Mr. Speaker, we are here debating a bill today that the Liberals have proposed, which would give endless chain migration, the ability to pass down citizenship ad infinitum, to anybody. We just heard a speech, for those who are tuning in, that shows why this bill is so poorly designed.
A member from the Liberal Party stood up and, over and over again in questions and answers, which will be interesting to watch back, did not know how many people this would apply to in the future. At a time in Canadian history when we are talking about what the value of Canadian citizenship should mean, that the Liberal government has proposed such a reckless bill without really thinking through the implications really speaks to the utter disarray and brokenness of a decade of Liberal failure in Canada's immigration system.
The consensus on immigration used to be universal. It used to be a non-partisan understanding that immigration was a good thing and that numbers should be set in accordance with Canada's capacity to do things like house newcomers, provide them with jobs, let them start businesses or have health care. Now we know, based on public opinion polling, most Canadians realize the truth: We are in a jobs crisis, we are in a health care crisis, and we are also in a housing crisis.
Because the Liberals have increased immigration to such unsustainable levels, they are the ones who broke the consensus on immigration. Instead of fixing those issues, instead of listening to the concerns of Canadians, they tabled an ill-thought-out bill that would enable intergenerational, without limit, chain migration without any consecutive residency requirements, any substantial presence in Canada. That is just so wrong and irresponsible.
I am going to tell members what happened with this bill. This is what I suspect happened, because Liberals have come to talk to me privately about how incompetent they think the Liberal immigration minister is. They are shocked, and rightly so, that the Prime Minister would put someone so remarkably incompetent in that role on such an important file.
Let me give proof of how incompetent the immigration minister is. She was an immigration minister for eight years in Nova Scotia, and during that period of time, audits showed massive failures in vetting and setting levels and no response to Auditor General recommendations. She even said there should be no limits on immigration into her province. She said it in a CBC interview. She said there should be no limits, no caps.
Now the Liberals have put that minister in here, and if anybody has been watching her performance in the House, it has been abysmal. She does not understand basic numbers on how many people are coming in and did not really have a grasp on how many people were leaving the country who were supposed to. Now she has tabled this bill.
This is what I think happened. We have an incompetent minister who has to deal with this issue. There was a court ruling that the government chose not to appeal and needed to address somehow. Rather than take an approach proposed by a Conservative member from the other place, which had a tight, narrowly defined solution that would have addressed the court ruling, the Liberals teamed up with a far left, now independent, member of this place to utterly gut that bill and extend Canadian citizenship, turning it almost into a low-grade frequent flyer program. It is basically like someone would need to scan once every five years to get their loyalty program. That is really what this bill is.
A competent minister would have taken all stakeholder concerns and said that for the few people to whom the lost Canadian ruling applied, we should have a tight, narrowly defined bill to address it. That is what the minister should have done. She should have listened to the stakeholder feedback and endless debate in the previous immigration committee and fixed the bill such that it could have been something that could be passed through the House.
Instead, I do not even think the minister read the bill, to be honest. I think she probably took a memorandum to cabinet with whatever the department gave to her and said, “Just table the same thing.” That is what she did. I bet if we had the ability to question her at length, she could not go through the provisions of this bill. To me, that is not responsible government, given the impact of this bill, so let us talk about what this bill would do, because it is really important for Canadians.
With what colleagues opposite in the Liberal Party have been putting up in debate today, we can tell by their answers that they do not understand what the bill does either. They are going to just blindly vote for it without thinking through the enormous, non-partisan concerns that the bill would create for the value of Canadian citizenship.
Essentially, the bill would eliminate something called the “first-generation limit”. This was a provision that was put in place by a previous, Conservative government to put restrictions on how Canadian citizenship could be automatically passed down to people who do not live in Canada anymore, for the most part. For colleagues who want a little history lesson, this was precipitated by a situation that happened roughly 15 years ago, during the conflict in Lebanon, when there were what we would refer to as “Canadians of convenience”, or people who had no substantive ties to the country who all of a sudden claimed Canadian citizenship so that the Government of Canada would be obligated to evacuate them. At that time, that initiative, in 2006, cost the Canadian taxpayer almost $100 million, plus endless other ancillary benefits. Most of these people, the vast majority, had no ties to Canada at all. Most of them left and went back almost immediately thereafter. This raised serious questions.
It is tough to talk about conflict, but in this place we have to talk about what the obligations of the Government of Canada are to people who do not have substantive ties to Canada and then claim citizenship. To be clear to anybody watching this, I am not talking about the small number of people for whom the first-generation limit that was imposed affected. This is why a Conservative member from the other place did the job of the government for it in the last Parliament and tabled a private member's bill to close that loophole. We support those provisions. It is why a Conservative member from the other place put them forward. However, a now independent member, who lost party status in the last election, worked with the government to completely gut that bill and turn it into a chain migration bill, which is what we have here today, and that is not right.
We need to have a conversation in this country about the responsibilities of Canadian citizenship, and the minister started her speech with those words, saying there are rights and responsibilities to Canadian citizenship. However, her speech was entirely about the rights and failed on the responsibilities, and that is why the Liberal approach to immigration has been so broken.
Even on a macro level, members will remember the mantra of the last decade: Canada is a postnational state with no identity. Well, if we are a postnational state with no identity, what does Canadian citizenship mean? If we are tabling bills that would allow people with no substantial connection to Canada to, ad nauseam, forever and ever, pass on citizenship with no ties to this country, then that denigrates every person, including people who have immigrated to Canada and become citizens, started businesses here, worked as health care workers, paid taxes and become part of our Canadian pluralism. It denigrates citizenship for us all; it denigrates identity for us all. The beauty of our country, of course, is our pluralism, and it has saddened me as a Canadian to watch people across the country, Liberal, Conservative and NDP alike, lose faith in the value of immigration to Canada. Again, it is because the Liberal government has focused entirely on some sort of false, broken understanding of the rights of Canadian citizenship and has done nothing about the responsibilities.
Let us talk about the responsibilities. In the bill, there would be absolutely no requirement for somebody to live in Canada over consecutive days in order to receive Canadian citizenship. Practically, for a person living abroad, the bill would make it so that a great-great-great-great-great-grandma in the future, or somewhere in a person's ancestry chain, somewhere in their family tree, someone had Canadian citizenship, and then, sometime over their entire life period, they would only need to spend slightly over 1,000 days in Canada. It could be over 70 years, it could be over 80 years, but sometime, not consecutively, they just need to spend that amount of time in Canada, and then they would get Canadian citizenship.
We have to start talking about the rights that these people would then obtain. Practically, they would be able to get access to the Canadian health care system. Right now, Canada does not have any obligation even for countries that have tax treaties for people to file taxes when they have a citizenship situation like that. I am not talking about double taxation here. They would not have any obligation, in their responsibilities as a Canadian with citizenship, to pay for those services.
That is the way the bill is written right now. That is what it functionally means. Part of the problem in this place, sometimes, is that people have to think about what a bill would mean in 10, 15, 20 or 25 years.
Let us talk about how many people this could impact. In debate today, over and over, Conservative colleagues brought up the fact that in the last Parliament, for months, we tried to find out how many people this could impact. The now independent member, formerly NDP, lost massively in the last election because of policies like what this bill would support.
