Madam Speaker, it is with great pleasure that I rise tonight to debate the amendments to Bill C-6.
I think a lot of Canadians in the last year have realized how important the issue of immigration is to the country, not so much as an if immigration is important conversation but how we do it well. Bill C-6 is the Liberal government's first legislation to deal with immigration. In the ensuing time since Bill C-6 was originally put in front of the House, many issues related to how we do immigration in Canada have come up which the government has not addressed.
To provide context for the Senate amendments, it is first important to paint a picture of how we got here.
There are several components to Bill C-6, including issues which I will speak to at length, issues such as language proficiency for people who seek to become citizens, at what age they become exempt from those requirements and why, the situations and circumstances under which people can have their citizenship revoked and why, and how they are addressed in the bill.
There are other very important components to Bill C-6, but I want to start with restating the position I and my party have on the components of Bill C-6 in its original form.
New Canadians enrich and strengthen our country. Their experiences and perspectives make us stronger. Immigration is an important part of who we are as a nation and the strength of our nation's future. We want newcomers to Canada to have every opportunity to succeed, opportunities for economic success, the experience of our many freedoms, and the experience of safe communities.
We are concerned that the Liberals' first priority, when it came to tabling legislation and public safety legislation, was to effectively give back the citizenship and protect the rights of a committed member of the Toronto 18, Zakaria Amara.
Under the bill, a dual national citizenship cannot be revoked for committing a terrorist act, but can be for fraud. Revocation for obtaining citizenship under fraudulent circumstances is still allowed under the bill, but the amendments would materially impact this component.
The bill would also lower the language requirements for citizenship, but we believe adequate knowledge of either French or English is a key factor in successful integration into our communities and the labour force. Canadian citizenship bestows rights and protections that many foreign nationals do not have. As Canadians, they can vote and seek an elected office. Proficiency in our official languages helps enrich both their experience and our country's future. This again speaks to the residency requirement that has been changed in Bill C-6. These are material changes that Bill C-6 would make to how we would allow immigration in Canada.
The parliamentary committee review on Bill C-6, after it progressed from second reading, gives me cause for alarm on a few things. When we asked for quantitative justification on why some of these changes were made, both the minister and the officials were not able to answer. That is concerning. I do not think we should provide arbitrary justification for changing things such as the age of the language requirement. There should be some justification or rationale given that language is a unifier, for example.
The same thing goes for the residency requirement that has been changed in Bill C-6. I do not know why no justification was given by the minister, officials, etc., on how this would impact the ability of newcomers to Canada to spend time to connect with our country, promoting successful integration, both for the newcomers of Canada, as well as Canadian society as a whole. A lot of testimony was lacking on Bill C-6.
I have followed the progress of this bill through the Senate. I think that the Senate was wise to look through the form and substance and make some changes to it, some that I accept and some that I do not. I also notice that the Liberal government has made changes to some of the amendments that have come forward, and I want to speak to those as well.
Again, the bill was tabled well over a year ago now. In the ensuing time, a lot of things have happened in Canada with regard to immigration. The migrant crisis in the Middle East has escalated. It is now, I would say, a top policy concern, not just for European nations that are being impacted by it but as a humanitarian crisis that impacts every country around the world.
We are having very serious conversations about how many people we allow into the country and under what circumstances. I just feel that as a country, we have not completed the sentence that started with “We are bringing 30,000 Syrian refugees to Canada”, or whatever the number was.
We, in our parliamentary committee, had a very in-depth study on the Syrian refugee initiative, and one of the most moving moments for me in the last year of my parliamentary career was listening to a Syrian refugee talk about not being able to access language training services because of issues such as child care and lack of funding for some of these programs. I was very disheartened when the Calgary Board of Education appeared before that same committee in that same study to talk about how the Calgary Board of Education gladly and with open hearts welcomed several hundred Syrian refugee students—the equivalent, as they said, of an entire new elementary school in the Calgary school system—yet had had no conversation with the minister or with the provincial government on how to address the funding needs that were precipitated by having to address the unique and worthy needs of these students coming into the school system.
We have to understand that many of these children that we welcome into Canada have had very difficult lives. They have grown up in refugee camps. They have fled from their homes. Their education has been interrupted.
I notice that the government's talking points have changed since the campaign, just recently. Until now it has always been about numbers. There is a flip side to that coin, which is how to support these people into success.
The result of that committee study was some very damning testimony on the state of our government's plan to provide support for these refugees. The minister has only appeared before our committee once since he has been appointed. I find that very odd, but when he did appear, we asked a very pointed question about how many government-sponsored Syrian refugees had found employment, and he was not able or willing to answer the question until he was repeatedly put under the gun. It was to the point of my frustration and everyone else's to admit that the government does not have a plan to help refugees integrate with employment or to have an honest conversation to ask, “Should we as a country be expecting Syrian refugees who have lived through this situation to find employment, and if so, what is the cost of that to the Canadian public and how will we pay for it?”
That is not a sexy conversation. It is not one that will sell a campaign slogan very well, but it is one that is worthy. As a legislator I feel a level of responsibility to the people we brought to this country. If their success is not guaranteed or seen through, not only have we failed them, but we have also failed to develop social licence within the Canadian public, writ large, for sustained high levels of refugee admissions, and that is my concern.
When I look at the rhetoric that happened around Brexit, the rhetoric that happened in the American election, I am greatly concerned that unless we have a very difficult and worthy conversation on how we deal with the issues of integration of newcomers to Canada, we will continue to see this type of us-versus-them rhetoric, when in fact there is no “them” anymore. We are a globally integrated community.
We need to have government policy, with honesty in that policy, in order to see success in the long term, and I am not seeing it there.
To go back to Bill C-6, this bill was introduced in the House of Commons and has gone through successive stages of passage without dealing with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Speaking further to the Syrian refugee initiative, I found it very disheartening to spend nearly six months working with members of my caucus to raise attention on the Yazidi genocide. While I realize there are many people in need in the Middle East, surely when a genocide occurs, there are people who require immediate and out-of-the-box-thinking help. The fact that it took us so long to acknowledge the genocide and then to include Yazidi genocide victims as part of our commitment to bringing high levels of refugees to Canada was very disheartening.
I am going to be very blunt. I strongly feel that our process for selecting and prioritizing refugees and internally displaced people for resettlement is flawed. I met with one of the representatives from the United Nations who deals with referrals to Canada through the government-assisted refugee program, and I asked very bluntly, “Why were there zero Yazidi genocide victims referred to Canada as part of the government-assisted refugee program?” I had my staffer in the office, so there were two people there who witnessed this. The answer that came back was essentially that they were under a very severe time crunch from the government to fulfill a quota, and it was easier to refer the people they did. In that moment I wondered, “Are we seeking to do what is easy, or are we seeking to do what is right?”
A process that cannot refer genocide victims to our country for resettlement is flawed. I am not saying it is necessarily the government's fault. It becomes the government's fault when we fail to discuss these issues in a way that seeks justice and beauty in our immigration processes, and there is none of this in any of the government's approach or forward motion on the immigration file.
Since that discussion, it has been interesting to watch the international reaction, because I think that there has been some acknowledgement that the process by which Canada selects refugees to come to our country deserves the scrutiny of Parliament. That has not happened at all, but internationally people are starting to realize that it is a topic worthy of debate.
Right now, we know that there are gay men in Chechnya who have been rounded up and are being placed in concentration camps simply because of their sexual orientation and who they are, and they are being persecuted and tortured. That is wrong. That is a place for Canada to use our refugee resettlement policy as a way to send a strong diplomatic message to states that sanction this activity, yet we have a failure to be able to act. Every single time a situation of urgency like this happens, we should have some sort of mechanism as parliamentarians or within the government to respond to these crises without having to spend opposition day motions and go through political chicanery for months in order to do what is right.
I do not think there is a single person in this place who would disagree with me that we need to be bringing Yazidi genocide victims to Canada under resettlement or that we need to be addressing the issue of gay men being tortured and persecuted in Chechnya or that we need to be addressing the issue of the South Sudanese, which I am sure will be declared a genocide in very short order.
The point is that we do not have a mechanism to deal with this situation. The government comes forward with talking points, saying it relies on the UN to provide lists of refugees to come to Canada. In that case, we should be able to audit those processes. None of that has been discussed in any of the amendments or this bill. It is a glaring gap for me.
I realize we cannot change the bureaucracy of Canada overnight, like the United Nations, so the trick becomes how Canada can exert pressure. There are many worthy things the UN does, but on this issue, it cannot respond quickly enough. The United Nations does not have a nimble way of dealing with the resettlement of internally displaced persons. It does not have a nimble way of referring genocide survivors or people living with the situation in Chechnya to us. That is something we should be asking the United Nations to change.
Where is the government on this issue? It is silent. For a government that purports to be compassionate on refugee resettlement, not using its leadership position to ask these questions, which are not partisan but humanitarian, is a glaring gap. I do not know why we do not have a subcommittee to our parliamentary committee to deal with the issue of internally displaced persons in emergent situations, such as ones in Chechnya or South Sudan.
I have to give credit to the chair of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration across the aisle, who I felt put partisanship aside and went to bat in his caucus to have a hearing on the Yazidi genocide, which led to action going forward. We should not have to argue over whether we will study something and then study it to death while people are dying when we could have intervened. It is a great frustration and sadness for me. Members of the government have privately talked to me and said it is a frustration for them too, yet the government has refused to act.
My request to the government on this issue is that it put partisanship and the rhetoric of the United Nations aside and say that this needs to change, that we cannot act this way anymore.
The second thing I would like the government to do with regard to refugee resettlement is be honest about the fact that what was said in the campaign was not the reality. I remember television talk show panels and debates on the question of the Syrian refugee crisis, and two things came up. The first was a game of one-upmanship on who was going to bring more people here, which I found deplorable.
I remember being on a panel with former minister McCallum and listening to some of the things he said. He said the initiative was going to cost no more than $250 million within the context of a fully costed platform, and he also made a very clear statement that refugees add to the Canadian economy. They might, but we have seen that many government-assisted refugees who came to Canada under this initiative—I believe the minister said 90%—have not found jobs 13 months after they came to Canada. That number is important because that is when their refugee resettlement funds run out.
The fact that the numbers are so high is at odds with what the then minister said during the campaign. We should have a conversation on whether we expect government-assisted refugees to become employed. Many Canadians would say yes, some Canadians would say no, but regardless of what the government chooses or feels on that question, it needs to be honest with the Canadian public about the cost of integration and support over the long term, and it has not done that. It has not done that to date.
I asked the minister in committee about there being no planning for the cost of social assistance payments for refugees who do not find jobs. That might seem very callous, but the government made a statement during the campaign about the economic impact of refugees. It should have said it was going to be charitable and would support refugees, told us how much it was going to cost, and asked Canada to give it a mandate to do that, but it chose not to.
In doing so, the Liberals off-loaded the cost to provincial governments, including my provincial government, which is having some very tough times right now. Who is left in the lurch on all of this? It is the refugees themselves.
We heard testimony from one Syrian refugee at our committee who said that they were living in a bug-infested apartment. This is not the experience that Canada should be offering to newcomers. We should be talking about things like the cost of affordable housing, the cost of social assistance, and special education for children who have had their education disrupted, yet we are not. This allows the rhetoric of not helping: What about me? What about us?
To be honest, it is the right of Canadian taxpayers to ask how much this is going to cost and why we are doing this. However, we have not had a space to have a public debate on this topic in this place, which is why I am very pleased to stand tonight to finally be able to put this on the record in the House of Commons.
It is very, very frustrating. As the years go by and we follow Syrian refugees, my prayer and hope is that they are going to be successful. However, when I hear numbers like 90% not finding employment after one year, what is the plan? What is the government doing to move them to a place of employment? What about the lack of language training services? What about the fact that there might not be the best alignment in terms of educational systems? The government has not completed the sentence on this project. Moreover, the Liberals have not completed the sentence on this project where they are failing some of the world's most vulnerable, like genocide survivors, or LGBTQ who have been persecuted.
We just underwent a study in committee on how Canada can support LGBTQ refugees. However, there is nothing in the bill or any of the amendments that have dealt with this. The reality is that LGBTQ members of this community are some of the world's most vulnerable and persecuted people. We know there are countries that have state-sanctioned persecution of members of this community.
Our former government started a pilot project that provided assistance to an NGO to prioritize and assist in bringing persecuted members of the LGBTQ community to Canada through our refugee program. However, the current government has not committed to making that an ongoing program to date. Where is that in how we do immigration in Canada? It is nowhere in the bill or in the amendments. Again, the testimony we heard in committee on that issue was heart wrenching. It is one thing to stand and march in a Pride parade in Canada and to acknowledge that we still have work to do at home, but it is another thing entirely to be silent on how Canada is assisting members of this community through formal government policy, including refugee resettlement.
It is not just about refugee resettlement. Whenever we look at international policy related to displaced persons or migrant crises, there is more than just the resettlement component of the policy stool. There is also the question of military intervention, and long-term aid and development, to build civil society and processes by which people can stay in their indigenous homelands, which is certainly something that is a question around genocides. Is resettlement the only option? The government, especially on this issue, has been largely silent. As we said—