Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to our Conservative motion regarding serious inefficiencies in the federal health care and immigration systems.
For those unaware, let us look at the cold, hard facts that were uncovered by the work of my colleagues and me at the parliamentary health committee last fall regarding the serious effects Canada's dysfunctional immigration system is having on our health care system, especially the effects of the interim federal health program.
It is a fact that thousands of my constituents and hundreds of thousands of British Columbians have no family doctor. It is a fact that residents in my riding often discover their emergency rooms are suddenly closing for hours, if not whole days, because of a chronic shortage of health care workers. It happened just this past weekend in Princeton. It is a fact that residents in my riding must wait months, if not years, to see the specialists they need, sometimes driving on treacherous winter roads to reach them.
It is also a fact that if someone is, for example, a non-Canadian arrested in Surrey in connection with extortion, or in connection with arson in Ontario, a shooting in Edmonton, or auto theft in the Lower Mainland, they can immediately file a refugee claim for asylum and be granted access to the interim federal health program. For Conservatives, this is not hypothetical. It is a real case, in which these individuals made real claims. Even our premier, David Eby, thought it was outrageous.
Conservatives tried to amend Liberal legislation in the committee to fix this. Our amendments would have prevented non-citizens convicted of serious crimes from filing bogus asylum claims in an attempt to escape deportation. Still, the Liberals voted against this common-sense change to our laws.
I know the Liberals will say we should let the process play out. However, even when clearly fraudulent claims filed by violent suspected criminals are rightly thrown out by our refugee board, these people still do not lose access to free specialty health programs. In contrast, they file an appeal, which may take years to be heard due to backlogs averaging up to four years.
Even with a budget of nearly $350 million and 2,500 employees, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada is growing its backlog year after year. The Parliamentary Budget Officer's report, using IRCC data, shows that this backlog will only grow for the rest of the decade. Even when these bogus refugee claimants are denied at every stage, and the fraudulent visitors lose all rights to remain in Canada and are told they must leave, until and if they are physically walked out of the country, they can still walk down the street and receive vision care or physiotherapy, things that the average Canadian does not have access to.
Here is the worst thing about these departures. The IRCC cannot even tell parliamentarians how many are actually departing. I guess it expects these fraudulent cases to walk out the door on their own and leave behind free health care. That is the interim federal health program as it exists today, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer confirmed when his office appeared before the health committee just a couple of weeks ago. Canadians have increasingly lost confidence in the immigration and refugee system under the Liberal government, and it is easy to see why.
No governing party in this House has ever opposed the admission of real refugees from Syria, Ukraine or Afghanistan. No governing party has ever opposed the interim federal health program. Canada is a generous nation to those who need our generosity. If someone comes to Canada blinded by acid, without a limb, from a war-torn country, no one is advocating leaving them in the street instead of ensuring they have rehabilitative care.
What Canadians have come to oppose is the bent shape that our refugee system exists in today. A complete failure by the Liberal government to properly manage the admission of temporary foreign workers and international students into non-essential jobs and fake universities has led to this crisis.
Guests to our country quickly realize they can create nearly endless extensions, with access to special medical care that they do not have in their own home countries, by filing asylum claims that everyone knows do not meet any standard of refugee. I do not blame these people for doing this. It is the government's fault for allowing the loophole to exist in the—