Bill Siksay

[Canada Marine Act, April 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I want to ask a question of the parliamentary secretary which is not unlike the concerns of my Bloc colleague who raised the issue of the changes in the financing arrangements for port authorities that the bill would allow and would also allow them to compete with municipalities for infrastructure funding.

We know that the Canadian Federation of Municipalities has said that there is a $123 billion deficit in infrastructure funding in Canada, far short of what the federal government has provided in infrastructure funding. Now it is opening that pot of money to competition from port authorities who have significant funding needs, it has to be said, all across the country. This is a serious problem with this legislation.

Also, there is the expanded borrowing powers generally of the port authorities. We know that they will now be able to collectively borrow billions of dollars. The NDP members are concerned about that because we were trying ensure that the Auditor General would have oversight over the port authorities given these expanded financial powers that are proposed in this legislation.

I would like to ask the member: What will the Conservative government be doing to ensure that there is appropriate funding in infrastructure to accommodate all of these extra and competing needs for infrastructure funding, and for the appropriate oversight of the Auditor General into the port authorities?

[Citizenship and Immigration, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, family reunification is the most successful part of our immigration system. Immigrants who join family here integrate faster, are happier, and contribute more to society and the economy.

Conservatives, with Liberal support, are downgrading family reunification to instead emphasize temporary foreign workers. Now the minister even wants the power to ignore legitimate applicants.

Why are the Conservatives doing irreversible damage to the promise made to immigrants that they can reunite their families in Canada?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, April 9th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the backlog is actually 900,000 people. I would ask the member to talk to people in his constituency who are waiting for a relative stuck in that backlog and ask them if they do not think it is a problem. It is a huge problem for families looking to be reunited in Canada to have to wait year after year to be reunited with that relative, especially when they were promised when they emigrated to Canada that their family members would be able to join them. We broke a promise to immigrants who came to Canada when we told them that our immigration policy was such that their family would be reunified in Canada.

There are two possibilities. If we did not have a backlog, it could mean that we were in desperate need of immigrants, but it might also mean that the processing in our immigration program was working appropriately and that people were not having to wait unacceptable lengths of time to have their applications processed and to join their family members in Canada. It would mean that employers would not have to wait for employees that they need to do important work in Canada.

We could have an efficient immigration system if we put those resources into place.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, April 9th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, if the member had heard the beginning of my speech he clearly would have heard what problems we have with this legislation.

The fact is that this legislation, which is buried in a budget bill, would fundamentally change the powers of the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, so much so that we could in fact drive a Mack truck right through the immigration act and the immigration provisions. They are very significant proposals. They should not be buried in a budget bill. They should stand on their own. They should be debated on their own. They should go to the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, whose members have the particular expertise and experience to deal with those kinds of recommendations, not to the finance committee, whose members' expertise lies in other areas.

What would we do instead? We would make sure there is transparency. We would make sure that we meet a target of 1% of population for immigration every year. We would make sure that we preserve the track from permanent residence to full citizenship in Canada. We would make sure that temporary foreign workers do not become guest workers and get exploited in Canada. We would make sure that family reunification, the most successful piece of our immigration program, retains a central place in our immigration program.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, April 9th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I had best get going if I have only two minutes. What we are debating is the amendment from the New Democratic Party to separate out the immigration provisions of this legislation because there are very serious changes to Canada's immigration law. We do not believe they should be buried in a budget implementation bill and we do not believe they can best be scrutinized there.

The Conservatives are right in that there is a problem with the backlog. The Liberals did not address the problem with the backlog and in fact created the backlog over many years in office. They stimulated it by not providing the appropriate funding to the department to do the processing and by not providing appropriate immigration targets for the country despite the fact that year after year they promised to increase that target. At one point, I added up all the years in which they missed their proposed target for immigration. If we added them all up, it probably would have eliminated the backlog on hand at that time.

Yes, there were problems. However, what the Conservatives are proposing is not going to fix the problems. In fact, it is only going to make them worse. The kind of discretion that the Conservatives propose to give the minister is just plain wrong. We need clarity in our immigration proposals. This is wrong.

In their immigration policy, the Conservatives are also giving far too great an emphasis to temporary foreign workers. We know that these workers are too easily exploited. They provide cheap labour.

Fortunately, we in Canada have never relied on this kind of labour to drive our economy. Unlike European countries that have had strong guest worker policies, we have never gone that route. We prefer instead to bring people in because of economic need as permanent residents and put them on the track to becoming full citizens of Canada. Unfortunately, the Conservatives are reversing that policy as well. It is one of the serious problems with their immigration policy.

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, we now know the additional 1,000 troops that will go in to Kandahar to assist the Canadians will be American troops. We know the Americans have 13,000 troops still involved in Operation Enduring Freedom, which is operated separately from the ISAF mission that Canada is a part of.

Could the parliamentary secretary explain to us if there will be a clear separation of the American troops involved with Canadian troops in Kandahar from Operation Enduring Freedom and how that will be accomplished?

[Business of Supply, April 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is a little strange to me that we are debating for a number of hours today this motion, when there seems to be all party agreement that this is something that should happen. We are talking about a procedural motion in effect that could have easily been worked out and done much more expeditiously than spending a full day of the House's valuable time to discuss a procedural kind of motion.

That being said, we are now into this discussion and a number of comments have been made today that are very important to follow up on. There seems to be an ongoing confusion on part of members of the government who do not seem to appreciate that there is a difference between a mission in Afghanistan that is led by NATO and how that might differ if the United Nations were actually leading that mission.

Conservatives do not seem to appreciate that the United Nations' mandate has been given to NATO to lead this mission, but that it is the United Nations with its considerable resources, its civilian resources, and its different attitude than a military organization like NATO might bring to the leadership of the situation in Afghanistan.

I wonder if the member for Ottawa Centre might comment specifically on what difference it would make to have a United Nations-led mission in Afghanistan as opposed to the mission led by the military organization NATO.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, April 7th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to participate in the debate on Bill C-50, the Budget Implementation Act, 2008, but specifically on the amendment proposed by my colleague, the member for Trinity—Spadina, which picks in particular our concern in this corner of the House for provisions that are included in the budget implementation act regarding changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

Specifically, the motion that we are debating at this point in the debate reads as follows:

That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:

this House declines to give second reading to Bill C-50, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on February 26, 2008 and to enact provisions to preserve the fiscal plan set out in that budget, since the principles of the Bill relating to immigration fail to recognize that all immigration applicants should be treated fairly and transparently, and also fail to recognize that family reunification builds economically vibrant, inclusive and healthy communities and therefore should be an essential priority in all immigration matters.

I think that spells out very clearly what our concerns are with this provision regarding immigration in the budget implementation act.

We are concerned because a measure that changes our immigration law so significantly, we believe, should not be buried in a large budget implementation bill. We believe that this change to the immigration law is so profound and so important that it should be debated on its own merits in a separate debate.

It should have separate committee consideration as well and that it should be considered by the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, not the finance committee which does not have the expertise that the citizenship and immigration committee does in relation to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and immigration concerns from coast to coast to coast in Canada.

We believe that this piece of Bill C-50 is improperly placed and really should be debated on its own with particular reference to the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

What does this proposal from the government actually do? We see that it gives major new powers to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to control the types of applications the minister accepts, to impose quotas, to dispose of current immigration applications, and to facilitate queue jumping.

We would say that it puts certain limits on the humanitarian and compassionate category which currently is the only channel for many who encounter challenges in the process of pursuing family reunification.

We believe that it gives the minister new powers to deny visas to those who meet all immigration criteria. We also believe that it further supports the current policy shift whereby immigrants are increasingly being understood and treated as economic units to be brought here through temporary visa arrangements, instead of the permanent residency program.

Those are all very significant concerns with this provision that is buried in the budget implementation act. That is why we believe that it should have a very thorough debate. All of these questions that we raise, we believe, should have a fulsome debate here in the House and in committee. By having it as part of a budget implementation bill and sending it to the finance committee will not allow for that.

It is not only New Democrats who are concerned about these provisions that would change the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that are found in the budget implementation bill. Richard Kurland, who is one of the most prominent immigration experts in Canada and editor-in-chief of Lexbase, which is one of the key sources of information about immigration policy and procedure in Canada, has been very critical of this proposal from the government that is included in this legislation.

He notes that it took a long time and it was a long fight to establish clear criteria for the processing of immigration applications to establish the principle that anyone who applied should have their application considered, that anyone who met the criteria of the immigration program should have a chance at success of their application.

He has some specific criticisms of what this legislation would do. He notes that in the existing IRPA, section 11.(1) states:

A foreign national must, before entering Canada, apply to an officer for a visa or for any other document required by the regulations. The visa or document shall be issued if, following an examination, the officer is satisfied that the foreign national is not inadmissible and meets the requirements of this Act.

The important word there is that the visa “shall” be issued. Mr. Kurland notes that in the proposed legislation this same section 11.(1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act is amended to say:

A foreign national must, before entering Canada, apply to an officer for a visa or for any other document required by the regulations. The visa or document may be issued if, following an examination, the officer is satisfied that the foreign national is not inadmissible and meets the requirements of this Act.

There is a significant difference between the words “shall” and “may”. It opens up a huge opportunity for discretion and the operation of the minister's own biases. It is a real attack on the kinds of transparency and guarantees that exist in the current legislation, guarantees for the appropriate processing of applications that were fought for long and hard over many years.

Mr. Kurland further points out that the use of the word “shall” in IRPA's section 11.(1) gave all visitors, foreign students, foreign workers and applicants for permanent residence the right to a visa when they met the preconditions for visa issuance.

He notes that the use of the word “may” in the government's proposed change to IRPA's section 11.(1) takes away those rights. All visitors, students and foreign workers and applicants for permanent residence no longer will have the right to a visa, even when they qualify for the visa by meeting the required preconditions for visa issuance or renewal of their status.

Mr. Kurland additionally points out that under this proposal, applications for visas do not have to be accepted, applications for visas that are accepted do not have to be processed, applications for visas that are processed do not have to be given visas even when the person meets all the requisite conditions to the visa issuance, and applications for visas with the supporting materials and documents may be disposed of at any time.

Surely, those are all important compromises to the kinds of transparency and guarantees that have existed recently and that were fought so long and hard for in the current Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, and the addition of that kind of discretion to the minister or the department is a huge step backward in ensuring the appropriate processing of immigration applications.

The whole question of what this does to family reunification is a key one in all of this. It is something that we need to highlight when we are looking at the effects of current Conservative government policy when it comes to citizenship and immigration.

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to resuming my speech.

[Human Rights, April 7th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, gay and lesbian Canadians know that Conservatives have never supported our full equality. We fear the attitude in question shows their true colours.

The Prime Minister could show leadership. He could add gender identity and expression to the Human Rights Act, overturn an organ donation policy rooted in the fears of the 1990s, adopt and promote the Montreal and Yogyakarta declarations on GLBT rights and restore the court challenges program.

More than words, what action will the Prime Minister take to show that such views are not the position of the Conservative government?

[Human Rights, April 3rd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, a video tape from a party some years ago was released today in Regina that includes Saskatchewan Premier Wall, former Senator Berntson and the current Conservative member for Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre who allegedly states on the tape, “Let me put it to you this way: There are As and Bs. The As are guys like me. The Bs are homosexual faggots with dirt under their fingernails who transmit diseases”.

Will the government ensure that the member makes an immediate, unequivocal apology to all members of the gay community and all Canadians for these ill-informed, hurtful and unconscionable remarks? Will it take all appropriate action?