Mr. Speaker, back in June, I was able to ask the Prime Minister directly in the House, given his stated commitment to families and family reunification, why someone's parents or grandparents coming to Canada was based on the luck of the draw. This was in the face of media reports that said that in fact the lottery system was worked off an Excel spreadsheet and subject to rigging. Thankfully, since asking that question in question period four months ago or so, communities across Canada came together to denounce the idea of family reunification being determined by the luck of the draw and the government had no choice but to abandon the parent/grandparent lottery system. It was an honour to bring those concerns to the House and I am grateful to the people back home in Nanaimo—Ladysmith, who let me know what impact this was having on their families.
However, the New Democrats remain concerned that the government has decided to go back to a first-come, first-served race to get an application in before the application cap is hit. This is almost identical to the system prior to the lottery, and just like family reunification should not be a matter of chance, it should not be a race either.
I am proud my colleague, the member for Vancouver East, said, “I will continue to advocate for a parent/grandparent system that reflects what Canadians want, the elimination of the annual application cap, increasing the annual levels plan space to accommodate the desire of Canadians to be reunited with their loved ones, instituting a standard processing time of 12 months for these applications, as this is the standard already in place for spousal sponsorship applications.”
I want to flag how hard it is for families to navigate these systems. I have a constituent named Fatima. She and her two daughters were accepted to Canada as refugees from Eritrea. The personal story of this family is tragic. It was a huge effort for them to get here. They are sponsored by the Neighbourhood Church in Nanaimo, which is doing a fantastic job of working hand in hand with refugee families, supporting them, embedding them in our communities. However, what Fatima has said is that she cannot settle into our community fully knowing that the husband, who she thought had died in the civil war, in fact had survived, but that it was beyond the period where she was able to sponsor him because of the one-year limit. They are now caught in this bureaucratic mess. Her little daughters are saying that they do not believe that their father is still alive because it has been years that they have been waiting for our system, for the Canadian government, to say when it is that his processing will be complete. It is a huge heartache for this family.
I am hearing again and again that the government has chosen not to restore the public service and the front-line people who are meant to be serving Canadians. To have people kicked off phone lines, left on hold indefinitely or for them to have to call 20 times even to have the honour of being put on hold, that says to me that everyone is challenged by a broken system. Therefore, my question to the government is this. Why is it making people wait so long? When will it truly deepen the investment that allows immigration and family reunification to happen as it should?