Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to share my time today with the hon. member for Louis-Saint-Laurent, my friend and colleague.
It is an honour for me to speak to this opposition day motion. I will echo the comments made by my friend from Scarborough—Rouge Park. As a greater Toronto area member of Parliament, I was horrified by the attack yesterday. Our prayers and thoughts go out to the families that were affected, the people who were tragically killed, and the 14-plus who were injured. It struck home. The perpetrator was stopped, most effectively, by the Toronto police in front of the building I used to work in, at Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue, for five years when I was with Procter & Gamble. Fortunately, the people on the team I worked with are fine. However, there are families that have been struck by such a horrific act. I think we all echo those sentiments today.
Moving on from shared sentiment, my speech will be directed to the disaster at our border, over which the government is presiding. We hear ridiculous language, such as Canada is going to be closed off like an island or that we are demonizing people, which is highly divisive and unfair. Allowing our system and the trust of Canadians to be eroded over time by not enforcing our border laws will mean that fewer Canadians will have confidence in our immigration and asylum system. What the Liberals could be presiding over is a period when fewer Canadians would see this as the positive. To suggest that following the rules is somehow unreasonable shows how devoid the government is of leadership. I will use my few moments to talk about that.
Last year there were about 23,000 illegal crossings. The minister admitted to the committee that it was illegal. However, the Liberals are bending over backward not to suggest that. We have a process for asylum claims and refugee resettlement. All sides have worked on that and have followed the rules, until the Liberal government.
The exceptional work done by friend, the MP for Calgary Nose Hill, brings this issue to the House for a solid debate. That is what Canadians expect. They do not expect buzzwords like “welcome to Canada”. They do not expect suggestions that we are trying to turn Canada into an isolated island. We all see the tremendous benefit of immigration in Canada, of our fair and rules-based refugee and asylum process. What is happening now is an erosion of that.
My colleague mentioned four different ways to ensure our agencies are properly equipped, because they are not. I will show how the minister has allowed that to happen. She mentioned the Prime Minister's irresponsible tweet. In trying to show the world that he is not the President of the United States, he has caused such a problem that the Liberals are now sending ministers to cities in the U.S. to try to rectify it, rather than the Prime Minister providing any responsibility with respect to clarifying our fair and rules-based process. That was irresponsible grandstanding by the Prime Minister. She mentioned the social services costs, which I will show are in the billions of dollars. The Quebec premier has put the Liberals on notice that the province needs millions of dollars more because of this inaction.
My friend from Calgary Nose Hill wants a plan tabled by May 11. As members will see from my remarks, and from the government's own information, there has been no plan, other than hashtags and the faulty suggestion that somehow by saying it is fair to follow the rules, we are going to close Canada off like some isolated island. That is hyperbole of the highest order and it is hiding the failure of the Liberals with respect to this file.
In September 2017, when there were already problems with people not going to proper border checkpoints in accordance with the safe third country agreement, which the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien negotiated between Canada and the U.S., my colleague asked a simple question with respect to updating the loophole in that agreement. The minister said, “the safe third country agreement works fantastically well for Canada.” However, it is not working fantastically well, because it is being exploited. Not even a year ago, when we were already seeing the provinces of Manitoba and Quebec struggling with the challenges of people not following the rules, the Liberals suggested there was no problem. The minister has not even raised it as something that needs to be updated with his counterpart in the United States, the Homeland Security secretary.
This shows the minister's incapable hands on this file. His own department, a few months before he said that in the House to my colleague, suggested in a memo from his deputy minister that “despite strong collaboration among Canadian agencies and with United States counterparts" a "major humanitarian or security event could create an urgent need to revisit existing policies.” The safe third country agreement is those existing policies.
The documents from the minister's department are leaking out, contradicting what he is telling Parliament. The department said that it was talking to its U.S. counterparts, that things were not working too well, and if it saw another surge, it would have to be revisited urgently. However, the minister in the House of Commons said “fantastically well”. I see his parliamentary secretary is here. I hope he reports back on this, because I do not have confidence in the minister.
My colleague from Calgary Nose Hill, in October 2017, had the minister at committee. She responsibly, because she knows the file very well, talked about a backlog of 40,000 cases at the Immigration and Refugee Board. Those people, many of them legitimate refugees, were now waiting because of the backlog caused by inaction at the border. Therefore, my colleague asked about that and asked if there were enough resources.
In fact, the previous speaker, the member for Scarborough—Rouge Park, asked the minister if “mechanisms, timelines, and resources are in place” to handle the surge of illegal crossers. The minister at that time reassured everyone. He said, “We've done it with the resources we have. It's been a question of being a little more efficient, finding innovative ways to deal with this”, which basically suggests there was no problem, and it was being handled. At another point he said in an interview that we had to be a little more nimble but that we could handle the surge, that we did not have to change anything.
In fact, in the October 5, 2017, meeting, my colleague, the capable MP from Calgary Nose Hill, asked the minister if he had spoken to the United States about closing the loophole in the safe third country agreement, and the minister once again said, “We haven't done that.”
Therefore, the Minister of Immigration has been told repeatedly over the course of a year by his department that there is a problem. When the minister appears before parliamentarians, there is no problem at all, that it is working fantastically fine, that we just need to be a little more nimble. I suggest that it is not accurate and I will show why.
Here is perhaps the most damning piece of information about which I would like the minister to tell the House. It is a briefing memo from his deputy minister. While the minister was reassuring parliamentarians and Canadians that there was no problem and to move along, his deputy minister said, “With no new funding allocated to the IRB in budget 2017, the RPD will be unable to keep up this volume of claims, even with the anticipated efficiency increase of 20%.” His deputy said that by the end of 2021, this would lead to a 133-month delay, which is an 11-year wait time.
How is 11 years fair to any Canadian, any asylum seeker, any refugee family, or any family trying to use the system in the way it is meant to be? Eleven years is an admission of failure at the highest level, while the minister is telling the House of Commons and committee that everything is working fantastically well.
The kicker that Quebec is already worried about and that Canadians should be worried about too is that the same note then suggested:
Individuals waiting in the backlog can still continue to utilize social supports, including education, social assistance, and Interim Federal health....For 2016/17, these were calculated...“600 per month per claimant. Therefore, in the above scenario, social support costs for the inventory could climb to...$2.97B from 2017 through 2021.”
If we use the 11-year wait time that the minister's own department has warned us about, the cost to the treasury of many provinces would be $8.2 billion.
That money would pay for some of the national pharmacare program they are talking about. It is a sign that the Liberals are not running the system fairly. It is time for them to be honest with Canadians.
