:
I will try to be quicker than that, Mr. Chair. Thank you.
My thanks to all the members of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. It is a pleasure for me to appear before the committee for the first time since this Parliament began its work.
I would like to congratulate all the members of the committee on the activities they are undertaking. I would particularly like to thank the committee for choosing the backlog in our immigration system as its first study topic. This is quite a serious problem that we must all work together to resolve.
I am pleased to be here with some senior officials of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. We have our Deputy Minister, Mr. Neil Yates, our Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic and Program Policy, Mr. Linklater and our Assistant Deputy Minister, Operations, Ms. Deschênes.
Mr. Chair, allow me to say that, as minister, I am very fortunate that the officials at all levels of the department are so capable and dedicated.
Mr. Chair, I would like to provide you with a presentation showing the principal elements of the problem of the backlog in our immigration system. I must say at the outset that the backlog problem is partly a reflection of the fact that Canada is the world's most desirable destination.
[English]
So I can tell you that the problem we have with inventories.... The technical term in the ministry is inventories; the common English is backlogs. Whatever we call them, they are partly a reflection of the fact that Canada is, I believe, the most desirable destination in the world. In fact, last year Ipsos Reid did a global poll, from which they estimated that at least two billion people around the world would like to emigrate to Canada right now. This includes 77% in China, 71% in Mexico, 68% in India, etc. They didn't actually survey every country of the world.
This is a reflection of the good problem we have, that Canada is seen as such a land of opportunity, prosperity, and democracy. This of course is why we must have a managed immigration system. The objective of that managed immigration system is to attract and select those people to Canada who will make the maximum economic contribution to our country, in part. It is in part to deal with the challenge of our shrinking labour force in the future because of our aging population. It's in part to try to counteract that aging demographic, so we have more people working and paying taxes, contributing to our country and economy and its prosperity in the future. Of course, as the country that now receives the highest per capita number of resettled refugees in the world, we also seek through our immigration programs to discharge our humanitarian obligations.
There's that huge, almost infinite, supply, if you will, of people who are what we would call in immigration policy a huge push factor from all around the world. How do we do in terms of receiving people? On slide 2 we can see that Canada has very high levels of immigration. In fact, over the course of the past five years our government has received the highest sustained level of immigration--that is to say, of permanent residents, not just temporary residents--of any government in Canadian history, with an average of 254,000 admissions. Admissions is a term that used to be called landings, but that basically means when someone comes here and has the right to stay permanently to work and to live in Canada. That compares to the previous 12 years, when the average was 222,000.
To put it in relative global terms, this represents about 0.8% of our population that we add on average per year. That is the highest per capita level of immigration in the developed world. I say the developed world because many third world or developing countries don't really have control of borders or managed immigration systems, so they're not a fair comparator. The only country that comes close to our levels right now would be New Zealand.
During and since the recent global economic downturn, many other countries actually cut their immigration levels. I'll give you one example. The United Kingdom has a population about twice our size, and they are right now restricting immigration to about 100,000 a year, when our average intake is a notch over a quarter of a million a year, so three to four times more on a per capita basis. That just gives you one point of comparison.
[Translation]
The backlog problem facing us is quite simple, in a way. Backlogs are a function of very simple mathematics.
[English]
Backlogs are a function of very simple, basic math. Here is the calculation. When you get more applications for immigration than you're able to admit, you end up with a backlog. When total applications exceed total admissions, you get a backlog. When that happens year after year after year, the backlog grows. As the backlog grows, of course so do processing times. Even though the time it takes our ministry to process a particular application may shrink through operational efficiency, the total time it takes someone to go from the point of application to the point of admission gets longer. This is not because of operational inefficiencies but because they're simply waiting in a growing queue.
The inverse mathematical formula is when the total number of admissions exceeds the total number of applications, backlogs shrink and processing times speed up.
I invite you to remember this basic mathematical formula through today's hearing and during all of your studies. There are a lot of interesting issues to be discussed, but at the end of the day it's a very simple mathematical problem.
Let's see how this works out in any given year. I'll just take, for example, 2008, which is the last year for which we have full stats, and it's an average year in terms of numbers for the past several years.
[Translation]
So, on page 5, we can see
[English]
--and I hope you see that we have these video screens--that we established an operational target for 2008 for admissions in the range of a quarter of a million, which is about average for the past several years. We assessed those applications and we found that about a quarter of a million met our criteria and could come to Canada, and about another 100,000 applications were rejected. But here's the problem. We received about 450,000 applications. That is to say that the total number of applications that we received exceeded the total number that we were able to consider that year by about 100,000. This is the problem we've had year after year.
Another way we could look at this is to think if we were to actually try to process everyone who would like to make an application, based on the Ipsos Reid poll, that would be over two billion people. I just throw that in there just to give us a sense of perspective about how much supply there is versus our capability to accommodate that demand to come to Canada.
As another way of looking at this, a metaphor I often use is to look at how a transport company would sell tickets, because it's a good way of considering the problem of backlogs.
This is essentially what happened. The problem really picked up momentum following the adoption of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act by the previous government in 2001, because that act created a legal obligation on my department, on the government, to process all new applications to a final decision, regardless of how many people we plan to admit or practically could admit. So there was, frankly, I would say, an irresponsible policy decision that threw completely out of alignment the number of incoming applications with an obligation to process them versus the capacity to admit people and settle them in Canada. That is one of the primary reasons we've seen this problem.
So one way of explaining this metaphorically would be to say that over the past decade or so the Government of Canada was on an annual average basis selling 400,000 or more tickets on the plane to Canada to that market of two billion people who would like to buy those tickets. Yet even though we've been maintaining our highest average levels of immigration in our history, the highest averages in the developed world, unprecedented levels of immigration to a developed country, notwithstanding that, we've been admitting about, on average, a quarter of a million people. It was a little less than that under the previous government, a little more than that under the current government.
So every year selling 400,000-plus tickets, admitting, let's say for sake of argument, a quarter of a million people, what does that mean? It means 150,000 customers, if you will, who bought their tickets to Canada, who paid their fees, and those fees went into our general revenue fund and we cashed those cheques. And they end up at the airport, saying, “What happened? You oversold the plane by 35% and we're left sitting here.” We say, “Yes, sorry about that”. Next year we come back and we sell another 400,000 tickets. We say there are a quarter of a million spots on the plane to Canada and then that crowd at the airport grows to 300,000 the next year. Then the third year we do it again. The next thing you know there's a growing number; in fact, there are 450,000 in the backlog. Year after year, that's how you end up with a backlog of over a million people.
Here I will admit that our government did not act quickly enough to reverse the policy mistake of our predecessors to align the number of applications with a capacity to accept newcomers to Canada. This is not the fault of one government. We must accept some of the responsibility for not having acted more quickly to better align applications with admissions. This is why we've now ended up with a total backlog in all programs of just over a million. In fact, I think it has just gone back down below that.
Let's look at this over time, in the past decade. On slide 8 you'll see that in 2001 the backlog was just under 700,000. But here's the interesting thing. The bottom line shows the immigration target. This is what we call our operational target. And you'll see that it's gone up over the course of the past decade to about a quarter of a million a year.
The red line above it shows the number of applications received, and as you can see, the number of applications received over the past several years is consistently over 400,000. That means there is a consistent, perpetual surplus of applications over admissions. And because of the basic math formula I talked about, that's why you see the growing backlog.
The backlog, incidentally, was at about 150,000 when our government came to office in 2006. The good news is that in some of the programs we've begun reducing the backlog, and I'll address that in a moment.
What are the possible solutions? Well, they really boil down to two very simple possible solutions. One would be a massive increase in the level of immigration to Canada, by orders of magnitude. So if we wanted to just maintain what we would call a working inventory, or a just-in-time immigration system, without limiting the number of new applications, then we would have to increase overall immigration levels to over 400,000 a year. That's a massive increase, an increase by orders of magnitude.
Or we could limit new applications, find ways to control incoming applications or at least our obligation to process new applications. Or we could do a combination of both.
Let me just say that there are some people suggesting that we actually open up whole new huge avenues of immigration to Canada. For example, I believe my friend Mr. Davies suggested recently that we find a pathway to permanent residency for all temporary foreign workers. Excluding those who already have a pathway to permanent residency, that would mean adding about 140,000 additional people to the immigration queue.
So if we want to prevent the further growth of backlogs merely by increasing admissions, we'd have to increase admissions to over 400,000. If we then wanted to add new PR programs, as Mr. Davies has suggested for temporary foreign workers, we'd have to increase it by about another 140,000, and that would bring us up to well over half a million permanent resident landings per year to Canada. And a valid argument could be made for that. I don't think there are many Canadians who support that, but if that's where people want to go and if that's where parliamentarians or this committee want to go, I invite you to be explicit about wanting to invite over half a million immigrants, essentially more than doubling immigration levels to Canada. Let Canadians participate in that debate.
I have a little dynamic video here and I have a mad scientist here who is going to show what happens when you try to do this. Some have said we should just increase processing resources for the department. Give Claudette more money to hire more visa officers around the world so they can make these decisions faster. And that's one of the suggestions that's come from the opposition, faster processing. Well, here you can see what happens when you're trying to take the demand—that is to say, the number of applications we get—and put it through a funnel, so it goes slowly. The number of people coming, the volume that is received, comes through that funnel, but you see it goes up to the number of people we can accept, which is about a quarter of a million.
Let's say that we hire a whole bunch more visa officers and process the applications faster. Well, guess what. You end up with just the same number of people admitted to Canada. So that's not a solution. Let me put it this way. Backlogs are not a function of a scarcity of operational resources in the department. Yes, our department could always function more efficiently, and we are doing that. In fact, I'll get into this perhaps in questions and answers. Through our implementation of, for example, our global case management system—which is a new worldwide electronic IT platform—together with other aspects of modernization, we are seeing our whole system operate more efficiently. But at the end of the day, if there's not an alignment between the number of new applications and the number of admissions, it doesn't matter how quickly you can process them. You could hit your targets in the first quarter of the year, and if the surplus of applications over admissions ends up waiting in the airport lounge, so what?
I'm someone who believes we should listen to Canadians on immigration.
[Translation]
I do not want to see here the problems that we see in Europe, for example, where immigration policies do not reflect the will of the public. In Canada, fortunately, people are on the whole in favour of immigration and diversity.
I want to keep our minds open in that way, Mr. Chair, but I am conscious of the fact that about 80% of Canadians tell us that immigration levels must be frozen at present levels or reduced.
[English]
Consistently, only about 10% of Canadians indicate that immigration levels are too low. About eight out of ten Canadians are saying that they're too high or high enough. There was a study that came out this week that points out that immigrants to Canada are those who are least likely to support increased immigration levels, and that's consistent in the polling.
Let's look at how we might fix the problem. In 2008 we had to overcome opposition, but we managed to pass Bill , which gave the minister the capacity to limit the number of incoming applications. This power we have applied to the federal skilled worker backlog—that is, the point system. Had we not taken those actions, the federal skilled worker backlog would now be over a million. But as a result of limiting those applications to 10,000 a year, we are at 475,000 overall, so we've had a significant reduction.
We've applied the same logic to the investor immigrant program, and we are doing the same thing with the privately sponsored refugee program. But there's one program where we have seen real problems with backlogs and we've not applied that logic—parents and grandparents. The backlog when our government came to office was 108,000; it's now 160,000. Last year we received almost 38,000 applications for the program. On average, over the course of the past decade, we've been admitting about 18,000 people. Just to freeze the backlog would require that we double the number of parents and grandparents coming to about 38,000 a year, which would be moving that up from about 6% to maybe 14% of total immigration to Canada. That would mean cutting economic immigration. Increasing admissions to that program, even doubling them, will not eliminate or even significantly reduce the backlog in the program. We could not achieve this even if we cut applications in half.
My hope, my vision, is that by using some common sense, we can in the next few years arrive at a just-in-time immigration program where applications received for our various programs are processed in the same year, and people are admitted without having to wait longer than a year. I hope that we can have a constructive debate about how to get to that just-in-time immigration system.
Merci beaucoup.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairperson.
I find that's the biggest problem. The minister, on the one hand, says he wants to have this wholesome discussion and I'm all for that. I've a lot of ideas in terms of how we can improve the system, and I want to be able to participate in improving the system. I think we need to have dialogue.
The study for a number of weeks on the backlog.... Personally, I'd put that on the back burner and have the Minister of Immigration here where we can have a roundtable discussion, questions and answers, and be a part of a process that would actually look at coming up with answers so the public would be better served.
I spent more time asking questions of the minister of immigration at the provincial level when I was an MLA, because time allowed for MLAs to actually question, thoroughly question, and get answers from a minister. Here, I'm given five minutes to be able to question what affects the lives of millions of Canadians. That's simply not good enough, dealing with the backlogs.
Having said that, let's take a look. One of the more sensitive issues is in regard to the parents. What we've seen is that the lower end of the target has now been reduced for parents, yet the greatest problem on which we're getting the most phone calls is in dealing with those backlogs of parents. Yet the targets have been reduced. In fact, if you look at last year, we were at the low end in terms of accepting the number of parents coming into Canada.
So I have some difficulties in terms of how the government has prioritized. I have some ideas that I would love to share with the minister, and I will share them with him, but I only have five minutes here. If you want to give me leave, I'll be more than happy to do that.
Mr. Chair, I want to talk about the specific issue of backlogs, and ask a question, a very specific question.
Imagine your son is wanting to sponsor you. You're living in the Philippines. You're 50 years old. You have two children. One's in university, the other one's in high school.
Now you're getting into the system. You can today expect it to take seven years in order to be processed, if you're coming from the Philippines. You are obligated to keep your university student in public education until the time you are issued a visa. That means, at the end of the day, we're saying to that student that they don't have a choice; they can't go into the workforce. If they do, they lose their dependency.
These are the types of nuances that need to be changed. And this deals strictly with backlogs. We have people who are put into positions in which, in some cases, they're having to possibly misrepresent themselves because of bad government policy.
My preference, when we have meetings like this, is that these are the things we should be talking about. We shouldn't be constrained to a few minutes of questions and answers.
Here is a very specific question that I would ask: will the minister commit to allowing dependants who have achieved the minimum of a three-year post-secondary course or program to remain as a dependant of a principal applicant if the principal applicant has been in the system for a minimum of 12 months? That would then allow.... For example, if I'm a parent and I'm being sponsored by my son in Canada, my child, who now has a three-year degree--but I still have another five years before I'm processed--could actually go out and work and support himself and not have to be worried about being dropped as a dependant.
That's only one example of the types of discussions I believe we should have.
The minister is right, Mr. Chairperson. It's not a question of resources. We have the resources in the embassies across the world. Our issue is that we have to deal with the numbers and how we are processing the applications.
I don't question that. I do question to what degree we are being afforded the opportunity to have that wholesome debate. That's what the minister says he wants, a wholesome debate. I think you have a wholesome debate when you enable opposition critics, who have a responsibility that is broader than their own constituency, to ensure that there's accountability on the issue of immigration and citizenship. You have to provide them the opportunity to be able to ask all of the questions, not limit it to five minutes.
The question I would like answered by the minister—
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We are all well aware of the challenge of processing times. We know the existence of the backlogs. I don't think we need additional witnesses to provide whining and complaining. We need creative solutions to the backlog problem. What I'd like to do is look quickly at the big picture, focus on the two strategic backlog areas where solutions are needed, and then go controversial and provide policy solutions.
In the big picture, 60% of Canada's immigration inventory is fixed, cured. I'm speaking of the economic class, the skilled workers. The politically courageous decision to cap intake of federal skilled workers in 2008 was the appropriate solution at the time. In respect of the pre-2008 skilled worker backlog, we still have a chicken in the python to digest. I anticipate that this will disappear in the next two fiscals. So the complaint is not about federal skilled worker immigration to Canada.
We have also, better late than never, cured the inventory issue when it comes to Canada's investor immigration inventory. We accomplished this by capping the intake in 2011 at 700 cases. Operationally, there are big question marks on how it was done, but the fact is that by shutting intake you reduce the backlog growth trend: pure math.
Where we cannot fix things are in the categories affecting parents, grandparents, and spouses.
The spousal category should not be on the table, because, frankly, it's a just-in-time inventory. Processing times have been growing, slight slap on the wrist operationally or tug on the ear. That's 80% of cases being done in a lot more than the nine months committed to by this government. So that may need a quick tweak.
As to the parents and grandparents, that's going to need a novel approach.
So we have two inventories, backlogs, in Canada that merit the attention of this committee. One is investors, who represent $9 billion cash to be transmitted to the Government of Canada, not into private sector businesses. This money is wire-transferred to the Government of Canada, $9 billion in 22,000 cases.
The other inventory is an inventory of love and respect, parents and grandparents. The challenge is to introduce a temporary backlog measure that will create within the backlog inventory of parents and grandparents two new processing streams. A processing stream with an addition to our existing stream would require a political decision taken by the members here.
Let's face it, parents and grandparents are not expected to work when they arrive in Canada. There's no taking of jobs. They're not criminals, and they're not security risks. As a matter of fact, they're not even presenting significant health risks, because they must successfully pass immigration medicals. The real concern is money. When they are here, they have access to medicare. Unfortunately, during their working lifetimes they did not have the opportunity to pay premiums into Canada's medicare system.
My proposal is to allow them an opportunity to pay a lump sum to the Government of Canada in compensation for 20 to 25 years of medical insurance, the same way parents must provide travel insurance when they want to visit Canada for one year. It's not all parents should pay. This is a temporary measure. If you like analogies, it's like a bagpipe. You need to put an additional pipe into that inventory to reduce the pressure and outflow it.
The amount of $75,000 is more than sufficient to defray the cost of medicare. I've gone into the field and asked families across this country what they think. In the greater Asian community it's a no-brainer. When the parents retire, they sell their property and the first $75,000 off their million-dollar-plus residence goes to the government. The greater Indo-Canadian community have similarly responded, saying they do not expect a free ride, they do not want something for nothing. They say, tell us the amount, our family will raise it, especially if we're already paying $6,000 a year in babysitting.
Economically, it makes sense. Ask Canadians if they would like these two additional streams: one, for $75,000, you priority-process within the backlog; for the second stream, it would be the same deal, $75,000, but if there's insufficient quota in that year you allow them forward—after they pass screening, criminal, and medical—on payment of the $75,000 to the Government of Canada, on a 10-year visit to Canada. They can wait until their number comes up, cost-free to this government and to the taxpayer.
That's my opening eight minutes.
I'm going to start by saying that the most effective way of undermining or crippling the management of an immigration program is to allow a backlog to develop. Unfortunately, that's what happened when the 2001 immigration act was passed. It did not, for some strange reason, contain any mechanism for controlling the flow of immigrants, and the act said, paraphrasing section 11, that anyone who met the selection criteria “shall” be accepted.
Of course, the department should have realized that there are many thousands of people out in the world who can meet our selection criteria at any one time. What happened was that within months a backlog began to build up. The government attempted—I think in 2002, less than a year after the act was put into effect—to correct that by saying that all those in the backlog would have to meet a higher mark on the selection criteria. That, of course, was ruled by the courts to be illegal and unlawful.
So nothing was done about the backlog until 2008, when, by that time, it had reached a million people waiting to come in. That's like the province of Saskatchewan being outside, waiting to come to Canada.
There was an attempt in 2008, and it was moderately successful, by the previous minister to Minister Kenney, to control that to some degree by first of all changing the act so that it meant that anyone, even though they met the selection criteria, “may” be accepted, not “shall” be accepted; there was no obligation to accept everybody who met the criteria. That was an important step, and it was difficult to get through. In fact, it had to be included in the budget to ensure that it would get through.
At any rate, that was helpful. Later, as the minister said this morning, they put a cap on the skilled worker component of the movement. That, as Richard has mentioned, has also been quite successful.
The problem is that there still remain many thousands, basically of grandparents and parents, in the backlog.
One of the adverse results of having a massive backlog is that people who want to get here find other ways of doing so. That has resulted in what I consider to be one of the most serious implications of the backlog, and that is that it allowed the tremendous development of the temporary foreign worker program, something that we in Canada had always avoided, knowing what happened to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s with the guest worker program. Thousands of guest workers came into Germany, France, and other countries of Europe, but of course they didn't go home. They're there now and have formed a large underclass in many European cities. It's a serious problem.
We avoided that like the plague until the backlog developed and employers, who wanted and needed skilled workers, found another route of getting them: they got them as temporary foreign workers.
Last year there were 283,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. That figure, when you add it to the 280,000 immigrants who came in, is significantly large. On top of that you have roughly 250,000 foreign students in Canada, and the foreign workers and probably many of the students are not going home. You can be sure of that.
That's the adverse impact, because many of the so-called skilled temporary workers are not so skilled. They don't have to meet any requirements, basically. They don't have to meet education skills or education and training. Many of them are unskilled and are the first to suffer if there is a layoff.
The problem here, really, if you look at it, is that the current government has lost control of the immigration program. Of the 280,000 or so immigrants who came to Canada, I would guess that only about 20% or fewer were selected or controlled by the federal government. I have figures here, but of the 280,000 who came in, 214,000 had nothing to do with the federal government except being checked for criminality and medical.... They were brought in by employers, they were brought in by provinces, they were brought in by relatives, or they consisted of refugees and humanitarian cases and several thousand live-in care workers or caregivers.
In effect, as far as I'm concerned, the federal government has lost control of the movement.
Add to that the asylum system, in which there is a backlog again of some 50,000 waiting. Again, even if they are found not to be genuine by the board, the chances are that they won't be sent home. That, I think, is a serious problem.
Until the backlog problem is resolved, I don't think that any department or any minister is going to be able to manage the program effectively.
How could the problem be solvedt? Richard has given some solutions. My own view is that we have a legal as well as a moral obligation to let the parents and grandparents in. I think it was a mistake to put the sponsored category in the act, as was done. Normally in the past we only accepted parents if they were over the age of 60 and grandparents if they were over the age of 65. Opening it up to parents of any age means we're getting a lot of parents who are in their forties and fifties and who are entering the labour force.
But that's beside the point. The current problem, I think, is that until you get rid of the backlog, you're not going to be able to manage the immigration program effectively. I would suggest that the way to do it is through a variation of what Richard is suggesting or by biting the bullet and letting the parents and grandparents in, at the cost that will accrue to us in health care and other things.
Thank you.
:
Quite frankly, I wouldn't take the job under any circumstances. It's a thankless one.
I think I would do what Bob Andras did when he was elected from the Lakehead and he arrived and found out he was going to be the minister. He started asking basic questions, like why do we have any immigration? And of course the bureaucrats, and I was one of them, couldn't give him a sensible answer. So he said we have to do a fundamental basic study on immigration. “Times are changing. We did need them when the west was wide open and we needed thousands of people to go out there and settle on the land, but do we really need them now?” So he set up a green paper study that went across the country.
Essentially, I think we have to figure out why we are bringing in immigrants. Most of the economists who know a lot about immigration and make it their field of study, like George Borjas at Harvard and many others, are saying that immigration doesn't really help the economy, not significantly. What you have to look at is whether it increases the per capita income of the current population, and most studies indicate that it does not. It does not. And our own economic studies dating back to the Macdonald royal commission, the Economic Council report, and Health and Welfare did an extensive study, significantly pointed out that immigration has very little impact on the economy.
The labour force may be a different thing. But again, if you're bringing in a lot of foreign labour, you are inhibiting the chances of people who are already here from getting training so they can get into the trades they want to get into. That should be a study. There isn't, in my view, a national labour force policy that makes sense.
You have high unemployment in the Maritimes. You have employers in Calgary who want 60,000 workers and can't get them. I don't know how you resolve that, but I think it's unwise to assume that you should keep doing this for labour force reasons.
The House of Lords in England did a study in 2008 and concluded that the British bringing in 190,000 immigrants each year was ridiculous. They didn't need immigrants for the economy, they were not helping the labour force, and they certainly don't help the aging. Yet Mr. Kenney, who was here this morning, will argue that we need immigrants for economic development, we need immigrants for labour force enhancement, and we need immigrants because of the aging of our labour force. There aren't economists who buy into that. Most countries don't buy into that.
I think we need a fundamental reform of the system. Initially, the backlog is the first thing you have to tackle, and it's a tough one. But I think Richard has given some excellent ideas. My own view is that until you get the backlog off your back, you'll not be able to run a proper immigration program.
On the provincial nomination program, it's working reasonably well, but the danger there is that these people coming in do not have to meet any federal standards of education, skills, or occupations. That can be a problem if they start moving around.