Borys Wrzesnewskyj

[Petitions, September 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I am pleased to present a petition signed in support of my private member's bill, Bill C-380.

In Canadian hate law, propagation of violence based on race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation is criminal. Incredibly, misogyny and the propagation of violence against women is legal. This bill would add sex, the legal term for gender, to the list of identifiable groups in relation to hate propaganda provisions in the Criminal Code.

Half of Canadian women have experienced at least one incident of physical and sexual violence since the age of 16. This type of violence against women is often motivated by gender based hatred. For these reasons, the petitioners urge the government to adopt Bill C-380.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, September 27th, 2010]

Unfortunately, the world is full of monstrous despots, such as Zimbabwe's Mugabi. Why Iraq and not Zimbabwe? Many Canadians, I among them, perhaps feel that it had more to do with Iraq's vast oil reserves than freedom and democracy. What was the end result of the war in Iraq? Over 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians. Yes, today Iraq's oil reserves are controlled by U.S. oil interests and not the Hussein family interests, but at what cost? Over 100,000 innocent civilians are dead.

For some in this House, that might be a statistic that they joke about, but there were brave soldiers on the front line who saw what it meant. People like Kimberley Rivera volunteered because she believed her president when he said that American freedom was at stake. She went to Iraq, half a world away, and saw the destruction of the personal property of Iraqis, the death of Iraqi civilians and the shell-shocked Iraqi children wandering Baghdad.

Robin Long, on July 4, ironically, was deported to the United States by our government a month after the House of Commons voted by majority to provide refuge to Iraqi war resisters. A U.S. military tribunal sentenced him to 15 months in prison. He told me that the only evidence brought forward was the fact that he called the Iraq war illegal on CBC.

We can compare that to the justice of Belmor Ramos who received seven months by a similar U.S. military tribunal for having taken part in the blindfolding and execution of four innocent Iraqi civilians who they then dumped in the Tigris River. One suspects that U.S. military courts have an agenda other than justice when we deport Iraqi war resisters who speak out against this unjust war.

There are others. Chuck Wiley, with 17 years service in the U.S. navy, who came back and could no longer take part in this unjust war, uprooted his life. Jeremy Hinzman and hundreds of others have arrived in Canada seeking refuge.

Eighty-two per cent of Canadians supported Canada's decision not to go to war in Iraq. Over the last number of years, continuously, 65%, two-thirds of Canadians have said that we should provide sanctuary to the Iraqi war resisters. Twice in the House of Commons we have voted by majority to provide refuge for those Iraqi war resisters, but unfortunately, the government is not respecting the will of the Canadian people and is not respecting the vote in the House of Commons of the people of Canada.

It is high time the government ceased standing shoulder to shoulder with a discredited Bush doctrine of chest thumping, unintelligible, unimaginative militarism, and instead, stood shoulder to shoulder with those courageous men and women in uniform who made that difficult and brave decision to say no to their commander-in-chief because they believed he had lied to them and that it was an unjust war they were being forced into. Those courageous young men and women of the American forces then sought sanctuary here in Canada. They did not listen to the unjust orders of their commander-in-chief but listened to the command of the real commander-in-chief who says, “Thou shalt not kill”.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, September 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, we share a North American continent with a global superpower: our American friends with whom we share many foundational democratic principles and with whose economy ours is intimately and intricately intertwined.

Although we share many of the same values as our American friends, there have been times in history when we fundamentally disagreed with our American friends on issues of human rights, human dignity and especially on issues of war and peace. In fact, during those times there have been Americans who have disagreed with their own government, with their president, their commander-in-chief, and made the very difficult personal decision of uprooting their lives on a matter of principle and heading to the Canadian north to seek sanctuary in Canada.

It goes as far back as the Loyalists who headed north to Canada because they wished to stay loyal to the Crown. We provided them with refuge. Blacks escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad sought sanctuary in southern Ontario where they built new lives and enjoyed freedom.

More recently, during our lifetimes, there have been wars in Vietnam and in Iraq. There have been resisters to those particular wars who have once again uprooted themselves and have come seeking sanctuary in Canada. They fundamentally disagreed with their president's doctrine, as did Canadian prime ministers of that time. They disagreed with the doctrine of U.S. presidents, such as Nixon and Bush, who believed that one could bring democracy to middle powers half a world away through the barrel of a gun, to countries that had no traditions or institutions of democracy.

Over the past few years, as Iraqi war resisters landed in Canada, they expected the same treatment as Vietnam war resisters received two generations ago, that they would be given refuge in Canada. Unfortunately, prime ministers have changed since Canada's decision to not engage in the Iraq war. It is no longer the Right Hon. Jean Chrétien, whose greatest legacy will be his resistance to bringing Canada into the Iraq war. He was a prime minister who did not listen to President Bush's embellished evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction, which was later found to be false. Instead, he listened to the UN inspectors who said that there were no weapons of mass destruction. He resisted President Bush's arm-twisting, who said that the war was about freedom and democracy and that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, a monster and a crook.

However, there are many tyrants and monsters.

[Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, September 23rd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, yes, in 2003, CSIC was established by the Liberal government because it identified that these parasites were preying on the confusion of new Canadians. However, it has also been shown that in the past seven years that it is not good enough. What we need to have is a statutory federal body that oversees. We need a professional association but we also need federal government oversight.

I want to further illustrate what has happened over the last couple of years. I have mentioned that of the skilled workers coming from Kiev, 80% of the cases are finalized today in six years and eleven months, 83 months. Horrific, seven years. In 2004, under a Liberal government, it was 34 months. That was still not good enough. It was just under three years.

However, today, under the Conservatives watch, it is now six years and eleven months. That is unacceptable.

[Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, September 23rd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I remember with fondness, as a small child in Toronto's Queen-Bathurst neighbourhood, where my grandparents, as new immigrants, set up their first business, a bakery. The member's mother was one of the customers who would come in to buy hot bread. What a wonderful reflection of what immigrants contribute to our country.

The member is quite correct in pointing out the hypocrisy of what the minister said, which is that potential new Canadians do not have to go to consultants. My goodness, where do they turn to when the system, as has been referenced, has become Kafkaesque? Some of them turn to the minister.

I mentioned Iryna Ivanie who has four Canadian children and has been separated from her husband for over five years. She wrote a letter to the minister because she had nowhere else to turn. I also wrote to the minister at the start of this year. What was the response? The response was, no. That is not good enough individually and in terms of the whole system.

I certainly hope that Bill C-35 does not become window dressing that hides the reality of what is going on behind that wall, a system that has become dysfunctional. The minister has been on this file for a number of years and knows it well. He must get the job done.

[Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, September 23rd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, the member for Timmins—James Bay is quite correct when he says that the system has become Kafkaesque.

What is required, and, hopefully, one of the changes that will take place in committee on this particular issue with these charlatans who abuse potentially new Canadians, is that a statutory body be created. Self-regulation is perhaps a good idea in the case of professional engineers and lawyers, but in this case we are dealing with people who are not Canadians, who do not know Canadian laws, who do not know where to turn and, unfortunately, do not know what rights they have to deal with those who have abused their desperation. That is in terms of this specific law.

However, we need a little bit of common sense when we revamp the whole act. I have stood watching a line of potential new immigrants outside one of our embassies. In that lineup there were young fathers. Their clothes and the size of their hands showed that these were young fathers who had worked with their hands and who had this incredible drive to build a better life for their families. The country that happened to be in is a country in terrible economic turmoil and in transition.

It was sad to watch because I knew those individuals would not get into our country. Under our current point system, it was guaranteed that the barrier would prevent them from landing in Canada and yet they had exactly what we wanted: the will to work, to work hard and to succeed.

On the other hand, in that same lineup I saw a couple of men dressed in flashy Armani suits and dripping in gold. I knew that with an investment of a few hundred thousand dollars, and we know how they arrived with that money in that particular country, they were guaranteed to land in Canada expeditiously.

The system must be revamped. We must apply some common sense and we need to look at the past to see why we succeeded in the past and why we are failing today.

[Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, September 23rd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, other than our colleagues, who are first nation members, you, I, and all of our colleagues in the House have something in common: we are the descendants of, and in fact some of us are, immigrants to Canada.

Yesterday in the House of Commons we heard speeches on Bill C-35 from two such members. The member for Newton—North Delta told his particular story of a young man arriving on Canada's shores as an immigrant from India and what an incredibly inspiring story that was. The immigrant from India, with virtually no money in his pocket, had a deep desire in his heart to build a new life in a new land. Who could have foretold that 25 years later he would be here, among us, in the House of Commons as one of the legislators of laws for this great land?

We also heard a speech yesterday from the member for Eglinton—Lawrence who also arrived as a new Canadian 55 years ago as part of a wave of Italian Canadians who arrived in Canada in the fifties, sixties and seventies. He mentioned that while he was speaking in the House, his grandson, a third generation Italian Canadian, was watching his immigrant grandfather address this august chamber, the House of Commons.

What incredible stories of Canada's potential, of Canada's promise. This has been the story of Canada right from the first days of Confederation. In Canada's first House of Commons there was a member elected by the name of Alexandre-Édouard Kierzkowski, a refugee from Russian imperialism, and a member of Canada's first House of Commons in 1867. That has been the story of Canada, wave after wave of people arriving on these shores.

The French, who settled and, along with the existing first nations, created something unique to Canada: a new first nation, the Métis. After the English, soon after Confederation there was a large wave of Bukovinians, Galicians, and Ukrainians who transformed the bush of the Northwest Territories into the golden wheat fields of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. The Chinese arrived to build our railroads, those ribbons of steel that bound our geographically vast land into a cohesive oneness.

More recently, as I have mentioned, the Italian Canadians and Portuguese Canadians arrived in the last half century and transformed our cities, cities such as my home town, Toronto. They transformed those cityscapes and created those jewels, the most liveable cities on the planet: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. What this speaks to is a system that is dynamic. Our multicultural mosaic is not static; it is a constantly evolving multicultural mosaic. That is Canada's promise and strength.

Unfortunately, over the last number of years our immigration system has been suffering from dysfunction. In fact, I would even say it has reached the point where the system pretty much does not work.

In the past there have been two types of newcomers to Canada. There have been the refugees, going as far back as the Loyalists, the underground railroad, and more recently, the Vietnam and Iraqi war resisters. Even my grandparents landed in Canada, on freedom's shores, as refugees from communism, from the horrors of Stalinism. There have been the refugees and there have been the economic immigrants who saw Canada not just as a free land but also as a land of opportunity, having departed from lands where at that point in time, unfortunately, opportunities were limited. In Canada the opportunities were limitless.

The waves of people that landed on Canada's shores landed here because Canada is a free country and, as a consequence of that freedom, it is a prosperous country. All of those people had something in common. They came here with a willingness to work hard so that they could build a future for themselves, for their families and for future generations. They succeeded and they contributed back into their communities and to the greatness of our country.

Unfortunately, we have a current refugee and immigration system that has ceased to function. It creates confusion. It creates a situation of shattered dreams for hopeful new Canadians, new immigrants to our country. In this confusion, and in desperation that is fed by the confused system that we currently have, the ones who step in are the charlatans, the ghost consultants, who prey on impossible dreams and make impossible promises. They prey on the most vulnerable.

As my colleagues have said, I also am supporting this bill which deals with crooked consultants. I am supporting sending the bill to committee to further refine it. But let us not lose sight of the bigger job at hand. That job is to fix our immigration system. We need a new act.

Let me mention specific cases to show how desperate the situation is for potential new Canadians and the circumstances the current system forces them into.

Marya Kunyk arrived on a work visa as a live-in caregiver. She had to work two years over a three-year period to be able to begin the process of becoming a Canadian. Just a year after arriving and working on fulfilling that obligation, she was crossing at a crosswalk and was hit by a car. It was a horrific accident. The driver was found guilty, but Marya today has a shattered body, literally. Parts of her body have been replaced with pieces of steel.

What is the system doing to Marya, who needs continuing health care and physiotherapy so that she can once again become a functioning productive member of society? The system is deporting Marya back to a country that cannot provide the health care she requires. The system is deporting her because she is not fulfilling the obligations of her contract that she work two full years. It is just common sense. She has not been able to fulfill the obligations of that contract. She was hit by a car through no fault of her own.

Is it any wonder that there is so much desperation among new Canadians that they turn to these crooked consultants, these charlatans who prey on that desperation.

In another case, Iryna Ivaniv is a young woman who has been trying for over six years to bring her husband to Canada from Ukraine. She has four young children, Canadian children. I will read from a letter that she wrote to the minister:

1. We have four young children who are Canadian citizens: 6-year-old; 3-year-old; and 5-months-old twins. They have a right to have both their parents raise them....

2. Our twins were born premature. They're under pediatric constant supervision and need medical care which I do not feel could be obtained in Ukraine in satisfactory manner.

3. All our children are registered to start school and daycare from September 2010. I must stress that Canadian children 6-year of age must attend school under The Education Act.

What has happened in the case of Iryna Ivaniv? Just in the past two months, her husband has once again been denied the opportunity to come to Canada to unite this family.

How does this happen? Through an access to information request, I have been able to get the notes of the decision. It is astounding. The decision states that Iryna Ivaniv is still in possession of Ukrainian citizenship and can therefore freely access all health and social services in that country. She is not a Ukrainian citizen; she is a Canadian citizen. Ukraine does not allow dual citizenship. She is a citizen of one country.

How is it that decision-makers who do not even understand the rules are making the decisions?

Further on the decision states that the children would benefit from being sent from their country to Ukraine so they could be with their extended family, so there would not be disruption to the children's life separation from their grandparents, and it is significant disruption that we have caused because in Ukrainian culture, extended families are traditionally important.

My goodness. We would take Canadian children away from their mother, their Canadian grandparents, their Canadian uncle, deport them, and send them to a country half a world away.

These cases clearly illustrate how dysfunctional the system has become. Is it no wonder that people prey on the desperation of people such as Iryna, on the desperation of people such as Marya.

Let me also reference a statistic from the public database of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration regarding the processing time for skilled workers from Kiev, Ukraine. In 2009, 80% of the cases were finalized in 83 months, which is 6 years and 11 months.

What employer in Canada will wait seven years for an employee that has been hired from a foreign country to arrive? What about the people in those countries, under the skilled worker class of immigration, who are waiting not several months, but year after year after year? What has happened to Canada's promise?

As I said earlier, Canada's dynamism and greatness has been built by the waves of people who have arrived on Canada's shores. We often reference the incredible natural resources of this vast land. Yes, we have been blessed with natural resources unlike any other country in the world, but our greatest resource is our human resource, the deep reservoir of human capacity that we have.

Canada is unique to the planet in having people who have an intricate understanding of every culture of the world, who speak every language of every people on the planet. In a future global village, what an incredible advantage that gives us.

That promise has to be reinstated. Canada cannot become a land that is static, that loses its dynamism. Yes, this particular bill addresses one issue, one small part of the dysfunction, and that is why we are supporting it. However, I certainly hope it does not distract us from the job at hand, and the job at hand is to put in place a new system. Canada's future is at stake.

[Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, September 22nd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to put a question to the hon. member. He spoke about the incredible frustration that new immigrants experience. I was wondering if he could give concrete examples of the type of frustrations that lead people to use these charlatans, these ghost consultants, just to show the terrible anguish that new immigrants are going through when they try to land themselves here in Canada.

[Public Safety, June 17th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative chair of the public safety committee was forced to apologize for denigrating Canada's 450 chiefs of police after calling them “a cult”, and the Conservative assault on the integrity of our police forces continues.

The Conservative MP for Saint Boniface unequivocally stated in committee, “There were officers who suffered consequences at the hands of chiefs like Mr. Blair, who transferred them when they spoke out...”.

Absolutely no evidence to substantiate this serious allegation of witness intimidation and workplace harassment was ever provided by that MP, yet she refuses to retract or apologize for making this ruinous allegation.

Parliamentary privilege is a tool to get at the truth of issues. However, when abused, it provides cover to the abuser, allowing the member for Saint Boniface to savage the good reputation of the chief.

Does the Minister of Public Safety condone this attack on the chiefs of police or will he apologize to Toronto Chief of Police William Blair, who has an exemplary 33 year record of serving and protecting our citizenry?

[Petitions, June 16th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I am pleased to present a petition signed by students of the women's studies program of the University of Waterloo.

These students are mindful of the fact that violence against women is often motivated by gender-based hatred, that half of Canadian women have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence, that Canadians continue to be horrified by the hate that motivated the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, and aghast that the glorification and incitement to similar acts of violence by misogynists is currently legal in Canada.

For these reasons, the petitioners urge the government to adopt my private member's bill, Bill C-380, which would add sex, the legal term for gender, to the list of identifiable groups in relation to hate propaganda provisions in the Criminal Code. Hatred and incitement to violence based on ethnicity, race and religion, and sexual orientation is proscribed by Canadian law. Why not misogyny and all gender-based hate crimes?