Mr. Speaker, the government will be announcing the 2018 immigration levels plan soon. This will provide an opportunity for the government to match its lofty rhetoric with action. Far too often, the government makes grand statements and fails to act on them. When it does act, the action, unfortunately, seems to revolve only around meeting a self-interested goal, with short-sighted planning and one-time exceptions. Then it is just back to more consulting.
We saw this with the Syrian refugee initiative. If it were not for Canadians from coast to coast to coast stepping up, the government would have fallen short of its lofty promise, even after changing that promise three times. While taking as many self-congratulating photo ops as possible, the government failed to provide the necessary funding for resettlement services once its resettlement target was hit.
We continue to see long wait lists for newcomers trying to access language training and a lack of child care spots, which has a disproportionate impact on newcomer women. So much for our feminist Prime Minister. We heard at committee about the extensive pro bono work being done by Canadian medical professionals due to the inadequacies of the interim federal health program. We also heard about refugees struggling to pay back travel loans while seeing the one-time exception of the government's waiving travel loans for a select cohort of Syrian refugees to ensure that enough people could arrive before its self-imposed deadline.
For this year, we saw the government immediately scale back refugee resettlement, squandering the humanitarian drive of Canadians by capping private refugee sponsorships, and committing to only 7,500 government-assisted refugees. This year, the government has also failed to take leadership in dealing with the situation of asylum seekers crossing the border. There was a lofty tweet and then months of ignoring the repercussions. Despite underfunding and understaffing at the Immigration and Refugee Board, the government continued to ignore calls for action, even as the IRB's backlog increased by 1,000 cases per month, which has now, by the way, increased to 1,400 cases per month, and still no action being taken in response, only consultation and more review.
In the meantime, the IRB is forced to rob Peter to pay Paul, reallocating its internal funding and experienced staff to clear the legacy claim backlog. At this rate, the writing is on the wall: the government's failure to act is going to create legacy claims 2.0 when all is said and done. This will leave the parliamentary secretary's successor forced to respond down the road, as he did in response to my question in May when he said, “The board also set up a working group to deal with the existing caseload, which will help eliminate the backlog of refugee claims inherited from the previous government.” The government cannot claim to be living up to its promise to “deliver a safe, secure, and humane refugee system” when it continues to ignore the needs of the IRB. People's lives become trapped in limbo as they spend years wondering what will happen with their files. It is unjust and, frankly, inhumane.
Does the government plan on matching its words with actions? Will next year's levels plan match its humanitarian rhetoric? Will it finally provide the IRB with the resources it needs?