COVID-19 Pandemic  Madam Chair, I understand the concerns of the hon. member. It is an important question. We are always taking feedback on the CERB. We have already heard from folks who were working but not making as much as they would make under the CERB, so we have expanded eligibility to include folks who are working but earning less than a thousand dollars.

COVID-19 Pandemic  I want to assure the hon. member that increasing the wage subsidy from 50% to 100% for employers would certainly ensure that more employers are able to take advantage of that opportunity to bring onto their employee list more summer students, and it would enable them to offer them employment in a way that is easier for them, as we are subsidizing those wages.

COVID-19 Pandemic  We said that we need to do more to include those folks, and we have. We have taken those steps, and we will continue to listen to Canadians and take that input.

Poverty  We have introduced the first-ever Canada housing benefit, which will make a real difference in the lives of families and enable families to take their rental supplement and make it portable and help children along the way. We are dedicated to also meeting our commitment to introduce an additional 250,000 before and after school child care spaces.

Social Development  Mr. Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to congratulate the hon. member for Whitby on his election to the House. Our government introduced and increased the Canada child benefit precisely to help families meet the rising costs of raising children.

Housing  Mr. Speaker, we will take concrete action to protect the most vulnerable Canadians. As part of the national housing strategy, we are investing $4.3 billion in the federal community housing initiative, which will help protect and build community housing for more than 330,000 families in Canada.

Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship  Live-in caregivers who provided services to Canadian families, under that party, under the Harper Conservatives, had to wait five to seven years to sponsor their family members. We have cut that down to 12 months. We will take no lessons from the Harper Conservatives.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a program that has really set the standard in terms of working towards retention of immigrants and not just their attraction to Atlantic Canada. It's the first employer-driven immigration program in Canadian history. The lessons we've learned from the Atlantic immigration program have been used to craft the rural and northern immigration pilot program. It has had a huge impact. In my numerous engagements with employers and provincial officials in Atlantic Canada, I have seen how the Atlantic immigration pilot program has done exactly what it is meant to do, which is to address the unique demographic, labour market and skills challenges in Atlantic Canada, but also the retention piece, in making sure that the employers attract not just the skilled worker but also their family and put together a settlement plan to ensure retention.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship  Speaker, that is the party that cut refugee health care, the people who are the most vulnerable in our society, a measure that the Federal Court of Canada called cruel and unusual punishment. We will take no lessons on refugee response. We are working very closely with Quebec. We have issued over 12,000 work permits to Quebec asylum seekers so we minimize the pressure on provincial services.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship  When the time came to invest in CBSA, the party opposite voted against that measure. We will take no lessons from the Conservatives on this issue.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Families under the caregiver program were waiting between five to seven years to reunite. It now takes 12 months to process their applications. We've reunited many families as a result of that. While the parents and grandparents program continues to be very popular with very high volumes, the wait times again for this program have come down from seven years to a little less than two years.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Our priority is family reunification. I am saddened to hear about the length of time it is taking for this family to reunite with their loved ones. I'm, of course, not familiar with this particular case—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In addition to that, the express entry system allows Canada to continue to be a global leader in being able to use our immigration system to bring the best and the brightest from around the world. In many industries across Canada, there is tremendous growth. They are taking up as much as is possible the local talent that is being produced in Canada through our wonderful educational institutions, but it's not enough, so the delta is being filled by foreign workers, who are coming in through various immigration streams to continue to power our economy and create jobs in the process.

Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship  Only the Harper Conservatives would pretend to care about immigration processing and people stuck in backlogs after we inherited those backlogs from them and are working hard to clear them and improve processing times. We have no lessons to take from the Conservatives on this issue.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We will be introducing a new measure where we'll be copying the client to make sure that when we are contacting the consultant, the client also knows about it. They can take action. They can be made aware when the consultant doesn't submit their application or hasn't done some of the work that they were supposed to do.