Madam Speaker, a Yiddish proverb I love is that if a wise man and a fool are debating, and rabbis love this proverb as well, what we have are two fools debating between each other. Sometimes I feel this is what I am watching. I have listened to the Herle Burly Podcast, and the new Minister of Immigration has appeared on it twice now. He talks a really tough game when he is on the podcast. Then he comes here and sings us a song on how great things are.
We have an immigration system with a backlog of 2.2 million in applications. I have been told everything, including that moving to digital would fix it, that there would be a new system and that there would be more people. This department has more than double the staff and double the money it had in 2015, yet nothing is getting better. It is pretty much static. The backlog was about 2.9 million applications near the end of the pandemic and it is barely any better. A million people are waiting in the queue.
We hear about this constantly. Members of Parliament and their constituency offices are inundated, with 80% to 90% of our case file work related to the immigration department. Families are broken because they cannot be reunited. Small businesses locally are missing that one critical person to fill a gap so they can then start hiring other fellow Canadians to fill the jobs, but they cannot do it. International students, who maybe have changed colleges, or are moving to a different program or are applying for a post-graduate work permit, are being told they cannot do that anymore, or they apply and run out of status and lose the temporary jobs they had. All of this is related to the customer service levels at the immigration department, which have not improved. I rarely hear the minister saying that this is being addressed.
It is a concern for Conservatives, and it continues to be a concern, that service levels are poor and that immigration backlog continues to be very high. Nobody seems to want to take responsibility in the moment when they make the decisions. I believe we are on immigration minister five or six so far after almost nine years, and it still is not getting better. It is still not improving, except for the rhetoric among the cabinet ministers who accuse each other of letting the system get out of control or of making it a mess. Again, I am not the one saying that. I am quoting two ministers who are having this public fight among each other on whose fault it is, pointing fingers at each other. The most incredible part of it all is that they are blaming each other.
In our great country, we of course have two official languages, so I will make some comments in French as well.
We already had this debate in the House, in October or November when we debated another motion during a Bloc Québécois opposition day. It is actually mentioned in today's motion.
Of course, we know that the government did not react to the motion. It did nothing. Going by what we can see, it made a few minor announcements for foreign students who are here in Canada. We know that more than one million international students are already here, according to a question that was answered in the House in October. We also know that the government reacts very slowly when opposition parties offer it solutions to new challenges for which we need to have an answer.
Today, one of these new challenges is asylum seekers who have the right to come to Canada, particularly those from a country in which there is a huge problem. That is an issue we need to address, because in January, the Premier of Quebec, Mr. Legault, had to write a letter almost four pages long that was addressed directly to the government.
If there were any consultations, it is obvious that nobody listened to the Premier of Quebec, since he had to write a letter. His letter says: “Over time, we have welcomed Chilean, Vietnamese, Haitian and Syrian refugees, and more recently Ukrainian nationals, whom we continue to take in”.
We know that we now have problems with one country in particular, because in 2016, this government withdrew the requirement for Mexican citizens to apply for a visa to come to Canada. They can go online and just pay seven or eight dollars to get permission to come to Canada. Now, in Montreal, tens of thousands of people are seeking asylum after not informing the government about their reason for travelling to Canada.
In 2016, about 250 asylum seekers came to this country in this way, back when there was a visa requirement. I have a press release that the government published at the time. It is only in English, unfortunately. I will read the relevant section. It comes from the Prime Minister’s website and is dated June 28, 2016. It may have been taken down, but maybe it is still on the site. Here is an excerpt from the press release:
Closer collaboration between Canada and Mexico on mobility issues will also help encourage travel between the two countries while preventing any increase in asylum claims or other irregular migration. Officials plan to meet regularly to promote these mutual interests.
We have gone from 250 asylum claims in 2016 to tens of thousands in 2023. According to the figures I saw online, 11% of the claims were accepted, which means that 89% of them were rejected. We are not the ones rejecting them; the independent panel is rejecting them. The panel says that it has seen the file and that the rules for becoming a refugee in Canada are not being respected.
The 2016 press release indicated that systems would be put in place to prevent an increase in asylum claims. Yesterday, I asked the minister to give us examples of programs implemented and actions taken to ensure that asylum seekers from one country, in this case Mexico, will not make bogus claims. Of course, 11% of the claims were accepted. Yesterday, the minister said it was much higher, 30%. These are figures given during the debates. Perhaps he can give us the figures in committee. Even with those numbers, that means that 70% of the asylum claims were rejected. These people came here because the visa requirement had been lifted. We have to wonder what the government is doing. It has not created any programs.
The only example the Minister of Immigration was able to give me had to do with programs implemented during the pandemic. However, they were public policies and the minister got rid of them in December, a month and a half ago, because they were no longer useful, he said. I reminded him that there was no pandemic in 2016. It began in early 2020. There was clearly no connection between the two. In committee, he had no other examples to demonstrate what he had done to keep this from happening.
In his letter, Premier Legault talks about the cost of these decisions. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Then there are also costs in terms of human lives. People have come to Canada, thinking they are eligible to apply for asylum for a variety of reasons. Premier Legault says that in the “first 11 months of 2023, no fewer than 59,735 new asylum seekers were registered in Quebec. Projections show that Quebec will receive a record 65,000 applicants this year”. The trends continues. Of course, with this increase in asylum claims, there is also a human cost. Real people will be affected by the Liberal government's negligence. Two immigration ministers are publicly attacking each other. They are pointing fingers and accusing each other of creating all the problems, damage and mess in the areas of immigration and housing.
I am going to talk about two articles by Romain Schué. In “Immigration Cartels”, he wrote: “Enquête uncovered human smuggling networks and fake passport makers linked to powerful Mexican organized crime syndicates that are becoming more and more heavily involved in human trafficking at the Canada-U.S. border.”
Two Mexican cartels in particular, the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel, have ties to human trafficking.
The government could not even talk about a program. I asked the minister to name one program, any program. One would have been enough, but the minister could not even come up with one name.
In the other article, “South American crime network targets Canadian homes”, the journalist starts describing exactly what is happening now because the government made this change in 2016 and did not follow up. I wanted to share that example because basically the same thing happens with reports to Parliament on permanent immigration, as the minister said earlier. They are tabled in the House every November. They also cover temporary immigration. Lots of people come to Canada as temporary immigrants to work or study. Many of them change their temporary status to permanent after they get here.
According to information provided by the department, about half of temporary immigrants become permanent immigrants through programs such as the provincial nominee program and the immigration program for construction workers. Roughly half of these people are already in Canada and have a home, be it rented or owned. It is simply a matter of changing their status.
What matters to us, the Conservatives, is the experience newcomers have when they come to Canada. Today's newcomers are not having the same experience I had when I came to Canada. I arrived in Quebec, of course, because my father worked at the Sorel shipyard at the time.
The leader of the Bloc Québécois talked about the fact that many immigrants who come to Canada are told that Canada is an English-speaking country, but when they arrive in Quebec, they realize that French is spoken there, especially at work. That is what happened to my father. I know because he talked about it often.
As we can see, cabinet is unable to decide who is to blame for the mess. The immigration system is out of control, and it is their fault. Even when the government appoints a new Minister of Immigration, it is his fault. In nine years, the government has destroyed the Canadian consensus on immigration.
We need a common-sense government, and that is what we will have when the member for Carleton becomes prime minister in the next election. We will give Canadians hope for the immigration system.
