Mr. Speaker, today we are debating amendments that the other place has proposed to Bill C-12, as well as the government's response to those amendments. I would like to use this opportunity to offer a word of caution to the government regarding developments that have occurred since the immigration measures in Bill C-12 were last debated here, as well as to suggest constructive remedies to restore parliamentary supremacy and repair the significant damage to Canada's immigration system that has been levelled by the Liberal government and, indeed, under the tenure of the Liberal Prime Minister.
Since Bill C-12 was last debated in this place, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that unapproved asylum claimants in Quebec have a constitutional right to provincially funded, low-cost day care spaces. The broader potential impacts of this ruling should set off alarm bells in every province, across the federal government and to every member of the House. They certainly did for His Majesty's loyal opposition.
Therefore, Conservatives affirm Quebec's right to pursue the use of section 33 of the charter in relation to Quebec v. Kanyinda in that ruling, should its government choose to do so. We also call upon the Prime Minister to direct his government to immediately review what impact the Kanyinda ruling may have on Canada's federal immigration and social welfare programs and to outline what actions may have to be taken in order to wrest power over immigration back from the big immigration lobby, as well as from overzealous judiciaries, and put it back into the hands of the Canadian people.
Liberals must also commit to vigorously challenging any Kanyinda-related litigation that may impact federal jurisdiction in the meantime, including what is included in the immigration provisions of Bill C-12. Here is why. Canada's asylum system should offer compassionate refuge to truly vulnerable persons in numbers that we can sustainably support, but Canadians believe that the asylum system should not be used as a back door by which migrants can quickly and easily end-run normal immigration selection processes. Today, data overwhelmingly shows that the asylum system skews heavily toward the latter, while the prioritization of benefits to those who most urgently need them falls under the former.
It is the provinces that have largely been left to cover the costs of this failure of the federal Liberal government. Since the years-long Roxham Road illegal border crossing debacle began, Quebec has experienced a massive spike in asylum seekers in recent years, many with unverified claims, and now hosts somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200,000. This influx, combined with the Liberals' years-long delays in processing asylum claims, which still exist under the Liberal Prime Minister, have strained Quebec's social services, including subsidized day cares.
With many Quebec families already facing years-long waits for day care spots, and with an unplanned increase in demand enabled by a dysfunctional federal asylum processing system, it is reasonable and, frankly, should be expected that Quebec would enact changes to its welfare system to ensure sustainability. Therefore, in this specific instance, Quebec should not be met with the typical reactionary pearl clutching should it follow through with suggestions among its political parties that it may invoke the notwithstanding clause in the case of Kanyinda.
However, the impact of the Kanyinda ruling has the potential to extend far beyond Quebec. Justice Suzanne Côté dissented from the majority opinion, saying that some of its findings had the potential to “unduly impede the state’s ability to act” in the public interest by limiting the range of policy choices available to governments in designing and administering social benefits programs. She concluded that refugee claimant status should not be recognized as what are called “analogous grounds” under section 15 of the charter to guarantee charter rights. In this she is right, but in the ruling, Chief Justice Wagner took the opposite position, suggesting that the charter should include asylum claimants as a protected identity group.
Given the breadth of the ruling and what amounts to Wagner's issuing an open invitation to the activist legal community to test the waters further, it is not hard to imagine many well-paid anti-reform lawyers salivating at the prospect of doing just that, nor is it a stretch that the justice's arguments for intersectionality that the judges made in the Kanyinda case could be used as a test on whether unvetted and unapproved asylum claimants, particularly those without work permits, should be entitled to other taxpayer-funded benefits.
These tests could include the legality of proposed copays that the government has put forward on the interim federal health benefit program, which of course is a program that has risen in cost by over 1,200% since 2015 and includes luxury health care benefits that many Canadians do not receive. The case and the ruling could also be used to test unfettered access to the Canada child benefit as well as old age security.
Chief Justice Wagner's concurrence regarding recognizing refugee claimant status as an analogous ground under section 15 of the charter could also provide a hook for broader arguments against aspects of the criteria-based immigration streams. That is a huge problem, so clarity is also needed about the extent to which the Kanyinda framework could be used to legally undermine specific rules within immigration processing streams that use neutral selection criteria such as age caps, language thresholds and education points.
Under Kanyinda, any of these criteria, the cornerstones of Canada's immigration selection process, could potentially be argued to have discriminatory impacts on protected or analogous grounds and, if subsequently overturned, further undermine Parliament and the government's ability to set and enforce immigration rules. That is crazy.
While some may argue that these scenarios are unlikely, history suggests the anti-immigration reform lobby, a.k.a. big immigration, will ensure otherwise. Canada's immigration lobby is arguably one of its most powerful. While there is undoubtedly a need for vulnerable non-citizens to have their rights advocated for, a major obstacle to enacting reasonable reforms to Canada's immigration and asylum systems has always been fierce resistance from a network of well-funded anti-reform lawyers, immigration consultants, lobbyists and non-governmental organizations profiting from Canada's overly permissive and enforcement-deficient immigration system.
Big immigration rarely if ever acknowledges that in order to achieve social consensus for immigration, the system cannot be left in its current state of abject dysfunction. Big immigration's voices dominate immigration-related news stories and submissions to parliamentary committees. A simple check of the lobbying registry proves that big immigration has disproportionate levels of access to senior immigration policy-makers, and many individuals from this clique have gone on to occupy influential roles on the Immigration and Refugee Board or in the courts, which further dooms reform efforts.
On that note, a former Liberal immigration minister, who bent to the will of big immigration to such an extent that he allowed nearly a million foreign students on work permits into the country in a two-year period, is now Canada's justice minister. The sheer volume of big immigration intervenors allowed in the Kanyinda case also illustrates this profound imbalance.
However, given the hull-buckling groans emanating from most Canadian social welfare programs, the deep deficits most Canadian governments are running and the disarray that Canada's immigration system is already in, the Prime Minister has a duty to prevent ideologically homogenous activists from using the Kanyinda framework to block reasonable reforms or to make the system even more dysfunctional than it already is.
There are many other reasons to prevent further blurring of the distinction between citizen and non-citizen using the Kanyinda framework. It will be virtually impossible for any level of government to disincentivize the abuse of the asylum system if there are endless legal options for unverified claimants or outright fraudsters to access social services they were never intended to receive.
Blurred boundaries on who is eligible to receive benefits will, beyond the obvious sustainability problems, make it even harder to prioritize those truly vulnerable groups and, frankly, also to maintain consensus for immigration, which is already rightly in the toilet in the country because of the lack of trust in the government's ability to manage the immigration system in a fair and orderly manner.
For many members of the public, this lack of distinction will be perceived as a lack of fairness. In return, there will be even less public appetite to extend benefits or welcome to truly vulnerable refugees, or for immigration writ large. Further legal erosion of the difference between citizen and non-citizen will only serve to continue to diminish the value of Canadian citizenship, which has been incredibly diminished under the Liberal government, and to accelerate the fragmentation of our already diffuse national identity.
Perhaps most importantly, the Kanyinda ruling adds a thick layer of judicial overreach to an existing spread of rulings that have already seriously eroded both parliamentary supremacy in setting immigration law and the federal government's ability to enforce it. Changes in 2012, which prevented non-citizens who made fraudulent asylum claims from receiving taxpayer-funded supplemental health benefits like vision care while awaiting removal from the country, were almost immediately struck down by the federal court. This led to the now frequent practice of judges' giving more lenient sentences to non-citizens convicted of serious crimes in order to avoid consequences for their immigration status.
Parliamentary committee testimony during the review of the immigration provisions of the current Bill C-12 suggests that its reforms would immediately be challenged in court, including the ones that we are debating today, by the big immigration lobby. They said this to us in our committees. Justice Wagner's tone, in his opinion in Kanyinda, suggests that this lobby will be successful should they choose to challenge the immigration provisions outlined in Bill C-12, so the government's talking points that this bill is going to remedy any problems are likely false.
Allowing this trend to go unchecked by the federal government will only further ingrain the Canadian public's sense that there is an overall loss of control in the immigration system and, in turn, further erode the consensus for Canada's immigration system, which we know is already in the abject depths of despair. It will also suggest that the federal Liberals' willingness to prevent asylum system abuse only goes as far as the court's willingness to accept the reforms.
However, at present, Canadian immigration law and public support for immigration is predicated on the principle that it must be fair, legal and necessary to treat non-citizens differently from citizens for the purpose of immigration selection and entry into the country. That is a no-brainer. It is the fundamental principle of our immigration system. In fact, colleagues, this concept is reinforced by Subsection 91(25) of the Constitution Act of 1867, which gives Canada's Parliament the main power to set immigration laws. We are supreme, and it should be our will in this place, not that of the courts, to set the processes by which non-citizens enter and stay in the country. The public expects that they can turn to and rely on the federal government and Parliament to both support a strong Canadian national identity and maintain a fair and orderly immigration system while securing our nation's borders.
However, the Kanyinda framework shows that Canada's Supreme Court is willing to fixate on the increasingly tone-deaf voices of the big immigration lobby and directly challenge these foundational principles, which were the only thing that through the decades allowed the consensus for immigration to exist in our country. Those foundational principles are being actively eroded. The charter has a built-in fail-safe for extreme potential situations such as these, and the government and Parliament have other tools at their disposal to rein in an overzealous judiciary. It is now up to the Prime Minister to provide clarity on how much more judicially inspired immigration dysfunction his government will tolerate before he directs it to act. Let us pray that his patience has boundaries and that the judiciary and big immigration do not further test the limits. While hope springs eternal on this front, data proves otherwise.
Under the Liberal Prime Minister, over the last year, the asylum claim backlog has grown to nearly over 300,000 people. That backlog in 2015 was 10,000 people. Colleagues should think about that and think about the size of the backlog. These are just people currently in the queue, not people who have been processed. This is a years-long backlog, with a similar size to a sizable city. Three hundred thousand people is a lot. Eighty per cent of the refugee claims since 2019 have been approved with zero screenings. To this day, we have been trying to get the government to change course. For countries like Iran, there is a system called the file system in which the government virtually has no oversight. It is basically a rubber stamp for asylum claims.
There are some other things too. The Liberals, in the last few days, have come under extreme fire. Again, colleagues do not have to take my word for it. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said that this was the most scathing report that has been issued by the Auditor General in recent memory.
The Auditor General issued a report that showed over 150,000 cases of student permit fraud; the government had only followed up on a minuscule fraction of those cases. Then, of that tiny fraction, many of those cases, which were obviously fraudulent, went on to get permit extensions; worse, to get permanent residency; or, as we are talking about today, to make asylum claims. This is not a system that is in control. This is a system that is wildly, dumpster fire, out of control. Now we have a situation in which the Supreme Court has invited the big immigration lobby to invite further dysfunction into the system.
To colleagues across party lines, I say that this is not fair to anybody. It is not fair to non-citizens who are making applications to enter the country through normal immigration processing streams and who are basically being put into “no-hope” queues of ever coming into this country, because the wait times are so long. Why? The Liberals have allowed many backdoor immigration streams to happen, whether in the illegal border crossings at Roxham Road that led to a massive spike of crossings in Quebec or in the fact that we now have a multitude of student permits that were issued under the justice minister. This was a very bad period of Canadian history. Now that those permits are expiring, people either are not leaving or they are making fraudulent asylum claims.
I would like to know from the government what happens now. I guarantee this was asked in committee. When the big immigration lobby challenges the provisions that are in this bill, what happens? I can tell the House what is going to happen: Nothing is going to change, and the system is going to get worse.
It is incumbent upon the Liberal Prime Minister to tell Parliament how he intends to deal with the Kanyinda framework. The government needs to undertake a review of all of Canada's immigration laws to see what could be legitimately challenged and then tell Parliament what it intends to do to prevent that from happening.
Essentially what we have here, with what we have seen between the Auditor General report, the Kanyinda ruling and the out-of-control asylum claim crisis, is an open border system in Canada. There really is no functional immigration system, between the lack of ability to screen people coming in and make determinations on who can come in under what processes and then to remove people who do not have a legal right to be here, including those who have undertaken serious criminal activities like sexual assault. The Liberal government has basically erased Canadian borders. Not only is the immigration system not functioning right now; for all intents and purposes, it does not exist.
With that, what happens? We have a housing crisis. We have a 14% youth unemployment rate. We have a massive strain on Canada's health care systems and other social welfare payments. Also, as for the thing that everybody here has talked about for decades, the fact that Canada is an open and welcoming country, it is borne out in polling that many Canadians do not feel that way anymore. It is not me saying this. This is the fault of a lack of ability to manage a fair and orderly process. It is a lack of ability for the government to say to the activist judiciary that Parliament is supreme and we have the right to set immigration processes.
Day after day, we just hear false numbers from the Liberal government, more platitudes, failed immigration. I think the Liberals have gone through eight immigration ministers in 10 years. The Liberals treat the immigration ministry like the armpit of cabinet, when in fact it is a set of policies foundational to the functioning of both our economic and social fabric, as well as to our national identity.
In closing, I just want to speak to Canadian youth, many of whom cannot find a job right now. I will refer to a memo that one of the government departments had. It said that these out-of-control immigration levels, and the lack of process and fairness, led to a huge increase in the youth jobs crisis. This needs to be fixed.
Conservatives have proposed dozens of concrete policies to fix this. Unfortunately, the Liberals have voted against them. However, I am encouraged because other political parties have supported Conservatives across party lines to restore order and fairness.
With that, I would urge the government to seriously look at the Kanyinda ruling and how it is going to affect the provisions in Bill C-12 and other potential immigration streams and come back to Parliament with a plan so that we can tell Canadians with some measure of confidence that fairness and order may be restored.
