Embassy
Kenney hopes human smuggling bill will pass before
Christmas
By Kristen Shane
Published September 28, 2011
Jason Kenney was appointed minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism almost three years ago. Dubbed by his opponents as "The minister of curry in a hurry" for his constant presence at multicultural events, he will have another busy legislative agenda on his plate this
fall.
Mr. Kenney says he hopes Bill C-4, the human smuggling bill he calls his top priority, will pass before Christmas. It is currently at second reading in the House.
Meanwhile, refugee system reforms passed last year won't take effect until June 2012, an unexpected delay for some observers. Mr. Kenney blames the complexity of the changes required, and budget restraints.
Mr. Kenney and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews often make announcements together these days. Expect more of the Kenney-Toews duo this fall, as Mr. Kenney says he hopes to see legislation tabled to streamline and speed up the process of removing foreign criminals.
These changes come amid a constant emphasis on economic immigration that Mr. Kenney says will
continue.
Embassy sat down with him in his East Block office Sept. 21 to explain these changes and more. The following transcript is edited for style andlength.
We're in a majority now. You have a solid footing with your
government. What's on your agenda this fall session?
Well, the top priority is Bill C-4 to crack down on human smuggling. This is a key election commitment. It's a bill that is shared by Minister Toews and I because it touches on both the enforcement aspects of immigration and immigration policy to some extent.
So we do hope to get that passed before Christmas.
I was in Southeast Asia in August, and I can tell you that there continues to be real activity on the part of smuggling syndicates, who already received down payments for customers to smuggle them into Canada. So the smuggling activity continues at the planning phase.
We've been quite successful, in co-operation with our Southeast Asian partners, in interrupting planned voyages to Canada. But that is not sufficient. We do need to reduce the pull factors, the incentives that cause people to commit up to $50,000 to smuggling syndicates to come to Canada. And that is what the bill is designed to do.
Other priorities would be that we have a campaign commitment to bring forward legislation to streamline and speed up the process for removing dangerous foreign criminals. Right now, foreigners who are illegally in Canada with criminal convictions, who pose a threat to our society, can run the course on redundant appeals, for sometimes several years. And Canadians expect that everyone will get due process, but not be able to abuse our process so we'll be bringing forward legislative changes on that.
Finally, in terms of non-legislative changes, we, of course, will be tabling our annual immigration
levels plan in November, and we continue to work with the provinces in developing a multiyear immigration levels plan. The focus of that strategy will be getting better economic results from immigration.
So everything I've tried to do over the past three-and-a-half years has been focused on making immigration work better for the Canadian economy and making the Canadian economy work better for immigrants. So that's really the number one focus.
What would it look like, then, making immigration work better
for the Canadian economy? What do you mean?
Well, it means that we have to maintain the emphasis on our economic immigration programs, making sure that they are selecting people with the optimal skills for our labour market, so we fill the labour market shortages as much as possible.
One example would be our large-scale expansion of the provincial nominee programs over the
past five years. We've gone to from about 5,000 to over 40,000 admissions under that program.
And we plan to continue a robust provincial nominee program. It works, typically, very well where employers are able to identity folks abroad to fill skill shortages for jobs Canadians are not applying for. And often, these are workers that would not qualify for a federal skilled worker program, which typically requires higher levels of university education and language proficiency.
It has led to really one of the unheralded accomplishments of our government on immigration policy, which is a much better distribution of immigrants across the country. It used to be that roughly 85 per cent of primary immigrants settled in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Now
that's down to around 70 per cent. And the balance are moving to, typically, the prairies and some to Atlantic Canada, and even the interior of British Columbia.
And that's just one example. We're also retooling our entrepreneur program. We continue to review the investor immigrant program, to see if we can improve it so we get more bang for our buck...in Canada. We've done consultations on how to improve the points grid in the federal skilled worker program, again, to get a better selection of people with skills.
The bottom line is this: there is no shortage of people who want to come here. But we want to ensure that those who do come through our economic immigration programs have the best skills to succeed quickly in the Canadian labour market.
One of the things that came out of the consultations [on levels and mix that you were holding this past summer], I know there was a question in the backgrounder regarding ministerial instructions and using that to limit the intake, and specifically mentioning parents and the grandparents category as well. Do you think ministerial instructions should be used on that category?
First of all, the ministerial instructions are a very important tool that Parliament gave the minister of immigration in Bill C-50 in 2008. And it's the only way that we can deal with the huge and growing backlogs.
When we came to office, we had a total backlog of all immigration categories of about 850,000 with average wait times of seven years.
That's because, on average, the previous government was accepting over 400,000 applications per year, with a legal responsibility to process them. But [they] were only admitting, on average, 220,000 over the course of 13 years. So that meant, every year there was a huge surplus of applications, over admissions, that led to this 800,000- to 900,000-person backlog.
So we are turning the corner on that, where we have used ministerial instructions, for example, on the federal skilled worker program, where we have seen the total backlog go from 640,000 three years ago down to about 430,000 now.
And we're on course, based on our application of ministerial instructions, to possibly eliminate the skilled worker backlog by about 2017.
You've raised the parents and grandparents category. During the campaign, I made a commitment that we would admit more parents and grandparents this year than last; so that would be more than 15,300 in 2011. And I would consult with stakeholders, interested Canadians, communities, about developing an action plan for faster family reunification.
We're about to start those consultations. So I'm not going to prejudge the outcome. I'm not going to
include or exclude any remedies.
But I will say this: last year we got nearly 40,000 applications in that program, and that's far above our capacity. We cannot realistically admit 40,000 parents and grandparents. That would end up displacing economic immigrants. And I think it's hard to justify a huge increase in admissions for people who will be dependents.
Not necessarily though...Some people are going to contribute to society, or they're going to take care of kids so that parents can work.
All of the economic research on this that I have seen indicates that, unsurprisingly and quite intuitively, older immigrants constitute a net fiscal burden on Canadian society. That's not to say that they're not valued by their family members and they can't contribute. We do have a parental reunification program, and it's probably the most generous in the developed world, and we will continue to have such a program, but it has to be within reasonable limits. Because we all know that, I think, roughly two-thirds of health care costs are borne by people over the age of 65. So there are acute costs associated with that
population.
We tell Canadians that the reason we need high levels of immigration is to primarily deal with the aging of the population and labour market shortages. To help us pay for the pensions and health care of the future. So if we're telling Canadians that, we better mean it. And that's why we need to keep the emphasis on economic programs, which we'll continue to do.
The Balanced Refugee Reform Act. Your government passed it in June 2010. And it's going to come into effect in June of next year, 2012. Why the delay?
First of all, we did some consultations on regulations...There's a lot of moving parts. It deals with the [Immigration and Refugee Board, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Canada Border Services
Agency], to some extent the federal courts, legal aid provincially. It is a hugely complex policy change.
And so, for us to modify some of the regulations, based on the input we've received will require a bit more time.
Secondly, we have the deficit reduction action plan. And both my ministry and IRB are mandated to propose significant cost savings...So we need a little more time to figure out how we are going to implement cost savings, in the context of refugee reform. Because, actually, refugee reform has us
increasing the budget of CBSA, CIC and IRB. How do we accommodate those changes, while at the same time proposing a reduction?
So there's a lot more policy work to be done. But we are obviously committed to implementing balanced refugee reform.
What do you say, though to those who want a change to come quicker? For instance, the Mexicans and the Czechs potentially [on whom Canada placed visa requirements in 2009]. What's your response to them?
Well, our response is that we need to get it right. We need to make sure that the system we implement is going to achieve our stated objective of allowing us to liberalize visa policies vis-a-vis countries that are generally democratic countries, which respect human rights, but which have been
the source of huge numbers of unfounded asylum claims. That's really the nub of the issue. It's not the only issue, but that's the core issue for us.
So I say to such stakeholders: please be patient as we try and get this
right.
Do you envision any changes to this law?
Well, Bill C-11, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, was passed unanimously in the last
Parliament.
At this point, we are continuing to move forward towards implementation. We need a bit more time.
Okay, but the law came about in a minority situation, you had to have negotiations with the opposition parties. There have been rumours that the government wasn't happy with some of the concessions that it made in the finished bill, and that it might want to pass amendments.
Well, look, the bill that was passed was not the bill that we introduced. And even the bill that we introduced was I think very deliberately calibrated to get support in a minority Parliament.
But at this point, our focus is implementation of C-11. And if there are suggestions about how we can ensure that it really works, we're willing to consider those. But our commitment is implementation on C-11.
Okay, no changes to C-11?
Look, I'm not going to rule anything in or out...
It will always be a work in progress because there will always be the immigration industry and those who organize ways of unfounded claims. It seems to me that they will always find ways around any system. And so this is not going to be a permanent fix. There may be additional policy changes needed in the future. And we're open to those. We're not inflexible about those, I would say.
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