Chris Alexander

[International Trade, May 13th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, your guidance to us has been to correct the record as soon as the opportunity arises. This is the first opportunity.

[International Trade, May 13th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a point of order. The members of the NDP like to act self-righteously, but during a question last week, the member for Acadie—Bathurst, who is the official languages critic, deliberately tried to mislead the House, which is obviously very unfortunate. The member implied that we had cut funding for the Multicultural Association of the Greater Moncton Area—

[Questions on the Order Paper, May 12th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, producing the voluminous information requested in the question and sub-questions would require an extensive manual search of Citizenship and Immigration Canada records and an excessive number of taxpayer-funded man-hours. After a lengthy data extraction process involving millions of files, the report would have to be reviewed in its entirety to ensure that the data were accurate and valid. Providing the full and accurate information requested in the question and sub-questions is therefore not feasible within the prescribed timeline for the reasons outlined above.

[Questions on the Order Paper, May 12th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, with regard to (a), the 5000th application for sponsorship of parents and grandparents was received January 21, 2014. The Citizenship and Immigration Canada, CIC, website has been updated to advise applicants that the cap has been reached. Members may go to http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/information/applications/sponsor-parents.asp for details.

With regard to (b), CIC is preparing to return the applications received after the cap was reached. As of March 28, 2014, it is estimated that 2,579 applications will be returned.

[Official Languages, May 7th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, we are very proud of our record in this area, as we have increased funding for these programs across the country.

Francophone immigration is obviously one of our priorities. We are aiming for 4% francophone immigration outside Quebec in the coming years, starting with New Brunswick, with Moncton and Acadia.

[Business of Supply, May 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I do agree with my colleague, the Minister of Employment and Social Development, that most of the motion goes in the same direction we have been travelling as a government with a view to ensuring compliance, with a view to ensuring accountability, with a view to ensuring that Canadians get first crack at jobs. However, we will not direct the Auditor General with regard to the work that he or his office does. Liberals might do that, but we actually take the independence of officers of Parliament seriously on this side of the House, and we will continue to do so.

For my part, my main concern about the motion is that it does not address the issue we have been trying to address for a year, which continues to be central to our strategy for immigration, of creating pathways for temporary foreign workers to become permanent residents of this country, when they meet the criteria and when they are needed in Canada.

The leader of the Liberal Party seemed to want that. Then sometimes he seems to want a lot of things. The motion that is before us—

[Business of Supply, May 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, obviously it is long past time for studies. We have systems in both the Department of Employment and Social Development and the Department of Citizenship and Immigration that are continuously reviewing the data. The data in Canada for temporary foreign workers, even when the programs are implemented in partnership with the provinces and territories, is high-fidelity, high-quality data.

When we see abuses taking place and trends that are not justified by economic circumstances, we take action. That is why as the member well knows, we have expanded access to Canada, the pathway for temporary foreign workers to become permanent residents, fourfold since the ill-fated last Liberal minister, Joe Volpe, made a late, desperate attempt to try to do something about this in 2005. It was far too late, after so many abuses had multiplied and gotten out of control, to do anything that would have redressed the situation.

It has taken us eight years to get there, but we are proud to have 40,000-plus temporary foreign workers becoming permanent residents of Canada every year. That is very close to four times what happened in the last year of the Liberal government, when the temporary foreign worker program was already huge and growing quickly but when the door was still shut to immigration to Canada for people who really deserved it.

[Business of Supply, May 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I will agree that this moratorium was absolutely necessary to make sure that the integrity of the temporary foreign worker program is respected with regard to those going into the food industry.

I will also agree that the reforms the minister and this government have undertaken are wide-ranging and are having a positive impact on integrity and compliance. It is absolutely unacceptable for employers to let Canadians go, when they are available and have the skills and qualifications necessary, to turn to temporary foreign workers as a first choice. That is an abuse. Our government has been clear. When we have found those abuses, we have taken action.

What is not clear is where the Liberal Party is going on this issue. The member for Markham—Unionville outlined his plan, then halfway through his press conference called for some cooks to be admitted to a restaurant in his riding. For the Liberals, it is fine to have rules, but when they know someone who is a supporter, and they want to help out, the rules do not need to be followed. That is their record.

On the NDP, we have also heard of some in B.C. calling for a complete moratorium, a complete end, and others in B.C. calling for a broadening of the temporary foreign worker program to allow all temporary foreign workers to become immigrants. We do not know from either of the opposition parties which way they want to go. We will go in the direction of Canada's economic interests and the integrity of our immigration programs.

[Business of Supply, May 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, there is not enough time to go into everything we know about the Liberal record on immigration. If the member would care to have another debate about the Liberal legacy on immigration, we would be happy to have it.

Joe Volpe did not implement a five-year plan with x million dollars, because he was not the minister for very long. Canadians saw quickly enough what gross abuses a late-term government with a Liberal label was capable of, and that government was turned out of office, with a positive impact on our immigration system.

Let us be clear. The numbers are here. In 2005, the last full year of a Liberal government, we had 13,800 immigrants with some background of having worked in Canada or having been temporary foreign workers here. In 2012, that number rose to 38,000. That is almost four times the Liberal number. I guarantee that when we have the 2013-14 statistics, the number will be dramatically higher again.

[Business of Supply, May 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I will take this opportunity to remind the members of the opposition that we listened respectfully to their speeches and that they would do well, on a serious subject, not to interrupt ours.

There has been inconsistency from the Liberal Party. There have been low standards and, most important, there were no pathways. There were precious few and, in many cases, zero pathways for temporary foreign workers to become immigrants to our country.

Our government is proud to have taken action to change that. We have scaled up the provincial nominee program, mostly thanks to my colleague, now the Minister of Employment and Social Development, from a program that brought a paltry 5,000 or 6,000 people to our country 10 years ago to one that is on track to bringing 47,000 people to our country as permanent residents this year. Most of those people are already here. Most of those people are the temporary foreign workers that serve us in high demand occupations in western Canada. Some of them have served in the seasonal agricultural worker program, very successfully, in southern Ontario and other parts of the country. They serve us in trades where we cannot, honestly, in good faith, find Canadians. No employer can find enough Canadians to do the job, so we bring these people to Canada temporarily at first, then give them the opportunity to become Canadian permanent residents and Canadian citizens. That is an opportunity afforded to temporary foreign workers by our government. That is in addition to the dignity of temporary foreign workers and indeed to the motivation of temporary foreign workers by our government.

This is not the end of the story. The Canadian experience class, a new stream of immigration, is bringing 15,000 permanent residents this year. It is targeting both students who have work experience and temporary foreign workers. It is a creation of our Conservative government in 2008, when my colleague, the Minister of Employment and Social Development, was in this portfolio. It started small. We wanted to ensure that it worked, but it has grown faster and further than any new program in recent history. It essentially brings us to a point where our economic immigration has two sources. One of them is through the new and improved federal skilled worker program with higher language requirements and higher skills requirements. Because of the attractiveness of Canada in this day and age, we can afford to be selective about who comes here as immigrants. We are getting an unprecedented quality of economic immigrants to the country, thank goodness, and thanks to years of effort on this side of the House. We have added to that the federal skilled trades program and the start-up visa, all targeting the best and brightest from beyond our shores.

However, the other source, almost equal in size and volume to the programs that target skilled workers, tradespeople and skilled citizens of other countries to come from beyond Canada's borders, targets those who are already here, the highly skilled people here as temporary workers in a wide variety of capacities across the country. Some of them are here on LMOs, others without, having just finished their studies, proven themselves as able to adapt to the Canadian job market by having studied here and having received a diploma or degree here. That is a pathway. That is a vast stream of immigration to our country that simply did not exist under the previous Liberal government.

We are proud of that innovation. We are proud that we are able to promote temporary foreign workers, when they want it and when they meet the criteria, to permanent residents and to citizenship in a growing number of cases. We have seen the results that this gives in terms of not only the satisfaction of those new Canadians, but also in terms of the satisfaction of employers and labour market demand that would otherwise go unfulfilled in the country.

We are all aware that, starting in 2006, there was abuse in the system. There was abuse in the asylum system, the immigration system, the citizenship program, and yes, in the temporary foreign worker program, that needed to be addressed. We have striven, at every stage, to balance our strong immigration programs—20,000 people per year, on average, higher than under the previous Liberal government—with integrity measures that have sought to close the door to those who would take our generosity for granted, abuse the welcome mat Canadians put out, cut the queue, misrepresent the facts, or engage in other forms of fraud.

We have made huge progress on this. The compliance measures introduced by my colleague, the Minister of Employment and Social Development, came into effect at the beginning of this year: the blacklist, administrative and financial penalties, and the possibility of criminal investigation for those who abuse the temporary foreign worker program. Those measures are unprecedented, and we are prepared to use them.

We have taken similar steps in the live-in caregiver program to give these potentially vulnerable but very hard-working temporary foreign workers, who in the vast majority of cases go on to become permanent residents and citizens, the ability to phone hotlines if they are in trouble and to have more of their expenses defrayed by their employers so that they make a proper living.

Of course, the current moratorium in response to demonstrated cases of abuse in the low-skilled end of the food industry we felt was absolutely necessary. It will help us frame a temporary foreign worker program for the future that serves Canada's interests and the integrity of the Canadian labour market. It is a last resort. It is to be used only after we have exhausted our domestic possibilities, after we have exhausted the talent of our young people, who are increasingly getting the skills and work experience they need to handle the jobs of today in a changing labour market, and after we have exhausted the potential of the immigration system.

Express entry, our new approach to delivering economic immigration, which will come on stream on January 1, 2015, is going to result in a six-month processing time for all of our economic immigration programs. We have never had that, not under a Liberal or a Conservative government. It is going to be a very attractive new initiative in immigration that will help make it a good habit for provinces, territories, and employers themselves to have recourse to the permanent immigration system instead of the temporary foreign worker program, in a large number of cases.

Let me be clear about what has really been happening. Our temporary foreign worker program is long standing. We have had temporary foreign workers in this country at every stage of our development. Most of them have ultimately stayed as immigrants, whether they were first building railways, were in the construction industry in our cities, or were in the natural resource sector.

Let us be clear about what has happened since the 1990s around the world. There has been an explosion of this particular stream of economically driven migration around the world, and the larger number of temporary foreign workers we have in Canada is by no means out of step. In many ways, because of our immigration system, it is less, proportionally, than what other countries have. The difference is that we know how many temporary foreign workers there are in Canada, whereas many of our European, North American, and Asian partners cannot even report how many temporary foreign workers they have and what the impact of those workers is on their labour markets. We at least have data, and we are using it.

A lot of this analysis is done by the OECD, and I recommend to all members the comparisons between an increasingly well-managed Canadian system and systems in others parts of the world, in other advanced economies, which, in many cases, are out of control.

What lies behind the increase in Canada's temporary foreign worker population, in spite of our efforts to increase integrity and in spite of our efforts to tighten, scrutinize, and penalize those who would abuse the system? Why is it still growing?

Well, we should not go too far down the road in this debate without talking about the performance of the Canadian economy.

There are simply no other G7 economies or even OECD economies that have the sectoral and regional labour needs of northern British Columbia, most of Alberta, southeastern Saskatchewan, the manufacturing towns and cities of Winnipeg, or the mining towns and manufacturing towns in southern and northern Ontario and northern Quebec, where there is growth but not enough people.

We see this in the shipbuilding program in eastern Canada. We see it in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the mining industry is forging ahead and the offshore industry is strong. Newfoundland and Labrador had not really talked about immigration for decades, and maybe even a century or more, and it is now at the front of the queue asking Canadians to move there. It is also asking immigrants with the right skills to come. When those two sources fail, and only when they fail, foreign temporary workers fill the gap. Our economic performance has driven these numbers upward.

The International Experience Canada program was, again, created by a Liberal government. It was expanded dramatically by a Liberal government. There was more balance between Canadians leaving and foreign students coming here under Liberal governments. What is the difference between today and that time? Canada's economic performance was not so dramatically better than that of our IEC partners. That is why fewer Canadians choose to go to some of these European jurisdictions today. There are no jobs there. We hope that in two or three years, as we continue these excellent initiatives aimed at building long-term bridges and long-term economic relationships around the world, there will be jobs, and Canadians will go. We are obliging our partners to promote the jobs that are there to Canadians.

In the meantime, we will be proud of our superior economic performance. We will be proud of the integrity measures we have taken and that my colleague, in particular, has taken in recent days to ensure that our temporary foreign worker program works as planned, as a last resort in support of a skilled labour market in Canada and in support of economic immigration that is increasingly on target to meet the needs of the Canadian economy.