:
Thank you, Mr. Chair and colleagues.
I am pleased today to present to the Committee my department's supplementary estimates (B) for fiscal year 2010-2011.
I think the supplementary estimates are self-explanatory, but if you have questions, of course, we are here to answer them. Perhaps in my opening remarks I can provide a brief summary of new developments within the Department, our operations and our policies.
Last March, as you all know, we introduced Bill , which received Royal Assent on June 29, 2010, of course after receiving the unanimous approval of both Houses of Parliament.
I would again like to thank my colleagues from all parties who worked on this.
[English]
This act will make Canada's refugee system more balanced, ensuring quicker protection for those who need it and quicker removals of those who don't. It will help deter those who would seek to abuse our immigration and refugee protection systems.
As part of these changes, Canada will also increase the number of resettled refugees by 20%, or 2,500 refugees per year. This includes 2,000 more spots in the private sponsorship program and 500 more government-assisted refugees. In addition, we will increase funding to the refugee assistance program. We've already started that work. This will give the refugees we resettle the support they need to begin their lives in Canada.
To promote these increases, I travelled across the country this summer to encourage individuals and organizations to become private sponsors, to become more involved in a revitalization of the private sponsorship refugee program. In particular, I urged them to become part of our humanitarian tradition by helping to provide a new beginning for victims of violence and persecution around the world, such as those forced to flee the cruelty and brutality of the Ahmadinejad regime in Iran and religious persecution in Iraq.
I should also mention that we've begun--or more than begun, we're well into--the hard work of implementation of the Balanced Refugee Reform Act. In fact, I've appointed, I believe, all of the additional IRB decision-makers for the refugee protection division who are necessary as part of our commitment to begin the process of backlog reduction.
[Translation]
Canada remains committed to protecting those who are most vulnerable. The Government of Canada is equally committed to upholding our laws and to protecting the integrity of our immigration and refugee systems.
[English]
That's why we've introduced legislation to crack down on crooked immigration consultants who promote fraud in our immigration program and victimize those who dream of immigrating to this great country.
I'd like to acknowledge Ms. Chow's advocacy that this initiative had to be twinned with our efforts on refugee reform.
As was the case with , this spirit of compromise and cooperation surrounding has spoken, I think, very well to all parliamentarians on this committee.
We also introduced legislation that would strengthen the value of Canadian citizenship by making it easier to lose citizenship if it is improperly obtained, and we hope to begin debate upon second reading in the House in the near future.
But for Canadian citizenship to be meaningful, it also is essential that new and established Canadians alike share a common understanding of our rights and responsibilities, our institutions, our democratic traditions, and our history. That's why, just over a year ago, I was proud to launch Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship, our popular new citizenship study guide, which is required reading for anyone seeking to become a Canadian citizen. In fact, the demands for the publication and tens of thousands of downloads from the website, as well as the very positive feedback, have been extraordinary.
This past March, my department began administering a new citizenship test based on Discover Canada. We expect new citizens to know about our country, so we've made the material and guide more comprehensive in scope. We strongly encourage citizenship applicants who want to do well on the test to study the new guide and familiarize themselves with their new country's history, symbols, values, and institutions.
[Translation]
To become a Canadian citizen, you also need to have knowledge of English or French. That obligation is set out in the Citizenship Act. Discover Canada is available as an audio version to help applicants who are still learning English or French study.
And since 2006, we have tripled funding to settlement services, including free language classes, after it had been previously frozen for years. That's meant an additional $1.4 billion over five years to enhance services that help newcomers integrate into Canadian society.
[English]
While the government helps immigrants integrate into our society, including through the provision of language training, we expect newcomers to take advantage of this support. What concerns me is that only about 25% of newcomers who qualify for free language classes have enrolled in federally funded classes. To ensure that all immigrants are able to fully integrate and participate in society, this is a number that we would like to see increase.
I'm very pleased to report today that we are well on our way to achieving this goal, as a result, in part, of a pilot project that we launched last fall, where we mailed language training vouchers to 2,000 randomly selected permanent residents. The preliminary results of the vouchers show that more than twice the number of immigrants who received vouchers enrolled in language classes than those who did not. We'll being seeing the final results of our assessment in the spring, and if they continue to be positive, we'll look at options to expand this approach.
We've also updated the multiculturalism program's objectives, placing a much greater emphasis on integration. Through its new objectives, the program will help build an integrated, socially cohesive society, and improve the responsiveness of institutions to the needs of a diverse population.
[Translation]
The Government is committed to improving the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to protect foreign workers and live-in caregivers from potential abuse and exploitation.
To this end, we proposed improvements to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, including penalties for employers who fail in their commitments to their employees.
[English]
We also made changes to the live-in caregiver program to better protect these workers and make it easier and faster for them and their families to obtain permanent residency in Canada.
In addition, Mr. Chair, we have introduced important legislative amendments to Canada's immigration laws, which would help protect vulnerable foreign workers, such as exotic dancers, who could be victims of exploitation or human trafficking.
The government is committed to maintaining our tradition of welcoming newcomers from around the world, Mr. Chairman. In fact, it's likely that this year, we will see the largest number of newcomers landing in Canada as permanent residents in more than five decades. In 2011 we intend to welcome between 240,000 and 265,000 permanent residents. I understand my officials were before you last week to discuss the planned levels.
[Translation]
The Government of Canada also remains committed to using immigration in a way that best serves our economic needs.
[English]
That's why I'm pleased that Canada was able to lift the visa requirement for travellers with ordinary Taiwan passports. This is something we announced, I believe, just a week ago. This is the eighth visa that we've lifted since 2006.
As you know, I spent time in September visiting our principal immigration source countries—India, China, and the Philippines—as well as having discussions with my colleagues in Europe and Australia. We focused on working together to combat abuse of our immigration system, and human smuggling and trafficking.
We are taking steps to address this challenge. Regulatory changes have been introduced to clarify the authority of the government to refuse applicants on the basis of marriages of convenience. The changes provide visa officers with a better tool to prevent people who have entered into phony marriages from undermining the integrity of our system.
This fall I also held a series of cross-country town hall meetings on the issue of phony marriages. I want to personally hear people's stories, as well as their opinions and ideas about how to best address the issue. While we obviously want to keep the doors open for legitimate spouses, we also want to make sure the doors are not open for those who would break our laws and exploit Canadians.
Mr. Chair, in closing, let me just address human smuggling. This represents an assault on our country's borders and generosity. It clogs our immigration system by diverting resources away from other areas where they ought to be focused. That's why our law enforcement agencies need the tools to be able to combat human smuggling, whether on a small or large scale. Bill , an act Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System, will enable us to crack down on the despicable human smugglers who prey on vulnerable migrants.
Canadians expect strong actions, but actions that are also balanced with our humanitarian and legal obligations. We believe Bill C-49 achieves that objective.
[Translation]
In closing, these are just some of the ways we are working to make immigration more responsive to our economy, and make our refugee programs more fair and efficient.
Thank you for this opportunity to address the Committee, and I would be happy to respond to your questions.
:
I think that's a false choice, a false dichotomy, Mr. Chairman.
Obviously family reunification is an important principle of immigration, as underscored in IRPA , but in my judgment, for us to maintain the world's highest relative levels of immigration, we have to maintain a public consensus in favour of those levels. In order to do so, I think we need to demonstrate to Canadians on an ongoing basis that Canada benefits economically from immigration. And that's why I think our number one focus has to be on economic immigration.
Now, having said that, the government is actually being criticized, quite broadly, I might add, for the fact that only about 20% of the permanent residents whom we welcome to Canada are actually assessed for their human capital according to economic criteria.
Yes, 60% of our permanent residents come through economic streams, but two-thirds of them are dependants or family members of the primary economic immigrants. So 80% of immigrants coming to Canada are either dependants, spouses, parents, grandparents, or refugees. Only 20% are primarily workers.
I don't think there are trade-offs with the temporary streams. You do know that highly skilled temporary foreign workers have access to PR through the Canadian experience class, and that's growing and it's good news. Secondly, the largest pressure that we now have, I think, in the system is permanent residency landings for live-in caregivers who come here as temporary foreign workers.
So we're actually expanding opportunities for certain temporary workers to transition into PR, but there's not a saw-off. We're not taking away resources from processing family sponsorship PR applications in order to do temporary foreign workers. Those are separate streams. They're not in competition for the same resources.
I would now like to ask you a few questions about another subject that I informed you about earlier, the use of French at the immigration board in Montreal.
For several years, there have been lawyers who have criticized the decisions of the Immigration and Refugee Board, the IRB, for preventing them from practising in French and serving their clients in French. A number of cases have arisen in the past. There are still some underway at present.
When those lawyers are dissatisfied with the decision of the IRB, because it goes against the use of French, your Department always attacks those arguments in the Federal Court of Canada. Your Department is quite simply involved in legalistic guerilla warfare against the use of French in Montreal.
I have myself had the opportunity, and I won't say it was the good luck, to attend one of those hearings in Federal Court, where there were lawyers who were plainly very well-known and very numerous defending the IRB's decision. In those cases, for example, the issue was that documents were not translated into French, although the language of the proceedings had been changed to French.
Because we are considering appropriations, I would like to know whether you can inform the committee of the cost of this legalistic guerilla war. How much have you spent, in the Department, on legal fees, to make sure that things essentially continue to work in English in Montreal?
:
I haven't seen a grossed-up estimate of that, but the costs are enormous. We can't underestimate this.
There is first of all the monitoring cost for the coast guard and the navy as such a vessel approaches. You saw all the CBSA personnel helping to unload the passengers from that last vessel. We're talking about dozens of personnel involved in that. There is of course the cost associated with detention, income support, interim health coverage, and legal aid. There are the investigatory costs, and then there are the costs to our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as we've had to beef up their presence in the transit countries to try to interrupt these activities.
So I don't think I'd be out of order in talking about these costs as quite easily adding up to likely tens of millions of dollars over the course of, say, the first year of the arrival of such a vessel.
I think that's one of the many reasons Canadians are upset about this. They think it's a violation.
We take for granted the degree to which, in this country, there is a pretty broad public consensus in favour of quite remarkably high levels of immigration. But we cannot take that for granted.
One of the reasons Canadians, particularly new Canadians, are frustrated with this form of illegal migration is because they see it as violating the fundamental principle of fairness. You don't often see Canadians cutting in front of a queue. Canadians have a sense that the immigration system should....
And by the way, I have friends from the opposition here who say there is no such thing as a refugee queue. Not true: there are 12 million UN convention refugees patiently waiting for resettlement opportunities around the world. When the Vietnamese fled Indochina, they went to UNHCR processing centres. They had their claims assessed and they waited patiently, often for several months, for resettlement opportunities.
There are people around the world.... There are regional resettlement opportunities or protection opportunities in Southeast Asia for people who need that.
But these people are ignoring all of that and jumping past, I don't know, two or three dozen countries to come to Canada. This is not the only country. Why would people choose the country that is essentially furthest from them as the only option for protection? I would argue it's because there is a mixed motive here for most, if not a primary motive, which is economic opportunity, family ties, and the ability to use our very generous family reunification process.
:
No, I have not seen a lot in that respect. I think had some proposals.
Essentially what I hear from the opponents of Bill is what I would regard, personally, as a kind of ideological or political opposition without grappling with the really hard practical question of how do we create a disincentive to people from paying enormous amounts of money to smugglers to come here in the worst and most dangerous way possible?
I don't think there's been a really close study by the opponents of this bill of the phenomena—the practical, real, concrete phenomena—of the specific smuggling syndicates targeting Canada. What's motivating their clients? How are they operating? How are they bringing people through the transit countries? Where are people sourcing from, where are they coming from originally? Is it India, to some extent, for example, a democracy that respects the rights of Tamils, inter alia?
I think there's been an absence of close and hard analysis on this. The general critique I hear, to be fair, is that we should “crack down and focus on the smugglers”. That's what Bill does with mandatory minimums of up to 10 years for those involved in facilitating smuggling operations. But let's be honest, that's not sufficient. It's necessary, but not sufficient.
As long as there are people willing to pay $50,000, or money in that range, to come to Canada, there will be people in the black market willing to provide the service. We're not talking about some kind of philanthropic service to bring people who are facing immediate risk to Canada. We're talking about former arms runners who, in the absence of a civil war, are now looking for a new commodity, and they've just determined that's people.
We can't reach the arm of Canadian law into foreign jurisdictions where most of these people are operating, so we need to create disincentives to people on the demand side. The bill is balanced, in my view, by addressing both the supply and the demand side.
Some of those are operational police questions that I can't comment on, but we'll try to get back to you with an estimate of the up-to-date costs associated with processing those migrants.
Second, I understand that about 200 of the 497 passengers of the Sun Sea have been released on terms, from immigration detention, by the IRB. I think those would include all or most of the women and children who were on board. People of concern whose identities have not yet been established are still under detention, as authorized by the IRB. It's very difficult for the CBSA and their security partners to get information on who such individuals are.
With respect to the crews, this is a question that's often asked, because people I think correctly assume that the crews are involved in the smuggling operations. All I can tell you is what's in the public domain. I believe there was a report last week that the RCMP are coming close to laying charges with respect to the Ocean Lady and/or the Sun Sea and facilitators who may have been on the Canadian side.
It's my understanding—I think I can say this, because it's in the public domain—that there are three or four criminal syndicates involved in this form of smuggling out of Southeast Asia involving specifically Tamil clients. They were typically involved in being parallel organizations to the LTTE--not integrated within its command structure, but involved in the provision of supplies, including armaments, to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during the civil war. So they're very sophisticated in terms of logistics. They're like a very sophisticated travel agency operating in the shadows.
They provide a full-scale service, whether it's acquiring passports or visas, facilitating people across borders with the exchange of money, or ensuring that local authorities aren't too focused on their presence. The amount of work they have to do in acquiring a large, steel-hulled vessel capable of crossing the Pacific is one of those things, as is getting the supplies together and moving people around.
This is a very large, sophisticated operation, and that's why we have substantially increased the presence of Canadian police and intelligence officials in the transit countries. That has yielded increased cooperation with the local police and intelligence. I'd particularly like to commend our friends in Australia, who've developed expertise in this area. The Royal Thai Police have also been very helpful in the recent past in trying to interrupt these operations.
Hopefully that answers some of your questions.