Mr. Speaker, Canada's asylum system is deeply and fundamentally broken after 10 years of Liberal government. This was not the case 10 years ago, but today, Canada's once compassionate asylum claim system has been absolutely ruined, absolutely abused and absolutely made a mess of by the Liberal government.
Today, I rise to speak to Bill C-12. I will direct my comments to parts 5, 6, 7 and 8 of the bill, which would amend the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Act as well as the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. These parts are similar to the immigration provisions contained in Bill C-2.
A decade ago, Canada's asylum claim backlog sat at less than 10,000 cases. Today, that backlog sits at several hundred thousand cases, with thousands more claims being made every month. While there are many highly persecuted persons around the world who are legitimately seeking refuge in Canada, there are many claims currently in that massive backlog that are bogus. Those claims are taking years, not months or weeks, to process, and worse, even after being found to be a bogus claim, an applicant can appeal their process for years more and then not be deported for years after that, if they are deported at all. During this time, bogus claimants can draw social benefits that Canadians do not have access to, such as vision care.
In effect, over the last decade, the Liberal government has allowed Canada's asylum system to veer far away from the original principles of its design and turned it into a backdoor, skip-the-line, economic migration stream, which is not accounted for at all in federal immigration levels planning, including the impact on housing supply, health care access and jobs. The Liberal failure has had many negative impacts, which I will outline today, with the two most noteworthy being the destruction of the fairness and compassion of Canada's asylum system and, in turn, the inability of the system to prioritize the world's most vulnerable persons.
When the Minister of Immigration claimed that the immigration provisions contained in Bill C-2, and now in this bill, would do something about this problem, she said it “would improve the flexibility and responsiveness of the asylum system”. However, in reality, the immigration provisions of this bill are structured to do one thing, which is to shift the responsibility for addressing Canada's deeply broken asylum system to the courts and away from the Liberal government that broke it in the first place, potentially past the horizon of the next election. As such, it is my assessment that the immigration provisions in the bill are likely to fail without substantive amendment and additional measures to both reduce the incentive for economic migrants to abuse the asylum system, to swiftly remove bogus asylum claimants from Canada, and to restructure this asylum system to ensure that the world's most vulnerable persons do not continue to be let down by the Liberal government.
I will now demonstrate to colleagues and the IRCC bureaucrats listening in the government lobby why this failure is likely to occur and what changes must be made. To begin, it is important to understand the extent to which Canada's asylum system is broken and how we got to this point because we cannot fix something if we do not understand what the problem is.
In 2017, the leader of the Liberal government tweeted, “#WelcomeToCanada”, in a tweet that was designed to encourage failed asylum claimants in the United States whose temporary protected status had been revoked by a due process to come to Canada instead, and come they did. After that tweet, well over 100,000 people illegally crossed the border into Canada and claimed asylum, many in spite of the fact that they did not have valid asylum claims in the United States, which is considered to be a safe third country.
Said differently, if somebody had a failed asylum claim in the United States, they never should have been allowed to claim asylum in Canada after illegally crossing the borders, but the Liberals opened the floodgates in 2017, even putting up infrastructure at the illegal border crossing most used, Roxham Road, and instructing RCMP officers to help people with their baggage. In many instances, scammers, unscrupulous consultants and even human traffickers exploited the system at the expense of the integrity and compassion of Canada's asylum system and the safety of all involved. The Liberals encouraged this for years.
I have been standing in this place for years now saying this and here we are. At that time, I remember the Liberals implied I was a racist for saying these things, and here we are with Bill C-12 in front of us because of this failure.
Well over 100,000 people have entered Canada illegally from the United States since 2015 and claimed asylum. Most have bogus claims, most are still in the processing queue, most have work permits and access to health care, and many have been put up for years in hotels at the taxpayers' expense.
At the same time, the Liberals lifted visa requirements from countries that have had a long history of high levels of bogus asylum claims, like Mexico, without any plan in place to prevent those claims from skyrocketing again. At that time, I raised many concerns about this issue, which fell on deaf ears. It is unfortunate, because since that time, over 60,000 asylum claims have been made by Mexican nationals due largely to the visa lift. Most have bogus claims, most are still in the processing queues and many have abused the government's payment of hotel rooms for people. It is insane that we are here having this debate again.
Experts have raised concerns that there are likely many more asylum claims on the way from the record three million temporary residents the Liberals allowed into Canada over the past few years whose visas are about to expire. Social media posts have encouraged people to attempt to extend their temporary resident permits by making bogus asylum claims. The result is that Canada's asylum claim system is drowning in over 296,000 claims, with average processing times of 29 months or more. At current rates, estimates suggest it could take 25 years to clear the current inventory, while thousands more claims keep pouring in.
The prolonged uncertainty and volume created by this backlog strain resources and people with valid claims alike. This backlog is failing the world's most vulnerable, who have real claims of persecution.
Nearly $1 billion has been spent by the Liberals on something called the interim federal health program, which provides benefits to asylum claimants that in some cases Canadians do not even have taxpayer-funded access to. Since the Liberal government came to power, the program has increased in cost by 1,200% because of the backlog in the asylum claim system. This is on top of the billions of dollars that have been spent on providing funding to house asylum claimants in hotels and affordable housing, many of whom are bogus, while Canadians struggle to afford rent.
A shocking number of claims do, in fact, appear to be bogus, with news reports revealing nearly identical stories in hundreds of applications under one immigration consultant who had coached them unscrupulously. They often originate from low-risk countries with high volumes of issued temporary visas, serving as a back door to extend stays after student or work permits expire. Loopholes abound: easy inland claims, fraudulent labour market impact assessments and consultants peddling fake persecution narratives for fast-tracked permanent residency. Lax enforcement and limited oversight of immigration consultants have massively exacerbated this problem.
The determination process of these claims itself is inefficient, with inconsistent decisions that plague an already massively clogged system. Some experts suggest that the higher rates of acceptance in recent years are due to a desire by bureaucrats to rubber-stamp applications in an effort to clear the backlog. What does this type of action do instead? It incentivizes more abuse of the system.
Said differently, the Liberals' breaking of the asylum system is a direct affront to the principles behind the 1951 refugee convention, which aimed to protect individuals fleeing true persecution. It was never meant to support economic migration. Today, thanks to the Liberals, many of the claimants in Canada's system are trying to claim asylum for reasons far beyond what the scope of the Geneva Convention imagined or proposed, and most are likely economic migrants.
Now we find ourselves here with the provisions in Bill C-12. The provisions outlined herein would undoubtedly face, without question, charter challenges, and given the state of Canada's judiciary, they are likely to be struck down by the courts. Consequently, considering the Liberal government's history of not appealing court rulings on immigration matters, as evidenced by the events that precipitated the current federal bill, Bill C-3, this would probably result in a further clogging of Canada's already overburdened judicial system and the continued deterioration of the asylum system.
Advocacy groups have claimed that Bill C-12 may precipitate tens of thousands of court cases. The Refugee Law Lab, for example, in its report on provisions inherited from Bill C-2, highlighted potential infringements on section 7 of the charter due to the one-year bar on refugee claims, as well as section 15 on equality rights. This group has also suggested that it is already planning empirical research for litigation. The Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association suggested that the immigration provisions in Bill C-12 could be challenged because the Governor in Council powers for mass revocation of immigration status risk violating section 7 by enabling arbitrary politically motivated actions. Amnesty International and a coalition of another 300 organizations suggested that the bill should be challenged for potentially violating section 8 of the charter.
For Bill C-2, which has provisions similar to Bill C-12, the federal government's charter statement asserts that any engagements are justified under section 1 as proportionate for border security and safety. It also makes a bunch of other assertions and says that everything is fine.
Here is the thing. There is a massively vast gulf between legal lobbyists, who do not want any sort of boundaries on the abuse of the asylum system because they are financially motivated to make endless appeals by the big glut of people coming in and abusing the asylum system, and what the Liberals are saying would be charter-compliant. In fact, when I was at the immigration committee and asked some department officials what they thought about the charter compliance of the provisions in Bill C-2 that are now in Bill C-12, they were fairly silent on the matter, which told me everything I needed to know. This is the Liberals' “let the courts sort it out later” approach to a system that is massively broken. It will only lead to abuse of the system without massive amendment and other massive actions to reduce the intake of people and their incentivization to abuse the system. I can say one thing, though: This is definitely going to make lawyers and immigration consultants a lot richer.
After the Liberals established a reputation for not challenging court rulings, the ruling that precipitated Bill C-3, an unmitigated chain migration bill, was never challenged by the Liberals. They did not even bother to assert Parliament's supremacy on the laws that had been made in this place. They said, “No, this is good”, and we have all of these other potential problems with Bill C-3. Now, after the Liberals have refused to challenge that ruling, they are trying to say that all of the lobby groups that are saying this bill is not charter-compliant are somehow going to magically accept that it is charter-compliant and will somehow solve the problems, which I find ridiculous.
The other thing is that the Liberals have gone out of their way to eschew the validity of section 33 of the charter. What have they essentially done with that? Even though their history says they are not going to challenge immigration rulings and they know that every legal group in the country is saying that this bill will need a charter challenge review, the Liberals have said they are probably not going to do anything about it. Mark my words: I cannot wait to come back to this in the House a few years from now, or whenever it may be if this bill passes, and say I was right. What the Liberals are doing is punting this issue to the courts while the system continues to get worse.
The Economist magazine recently published an article entitled “Scrap the asylum system—and build something better” that stated, “Rich countries need to separate asylum from labour migration.” I agree. Bill C-12 is silent on several other measures that could restore order and fairness to Canada's asylum system right now. For example, the Liberals should immediately undertake a system-wide review of the benefits that asylum claimants receive, particularly bogus asylum claimants, those with claims that have been found to fail, with an eye to reducing the benefits that bogus asylum claimants receive, especially when they are benefits that Canadians themselves do not receive.
For example, did members know that bogus asylum claimants get taxpayer-funded vision care through the interim federal health program? I know a lot of Canadians who do not get that. Years of taxpayer-funded hotel stays for bogus asylum claimants while Canadians make ends meet serve as a draw for system abuse. These types of benefits must be reviewed, and where possible, they must be curtailed to prevent the abuse that further draws on the system.
Why is Canada, at this juncture, still accepting asylum claims originating from the G7 and other safe third countries? The Liberal government needs to give its head a shake if it believes that someone who is arriving in Canada after having reached the safety of the United Kingdom, Germany or Japan is fleeing persecution in the spirit of the refugee convention and should be allowed to stay in Canada for years on a pending claim receiving taxpayer benefits like free hotel rooms.
Also, Canada's laws regarding the removal of people with no legal right to be in Canada need to be enforced. Canada needs timely removals and anonymized but publicly released departure tracking, and we need to know how this is getting done within the CBSA. While hearings and immigration tribunals must be conducted in a timely and efficient manner to ensure that claimants receive a fair process, those who do not have valid claims must be swiftly removed from Canada if our laws require them to be. Otherwise, we will just keep incentivizing people to abuse the system, because there is no disincentive for them not to. This could mean ensuring the detention of offenders attempting to enter Canada undetected when conditions are met. Peace officers must be empowered to carry out their duties as set out in the law, and national security warrants must be issued and executed in a way that Canadians expect them to be.
We have seen reports that the Liberals have allowed foreign nationals with known criminal histories into the country. New rules are needed to ensure that those with serious criminal convictions are rendered inadmissible to our country. The Liberals also need to get serious about closing loopholes and backlogs that further overload the system and cause frustrating delays up and down the immigration system. Applications failing the physical presence requirements, false information and endless rights to appeal need to be modernized to ensure the system works for the folks who it is intended to serve: the world's most vulnerable. The existing inventory of asylum claims should be reviewed on a last-in, first-out basis, while the criteria for making new claims must be tightly narrowed to prevent the system from being abused by economic migrants.
The Liberals could be pursuing new rules and engagement strategies for countries with high levels of asylum claims, particularly resulting from bogus asylum claims made by temporary resident visa holders whose visas have expired. Educational institutions that have profited off of massive and unsustainable numbers of foreign student visas could be made to pay fines and be held financially liable when their students on these permits make bogus asylum claims. When the asylum-claim backlog reaches a certain number of claims or approval rates, an automatic review of the system could be triggered to ensure that officials are not incentivized to rubber-stamp applications as opposed to making thorough and consistent decisions.
Asylum claimants could be made to prove that their claims were made in a timely manner, as opposed to having that responsibility fall on the government. We could reverse the onus. This would prevent fraudulent claims from being made long after someone arrived in Canada.
Additionally, there are many reports of unscrupulous immigration consultants aiding and abetting the abuse of Canada's asylum system. Shame on the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants for rejecting a request to appear in front of our committee. We will be reinviting it. It is absolutely shameful what some of these consultants are doing. The fact that its executives left under mysterious circumstances and are not coming to our committee suggests that maybe it is time these consultants report to lawyers after all.
Also, the government should pause the acceptance of new United Nations-selected, government-sponsored refugees and use those spots to find room for highly persecuted persons who are already in Canada and who the government has already made promises to, like those waiting for news through the Hong Kong pathways program, or Ukrainians in Canada, who the Liberals made promise to and have failed.
The reality is that there are hundreds of millions of people who want to move to Canada, but we do not have the housing, health care or jobs to support them all. Our immigration system must be fair and orderly to make consistent and smart decisions and to prioritize, especially in the asylum system, the world's most vulnerable persons. The Liberals have moved us far away from that. ln that context, with regard to the asylum system, careful decisions must be made to ensure that our asylum system prioritizes the world's most vulnerable, is immune to abuse and fixes the mess the Liberals have created.
In the 30 seconds I have left, I will say this. The Liberal immigration minister has not answered any of these questions. She has put this bill out, it has been massively denigrated by all sides of the public and she has not come up with a solution. I have solutions. I have put them out, and I hope the minister will respond to some of these things in her speech so I do not have to keep doing her job for her.
