants.
If the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act is amended in this fashion, that would mean we would receive hundreds of thousands, prospectively millions, of applications that we would be obliged, legally, to process. What happens to those applicants? They submit their applications and their fees. They say “hooray member for Trinity—Spadina” because she is allowing them, as cousins of a Canadians, or nieces or nephews, and I am surprised she did not include godchildren, to enter the country, to make an application.
Do members know what that would mean? They are going to wait. Forget about waiting for five years or ten years. They are going to wait for decades. This bill is a recipe for making false promises.
We already have the most generous family immigration program in the world. Of the 181,000 immigrants we received last year, 180,000 were either the immediate dependants of primary immigrants or subsequently sponsored parents, grandparents, spouses and children.
Consistently, over the past 15 years, on average two-thirds of the immigrants landed in Canada were not primary economic immigrants, which she dismisses as economic units, they were family members. What she is proposing is going from a ratio of one primary economic immigrant to every two family members to completely turning that on its head.
I want those bright, young Irish and other folks who want to come and work here, but we need to attract them through our economic immigration programs. If we crowd out all the space with our federal skilled worker program, our provincial nominee programs, by massively expanding the family class, that means those bright, young Irish and other folks will be unable to come here because they are the classic economic immigrants.
The House might get the impression that I am opposed to the bill.