Mr. Speaker, I have noticed that, as we have gone through this debate, we on this side of the House seem to be the only party interested in what is going on. I have not heard a lot of questions or comments from the other side.
Bill C-43 is called the faster removal of foreign criminals act. The minister himself suggested that the bill would make it possible for legitimate visitors and immigrants to get better treatment. This bill may do that in a tiny way but it would not do it for the majority of well-meaning and non-criminal persons currently in Canada or those who want to come to Canada who are being treated with the slowest process since God made molasses. It is an incredibly slow process.
I have the privilege of representing the riding of York South--Weston which has an immigrant population of well over 50% and well over half live in apartment buildings. That is one of the reasons that my riding is a magnet for refugees and those refugees will be the ones facing the worst time of their lives as a result of the government's new applications. These refugees will find it more difficult to become Canadian citizens because it will be harder for them to reach all of the required thresholds. They will also find it more difficult to sponsor family members once they do become citizens.
The minister suggested that lessening the rules against spies would make it so much easier for persons to come to Canada and stay in Canada. If individuals spied against Canada or Canada's interests, they would not be considered a spy if they were spying for some other country or in some other country. Reading between the lines, it may be that the government is also adding industrial spying to that, although it is hard to tell. I am assuming that would make it easier for the tens of thousands of people who come to Canada, I say tongue-in-cheek, because that is clearly not a big problem.
The minister also suggested that if one member of a group does not meet the criteria, for medical reasons or otherwise, the whole group would be turned down. I agree that that is an excellent use of this legislation. That would actually cause some people to come to Canada who were otherwise be turned down. However, as I will tell members later, there are far more people being turned down for temporary visas without any reason. This is only a small part of the big problem.
The minister also suggested that the Minister of Public Safety could offer relief in some cases. Again, this another tiny piece of the puzzle.
The parliamentary secretary made it clear in his comments that the government's objective is to reduce the backlog of problems created by people coming to this country, and he referred specifically to the backlog that affected temporary foreign workers and the backlog that affected permanent skilled workers taking jobs that are not being filled by Canadians.
Missing from both of those objectives is the huge backlog of family reunification applications. There are probably hundreds of thousands of backlogged cases, some of which will take as many as 14 years from application to reunification because of the delays in processing and because there are not enough people working for the minister to get these things done. We have examples.
A woman wants to sponsor her husband but it is taking an unusual amount of time for the application to be processed. The background check is taking a long time to complete. The couple has been repeatedly asked to wait until a security background is completed, which means they have had to file several sets of medicals at their own expense. The application for sponsorship was forwarded in 2008, four years ago.
Another individual tried to sponsor his parents starting in 2007. They have now had three medicals because they keep expiring because it is taking so long.
Where is the government on trying to figure out how to make these things faster? The Conservatives are talking about getting criminals out faster, but they are not talking about getting deserving sponsored immigrants into the country faster.
Another person has been sponsoring his parents and siblings since 2003. We are now talking nine years. They have now gone through three medicals and they have had their third police clearance done because they keep expiring. In the meantime, the father has passed away. That is what happens when the system takes too long: people die in other countries as a result.
A woman, a convention refugee, who applied for permanent residence, also included her 11-year-old son in her application. Her son is alone in Nigeria. Immigration officials have said, “Too bad, there is a 24-month wait to process her application”.
Another individual has been sponsoring parents and one dependent sister since 2008 and is still waiting. The list goes on and on, and this is but a small sampling of those we have heard about in my office. There are hundreds more in my office, and I have only been there since last year, who have run afoul of the system. We are having to tell them that it takes 14 years, 10 years or nine years, and their parents or their grandparents will die before the application goes through.
Then there is the backlog in skilled worker applications that the minister talked about. Yet with the stroke of a pen the minister actually got rid of hundreds of thousands of skilled worker applications and forced them all to apply again. How is that speeding anything in our system? We are talking about speeding the removal of foreign criminals, but we are not doing anything to speed up the process for legitimate people who want to come to this country and provide a skilled, valued service to this country.
I have one applicant who has been trying to come to Canada for five years. He made the application before the “stroke of the pen” issue. At the time he applied, the language requirement was less stringent than it is today. He has studied and worked in the United States. He taught in the United States, so obviously his English is good but somehow he failed the English test that was given to him out of Cambridge University in England.
Why we are giving British tests for Canadian English is beyond me. To a person who is not a native-born speaker, it may be difficult. He found it difficult. He missed by one point. He is a doctor. We need doctors. He is actually certified to practise in this country. He wants to bring his wife with him, who is also a doctor, and his daughter, who is in medical school. They cannot come because he fell short by one point because the language requirement was no good. The skilled worker application has its flaws too.
As for temporary foreign workers, the other side keeps crowing about the many jobs they have created. How many of them are filled by temporary foreign workers? There are over 300,000 jobs currently filled by temporary foreign workers. They are temporary, so that is in the last two years. Since the last recession ended or whenever the economic meltdown happened under the Conservative watch, over 300,000 of those supposed new jobs they have created are actually being filled by temporary foreign workers.
Now, with a stroke of the pen, the minister has decided those foreign workers can be paid 15% less than their Canadian counterparts, so it will be even easier for an employer to say they cannot find anybody because the employer is offering 15% less than the going rate. People are not taking the jobs, so the employer wants to hire foreigners.
We have temporary foreign workers flying planes in this country. We do not have a shortage of airline pilots in this country, but we have temporary foreign workers working for some airlines.
There is something wrong with this system. It would appear to be a part of the Conservative economic action plan to drive down wages in this country through the use of temporary foreign workers at 15% reductions, through the use of reductions in EI that force people to take wages at 30% lower rates than they earned before, and by doing all this, the Conservative can then say, “Hey, our economic action plan is working. We are improving Canadians' productivity. We are getting more out of them for less”.
That is not what Canadians want. Canadians do not want to be working for less money, to have their standard of living eroded by the government. They want real action on the economy and they do not want it through the use of temporary foreign workers, which the parliamentary secretary referred to as a good thing.
We also have a whole bunch of issues with the PRRA system, the pre-removal risk assessment. I have a couple of examples here. We have an individual who is being deported to Spain. His mother is a refugee in Canada who has finalized her refugee status and is actually allowed to stay in Canada. She was born in Peru. He was born in Spain as a result of her being raped. Now he is being deported back to Spain because he was not covered by her refugee application. He is 12 years old. He knows no one in Spain. Spain is the last place he wants to go because it was the source of a lot of pain for his family. What government does this to people?
Now the new rules would be: no entitlement to a PRRA because we do not want to do that anymore.
These are examples of how the system is not working. We are tinkering on the edges with something that might appeal to the Conservative base across the way because it has to do with law and order. It might appeal to the baser instincts of some individuals in the Conservative base, because they can tout it as law and order. However, it is such a small part of the overall problem of immigration in our country that it is difficult to imagine that so much time and effort is being spent on this kind of thing instead of on the real problems that face immigrants in our country, instead of on the real problems that face those who are already here and those who should be here as a result of sponsorship applications. Those delays in the sponsorship applications are costing lives. People are dying in other countries.
The minister also mentioned in his speech this afternoon that he is spending lots more money on immigrant settlement services. He mentioned a figure of $35 million. Well, it sure is not happening in my riding. My riding has seen cut after cut in immigrant settlement services to the point where some organizations have folded altogether. Is that because we have fewer immigrants coming to my riding? No, there are lots coming to the riding. In fact, there are two apartment buildings that are now full of Roma refugees in the last two years, so much so that the superintendent has had to go out and hire a Hungarian translator because he cannot communicate with these people. They are coming to the riding in great numbers but the services that they are asking for keep disappearing.
We have a 6% cut at Access Alliance; a 4.2% at COSTI, which caused a layoff; a 10% cut at the Learning Enrichment Foundation. Midaynta lost all of its funding, $400,000. It has closed up. York Weston Community Services Centre lost $800,000. It closed, with twelve and a half people laid off. Languages that are no longer helped in this riding are Dinka, Nuer, Spanish, Arabic, French, Kiswahili, Russian, Farsi, Dari and Somali.
York Weston Community Services Centre was urged the previous year to sign a long-term lease. It did. The government said the organization was good for it and that it should sign the five-year lease. It signed it and then all of its budget was cut, some $800,000 gone. Northwood Neighbourhood Services lost $378,000, which caused the layoff of five settlement workers and admin staff. That is 100% of its Citizenship and Immigration Canada funds. It gets money from other places, so it is only 30% of its overall budget.
These things are happening in my riding. For the minister to tell us, bold-faced, that he is spending more on settlement services is just crazy. Community Action Resource Centre lost $305,000, which was 40% of its budget. It lost all of the federal funding. It still has some provincial funding, but it has lost 12 staff. It has caused layoffs in my riding, which is already a riding with a huge unemployment problem.
The Vietnamese Women's Association lost $30,000 in Citizenship and Immigration Canada funding. Access Alliance lost $300,000. Toronto District School Board's newcomer services for youth lost 100% of its funding and the program was closed.
There actually are many more but I am going to run out of time if I read them all. The point is that the government is single-mindedly focused on the wrong problem. There is a problem with settlement services in the riding. There is a problem with immigration systems into the riding. There is a problem with the family sponsorship system and with too many temporary foreign workers being allowed to come to this country and take jobs that would otherwise be filled by Canadians.
Rather than focusing on those problems, the government is going to speed up the removal of a handful of criminals, and not necessarily even the right criminals. Because of the cuts to the immigrant settlement funding we now have employers in the riding telling us that it is making it difficult for them to employ the skilled immigrants coming into the country under skilled worker applications because they do not have the necessary fail-safes and backup mechanisms and training to learn how to live in Canada. Those things are not there any more.
Employers are coming to my office and saying it is a problem for them as employers. They are saying that they cannot be as productive or efficient as employers because although these people have great skills to do the jobs, they are not getting along in Canada because the settlement services are just not there. Maybe we need some Conservatives to actually listen to these employers and hear the fact that cutting settlement services was not a good thing. Cutting the settlement services also makes it difficult for the children of these recent immigrants.
I have a huge Somali community in my riding, again because my riding is a place where it is easy for refugees to come because the rents are so cheap and the riding is full of low-income housing. Those Somali refugees have been here for maybe as long as 20 years. It has been 42 years since there was an election in Somalia. The country just had an election this month and a new president was elected. There was a big party celebrating that because they are hopeful that maybe Somalia will turn itself around.
However, the problem is this. We have the tragedy of six Somali youth this summer who were tragically murdered in what we can only assume was some kind of gangland problem, but it raises the spectre of what happens to those disaffected Somali youth when their settlement services are gone, when they have no hope, no job, no help from the government, when the services that even the ministry of public safety had have been cut? There have been cuts and more cuts and these kids have no hope. Some of them turn to crime as a result. What is going to happen to those kids who get a six-month or longer sentence and who are 18 years of age and have been in Canada 17 of those 18 years but are still Somali? They are going to get deported to a country that is war-torn, that really has no government, that is unsafe and where they have no family. That is just wrong.
I said earlier that the wrong people are perhaps going to be deported and I would point to those Somali youth in that regard. With just one bad occurrence they will have a record, but are now going to have an even bigger problem. If the sentence is six months or more, they will get kicked out of the country without their family.
Yet as I said to the minister earlier, Conrad Black is still here and although the crime he committed in the U.S. could apparently have been punished by a 14-year sentence here in Canada, he is still here. It tells us that there seems to be a double standard. There seems to be a system that if someone is just stealing money from ordinary Canadians through some kind of fraudulent system, that is okay and the person can come back.
I also want to comment because Todd Baylis Boulevard is in my riding and was named after the Todd Baylis who was killed. We in the NDP will do anything we can to make sure that kind of thing does not happen again. We are not opposed to the part of the bill that would prevent a criminal being left in this country long enough to be able to commit crimes of a violent nature, nor would we ever be. However, we want to make sure that it is done in a way that is fair and honest and does not rest so much power in the hands of one or two ministers.
