Olivia Chow questions Minister about family reunification processing variations

December 6, 2010    

Ms. Olivia Chow (Trinity—Spadina, NDP): It’s holiday season. Families want to be together, especially parents with their grandkids. New immigrants get lonely. They want their parents here.

    I saw the backlog list. I think Mr. Yeates told me and confirmed the number, there are 145,000 parents waiting. In Beijing you have to wait at least five years for parents to come. There are 7,000 people who are waiting from Beijing; from New Delhi 13,000–and that’s a six or seven year wait. This is from the various papers that have been given to us in the past.

    So you’re looking at applying to sponsor your parents, and it’s five to eight years before they can come to Canada. When I raise this, the target is only about 13,000 a year. It means that the backlog will just grow. I’ve met with some of those Canadians here, and they said, “You know, if I sponsor my parents, if the parent’s from Paris, it will take about a year at most. If my parents are from Beijing, I have to wait five to six years. That’s just not fair.” That is the queue, if you’re talking about the queue, where people are really desperate in terms of the number of years they have to wait for their parents to come.

    Is there any way they can increase the targets for both Beijing and New Delhi, because that’s where the backlog is, mostly, and overall targets in your annual plan for parents? I know you increased it for spouses, which is good. What about parents?

    Hon. Jason Kenney: Well, there’s a legal distinction here. The spousal reunification is an automatic fast-track program under IRPA, whereas parents and grandparents is discretionary, and for obvious reasons. People obviously have a greater need to be reunited with their immediate family members than with members of the more extended family.

    First of all I would point out that, frankly, this may be a reflection of the fact that we do have the most generous family reunification policies of any developed country’s immigration system that I’m aware of. Consequently, the demands are, frankly, greater than our ability to welcome people here in a reasonable period of time. I agree with you: five years is a long time to wait.

    The problem is, Ms. Chow, how to manage this pressure within the context of all of the pressures. So we increased our resettlement targets for refugees. Everyone loves that idea, but it has to come out of somewhere. We responded to the NDP government of Manitoba and other provincial governments in increasing the PN targets, but Ontario’s demanding higher federal skilled worker targets. Quebec, under the Canada-Quebec Accord, gets to virtually pick its number. Then we have, I call them the auto-pilot programs like FC1, family class one, spouses, independent children. That goes up or down, not depending on our discretion but rather the number of applications we expect to be filed. You look at all of these things and it becomes, frankly, impossible to maintain, to meet everyone’s hopes and expectations.

    In terms of the specific question about allocations for particular missions, do you mind if I…? Go ahead.

    Ms. Olivia Chow: Just one second. I think I know how it’s allocated. I got the question in last time.

    It really is an overall vision of who can come to Canada. Ten to 15 years ago half of the immigrants coming to Canada were from family class; now it’s about one-quarter. So we have fewer family reunifications and more from the economic class. We have far more temporary foreign workers coming in. You know I think we have too many temporary foreign workers, and they are subjected to exploitation. Their wages are not paid sometimes and they get deported immediately, even though their wages haven’t been paid. There’s just been a recent case.

    In terms of the vision, isn’t family reunification more important than or at least as important as trying to get cheap labour into Canada?

    Hon. Jason Kenney: I think that’s false. I think that’s a false dichotomy, Mr. Chairman. Obviously family 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 these levels. And 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 who we welcome to Canada are actually assessed where they’re human capital according to economic criteria. Yes, 60% of permanent residents come through economic streams, but two-thirds of them are dependants, 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 actually primarily workers.

    In terms of the trade-offs, I don’t think there are trade-offs with the temporary streams. Now you do know that high skilled temporary foreign workers have access to PR through the Canadian experience class, and that’s growing. Good news. And secondly, the largest pressure that we have now, 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 we’re not taking away resources from processing family sponsorship PR applications in order to do temporary foreign workers. Those are separate streams. They are not in competition for the same resources.

    Ms. Olivia Chow: I asked the question in the House of Commons and your parliamentary secretary said that if we have a specific example that labour law has been violated, then the minister would look at it and make sure labour law is not violated. In Ontario and in Alberta, foreign workers are not allowed to join a union, and a) I don’t think the right to join a union should be a given human right and it really shouldn’t be bargained–.

    The Chair: Your questions, Ms. Chow, are well over.

    Ms. Olivia Chow: And should we say to Ontario and Alberta that if you’re denying the collective bargaining, then you can’t really participate in this program because it’s not fair. It’s violating the human charter.

    Hon. Jason Kenney: Provincial labour law is a provincial responsibility and it’s not for our government to dictate to Ontario or any other province what labour laws they adopt. That’s up to their legislatures. I will say that as a result of the regulatory changes we are making, that there is much better information sharing between the provincial labour ministries responsible for the oversight of working conditions for most temporary foreign workers and our ministry. And you know the objective will be that when abuses are reported to the provincial labour ministries, they in turn will report it to us and we will put bad employers on a black list so they don’t have the same access to temporary foreign workers. So we are taking action on that, and if you have issues with respect to provincial labour market regulation, I invite you to take that up with the respective provincial labour ministers.

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