Speaking notes for John McCallum, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship At an Event Hosted by the Vancouver Board of Trade

Speech

Vancouver, British Columbia
March 18, 2016

As delivered

Thank you very much, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure for me to be back in Vancouver. And I don't say that lightly because it is true. Partly it's a pleasure to be here having come from somewhere that it's snowing, and the weather out here is beautiful. But more importantly, I have roots in Vancouver, having taught at Simon Fraser a long, long time ago, '78 to '82, and enjoyed four wonderful years in Vancouver. One of the good things about that is I met my wife there, who's in this room. So stand up, please. Welcome to another product of Simon Fraser, Nancy McCallum.

And her family, much of her family lives in either Richmond or downtown Vancouver, so another bonus of coming to Vancouver is to see Nancy's family.

And we were talking at our table, and I understand from Craig Richard that the Vancouver airport is regarded – is named statistically by a leading group after millions of votes as the best in North America. Now, congratulations to you. I've had several meetings with the Toronto airport people and they never told me that.

I had to come to Vancouver to find out. But we are meeting later today, so I hope to find out more because I am not the Minister of Transport, but immigrants – airports and immigrants go together. They are really important. So I look forward to that meeting.

So look, in my introduction it was stated all these, to many people boring, economic dollars-and-cents things that I have done over the course of my life, which is fine. I like those things. But what I'm doing now is totally different – totally different. There are dollars and cents involved, and I'm going to talk about the economy, but the basic mission of what we're doing on refugees is less to do with dollars and cents and more to do with what one might call a mission of the heart, a demonstration to Canadians and to the world what we are made of as Canadians. And I do believe that this mission certainly has made me prouder as a Canadian, and I am very grateful and thankful to the thousands and thousands of Canadians across the country who have come out to help welcome these 25,000 people escaping from one of the world's worst civil wars, the worst refugee crisis in decades, to come across the ocean and live in our wonderful country. So it's been an honour and a pleasure to be involved in this, and I thank you and all Canadians who have worked so hard to make it a success. Thank you.

And I would say it's a double pleasure, in a sense, because the world has noticed. And when Justin Trudeau met that first airplane in Toronto, that picture went around the world, to the point where I – when I met little refugee children in Jordan who had never – knew nothing about Canada, they said to me oh, I see your Prime Minister welcomed us in Toronto. So if they knew, many people knew. And so I think that it is terrific that, at a time of this worst crisis in years, decades, when many countries are closing their doors, or at least edging them shut, to refugees, we in Canada are saying our doors are open, you're welcome, come in. And I think that has sent a strong message to Canadians and to the world at a time when this global refugee crisis is convulsing much of the world, including the European Union.

So I would like to spend a little time talking about the refugees, and then talk about some other issues that we have dealt with. Immigration is not solely about refugees, although our Prime Minister added the title, so I am for the first time the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. And I am perhaps one of the first federal Ministers to speak at the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade. So two name changes, and I am delighted to be here with you at the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, just as I am the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. We've both undergone a name change, I think for the better.

But stage one of the refugee trip – I call it a trip. I think I've tried to take Canadians on this trip, to be open, to tell people when we have problems, like exit permits from Lebanon or housing, and also when we have successes. But the starting point for this trip was to get the people from A to B. And that was a challenge. In the early days it was a challenge to build a machine to bring them over, and I have nothing but praise for the public servants who got that job done. One of our campaign slogans was Real Change. And one of the definitions of real change is you do something you've never done before, or else it would be real change if you've done it before. And this is something they'd never done before, to be quick but, at the same time, do it well in terms of security, in terms of health, and to bring an unprecedented number over in a short time. So they got the job done, and I thank the public service and everyone else who worked on that job.

But you know, to get the people over here is one thing, and we did do that. But the bigger challenge is to equip our new Canadians for success in our country, and that is what we are doing now. That is what I would call phase two. And that involves at least three things: housing, language training, and jobs. And here's where I want to really thank the business community of Greater Vancouver, and also across the whole country, for their help, and the settlement agencies. You have done a fantastic job. Without the settlement agencies, who have dedicated your lives to this, we wouldn't be nowhere near where we are today. So I'd like to single out the Immigration Settlement Services of BC, ISSBC, plus the new provider that we have set up in Victoria, the Victoria Intercultural Centre has also become a settlement provider, plus S.U.C.C.E.S.S. – and I see Queenie over there – and MOSAIC. All of you have done fantastic work to bring so many people successfully into British Columbia, so I thank you for that.

The number I've been given for arrivals so far in BC are 2,329. And a lot of those have come to Vancouver, increasingly also to Victoria. But government-assisted refugees have also gone to seven other British Columbia cities or towns: Abbotsford, Nanaimo, Kelowna, Prince George, and others. And privately-sponsored refugees have gone to 30 to 40 different communities across British Columbia. And the business community here and elsewhere has also come to the – our help. One of the things I engage the private sector on is to raise money to help us settle refugees in terms of rent supplements. So far we've raised $30 million. And Ian Gillespie in particular, a developer from Vancouver who probably many of you know, has himself stepped up to the plate to provide free accommodation for refugees for a certain period of time. So I thank you all. I thank the business community, I thank all the people from British Columbia for all the work you have done.

Now, to be honest, British – Vancouver's had some issues on housing. Overall, we're making good progress. About two or three weeks ago, 52 percent of the Syrians who had arrived in Canada were in permanent housing. That number is now up to 72 percent. So we're definitely making progress. British Columbia – Vancouver is only about half. So the rest of the country is ahead of Vancouver. Vancouver and Toronto are the slowest, and that's because you are big cities with high cost of housing. I don't have to tell you that. And so we are working very hard not only to find the housing within the Greater Vancouver Area, but also to refine our hub-and-spoke model so more go elsewhere in the province. And I think, as I just described, that is what is happening. So I will move on now from refugees. I think, as I've always said, I don't sugar coat it, there are bumps along the way, but I think overall this has been a highly successful project of which Canadians can be proud, and I thank you for your role in it.

Let me talk about a few other things we've been up to. Refugee health care: it's back. It was taken away; it's back. So we are providing health care to refugees, as used to be the case. Citizenship revocation: we have made amendments to the Citizenship Act because we believe very strongly that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. There is one class of Canadians, not two classes of Canadians. And so no government can revoke the citizenship of a Canadian just because that person has dual nationality. And we will make that change so it will be the law of the land. And we are saying that the – if a person commits a crime, the person should be in jail, not at the airport, even though the Vancouver airport is very good.

A third thing I've been talking about is international students. I think there is no group stronger, better equipped to become future Canadians than international students. By definition, they're educated. They speak English or French. They know something about the country. And we as a country are desperate for immigrants, partly because we're an aging population, and we are in competition with countries like Australia, UK, US to get strong immigrants. So what you want to do is court the international students because we need them. You don't want to punch them in the nose. Now, what had been done is they had received the punch in the nose when the 50 percent credit they used to receive for time spent in Canada to become citizen was taken away. Well, we have given that back in our new bill, and we are going to make it easier for international students to become permanent residents because they were short-changed a bit under the Express Entry Program. So that has not yet been done, but it's work in progress.

Another issue that's really important is credentials. The stereotype of a foreign doctor or engineer or accountant driving a taxi is not just a stereotype; it's often true. But it is provincial jurisdiction. But at a meeting I had with my provincial counterparts earlier this week, a Minister from Quebec, of all places, proposed that all of us Ministers get together to discuss credentials and to compare best practices so that we can improve this situation. And I know this has been a problem for decades. It is not something that comes specifically under federal jurisdiction, but I am very happy that I will be able to work with provincial colleagues to identify best practices and hopefully to move forward in this area.

The last thing I want to mention is our levels, that is the levels of immigration. And we recently announced that we would admit 300,000 into Canada in the year 2016. There's two ways of looking at this. You could say oh, this is amazing, this is the highest number since 2013, which is true. What makes me think they must have let an awful lot of immigrants in 2013 if it was over 300,000, and Canada was a fraction of the size of what it is today. But anyway, that is true. But it's also true that it's only 20,000 or so more than last year. So it's some more, but it's not a huge number more. And that's the maximum capacity of the Department. They cannot let more than 300,000. They don't have the people, the resources to do it. Even if we put more money in this year, they couldn't do more than 300,000. So that's my given size of pie for the year, and we have to make room for the refugees to which we had committed.

We have a huge problem with Family Class. The waiting time for spouses is now two years. To me, that is unacceptable. It should be six months. And so we let in more spouses. So that means, in terms of economic immigrants, we had a modest reduction, but for one year only. And the plan is for 2017 and beyond we are going to have substantial increases in economic immigrants, and we will have consultations across the country with all of the stakeholders in terms of the shape of our immigration in the future.

But I want to make two points about this. First of all, I don't really like the term economic immigrant because it kind of implies that some immigrants are useful and economic and contribute something and the rest are non-economic and kind of a waste of time for the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of those so-called economic immigrants are spouses of principal applicants, who may not work. Many of the family members, both spouses work. It is, after all, 2016. And many of the refugees, and I hope soon most of the refugees, will have jobs. So all immigrants are economic immigrants in the sense of making a contribution of one kind to the economy. Even parents and grandparents, who may not work themselves in the labour force, facilitate the ability of both mother and father to work, so they too make a contribution to the economy. So I think that this is an unfortunate term. All immigrants, in one way or another, contribute to the economy and contribute in many other ways as well.

And finally, we want to increase that capacity. The capacity is 300,000. We need more economic immigrants. I just used a term I said I don't like. We need more people to contribute to the economy. We need more spouses because the waiting time is far too long. And undoubtedly we will want some more refugees too. So we need to increase that capacity. Part of that's money. But this is one thing we have learned from our refugee experience. I praised the public service earlier. They did something they've never done before. They learned how to process refugees fast and well. It took a fraction of the time it normally takes because they learned how to do things differently, exclude steps that aren't necessary, do things concurrently instead of consecutively, improve the processing apparatus. And so what we learned with refugees we can transfer to families.

So we are going to re-engineer how we do this work within the Immigration Department so we can continue to do it well but we can do it a whole lot faster. And by achieving those efficiencies, we will be able to admit more immigrants that the country needs so much. Whether these are immigrants for businesses, whether these are Family Class, or whatever, we have to increase our capacity, we have to re-engineer the way we do things, we have to become more efficient, we have to become more welcoming. And that, I can tell you, is top of my list of things to do in the coming months. Thank you all very much.

Hon. John McCallum Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada Government and Politics