CIMM Committee Report
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Dissenting Opinion of the New Democratic Party
The New Democratic Party (NDP) has long supported taking a holistic approach to social, economic, environmental and political issues. We believe it is important to recognize the intersectionality of the issues that impact humanity. Addressing global migration patterns is no exception.
With respect to this study however, it is the view of the NDP that the committee should have taken a more focused approach as opposed to this catch all approach, which produced at times, only a superficial review of the issues. Smaller more focused studies would have allowed the Committee to more thoroughly and meaningfully examine of the various aspects of the study.
The NDP believes that nearly every aspect that was touched upon in this study could have and arguably should have been its own dedicated and complete study. In fact, for some aspects of the immigration system and global migration, the committee had actually already conducted a standalone study of, or held briefing meetings on.
This study officially began on 10 May 2018 and lasted over 30 meetings.
It included an international trip from 2 June 2018 to 9 June 2018, which sent a committee delegation to Uganda and Tanzania.
There was a 46 page Interim Report dedicated to specific meetings on the Global Compact on Migration (GCM) and Global Compact on Refugees (GCR)
The Main Report is over 100 pages.
Yet, due to rules forced upon opposition parties, any supplementary or dissenting opinion is limited to the same 10 pages maximum threshold, regardless of the scope of the study and length of the main report. What this means is that the length of the report for the GCM and GCR study would be the same as the report for all aspects of forced and voluntary migration globally along with all of Canada's immigration streams.
Various attempts including a unanimous consent motion was made by the NDP in the House of Commons on 7 June 2019 to allow the length of the report to increase to 16 pages was denied by both Liberal government members and Conservative Opposition members.
The NDP will not give legitimacy to the undemocratic decisions that effectively means muzzling the opinion of the opposition through such inadequate report length constraints.
The testimony and recommendations put forward by witnesses cannot justly be summed up in 10 pages.
As such, the NDP has posted a more robust, though still limited view of the NDP on this study on MP Jenny Kwan, Vice-Chair of the Standing Committee on Immigration website. It can be found here: