Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in this place on behalf of the good people of Davenport in the great city of Toronto to speak to Bill C-24. It is of vital interest to the people in my community of Davenport, in fact to people right across the greater Toronto area, because over half the people in the GTA were born outside of Canada, so any changes to our citizenship and immigration rules, laws, or structures are of vital interest to the people I represent.
What we have here is a gross failure on the part of the government to address the fundamental issue facing so many of our immigrant families in Canada, and that is the failure of the government, in this legislation and in other pieces of legislation it has brought forward, to deal with the growing wait times, not just for citizenship but for family reunification. The bill does not address those issues. In fact, it makes those issues worse.
Right now we have about 360,000 people waiting for their citizenship applications to be processed. What we would have liked to have seen is the government expedite this, bring this issue forward, in a way that would actually get some resolution for so many families who are in sort of suspended animation. They are doing the work. In every other way they are Canadian citizens, except that they have not had their applications processed. They are waiting and waiting.
The bill also underlines a strategy the government employs time and time again, and that is to pick the outlier problem and use it as the justification for massive changes that would maybe appease some of its base but that would not address the fundamental issues immigrants in Canada face today.
I would like to bring the attention of the House to the issue of fraud in the system. We have over 300,000 applicants for citizenship right now. The other day the minister admitted that only 3,000 of those over 300,000 are being investigated by the RCMP for potential fraud. Fewer than 1% are being investigated, and we do not know what those investigations will glean. Of that fewer than 1%, they may find some fraud. I am not saying that there is not some, but the government and the minister are using this fraction of abuse in the system as a rationale for sweeping changes, changes that would, as they do so often on the government side, amass more power in the hands of the minister, power that would allow the minister to retroactively change someone's citizenship status.
If the Conservatives had listened to stakeholder groups, they would have heard quite resoundingly the deep concern of Canadians, immigrants, and the organizations that support and advocate on behalf of both refugees and newcomers to Canada.
I would like to also underline the fact that the government has changed the language test requirements. It has made it now the rule that anyone between the ages of 14 and 64 needs to undergo a rigorous language test. The minister has never once revealed any data that would back up any reasons for the changes he has made. He says that young people would score great on this test, and it would be great. We know that.
However, he has never brought forward any study that shows that this is indeed the case. The minister has never answered the question regarding what would happen if the child does not pass the language test, but the adult does. What happens then? I believe that one of the reasons that the government moved time allocation on the debate is because it does not want to answer the tough questions that are being raised on this bill. The questions just keep coming.
Today, there are families in my riding who have been waiting eight to nine years for grandparents and parents to come to Canada, and for the government to fulfill the promises that it made to newcomers when they first came that they could bring their parents or grandparents with them. What we have now is a government that says it going to fix the wait times for citizenship by making it much harder. In other words, the government would make the process and the system longer.
Some of it seems to make absolutely no sense. It the government wanted to ensure that those who were seeking Canadian citizenship would forge a real attachment to Canada, why on Earth would it then disqualify all of the time that a person has spent here as a non-permanent resident from their application?
That makes no sense. It sends a huge message to people. It tells them not to attach to us because we are not going to attach to them right now. That is fundamentally the wrong way to go, and it was not the case here in Canada until now, when the government politicized this debate.
The extended times required to stay in Canada are also an issue for many immigrants. In case the government has not realized, Canadians travel abroad for work all the time. We are in a globalized economy. We have Canadians working in the United States and we have Canadians working all across Europe and Asia, looking for opportunities. When they arise, Canadian citizens can take those opportunities, but the changes that are in this bill would make it more difficult for permanent residents who are waiting for citizenship. Indeed, after they are granted citizenship, it would make it harder for them to take the opportunities that are there in the global economy.
This seems incredibly unfair, and it brings up the point that my colleague from Scarborough—Rouge River made earlier about the creation of two-tiered citizenship. Making it more difficult for new citizens to take those opportunities elsewhere in the economy is also a way of creating a two-tiered system of citizenship in this country.
People should not be surprised that this is the direction that the government has gone in. After all, when we are giving a message to immigrant families that their grandparents and parents are not as important to Canadians as Canadian-born grandparents and parents, of course, we have a two-tiered system.
We have always had families at the basis of our immigration system. The government, through its policies, whether on refugees or immigration, has moved Canada away from family values. It has seen families being torn apart. Quite frankly, we have to build an immigration that has, at its core and as its central function, the goal of keeping families together and a part of the Canadian community. The New Democrats on this side are committed to that.