Speaking notes for John McCallum, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship at a luncheon hosted by the Canadian Club of Ottawa

Speech

Ottawa, Ontario
June 14, 2016

As delivered

I thought since it was coming towards the end of Parliament it might be time to do a bit of a balance sheet, a balance sheet to show what we have already done in terms of immigration and what we intend to do in the future, and also to tell you why I think immigration is so important. I think that it’s really more important than ever now that we have an aging population.

We have an aging population. Immigration has always been important and fundamental to Canada but it will be so even more as we go forward under these different demographic conditions. Just as an illustration of why immigration and immigrants are important I thought I might start by introducing to you three immigrants who happen to be sitting up here as role models for what the future might bring.

The first is Dr. Michael Schlossmacher from Austria originally, a well-known medical researcher in Parkinson’s disease, not yet a Canadian citizen but will become so in a couple of months I believe, welcome.

We also have right beside me Denise Siele who says she’s Kenyan born but Canadian made and one of Ottawa’s top 40 under 40, welcome Denise.

Finally I apologize if there are other immigrants at the front table but at least there’s one more, Carl Nicholson who is the executive director of the Catholic Centre for Immigration here in Ottawa an organization who has brought in many refugees and an individual who certainly has some ideas about how we might do it better. Welcome and thank you to all three of our immigrants.

As I said I’d like to do a balance sheet, where are we, what have we done and where are we going. Let me start with what we have done in certain areas. Before I get into immigrants let me say just a few words about citizenship because citizenship is also part of my portfolio. We have an act before Parliament which will change the Citizenship Act, reduce some of the barriers to citizenship but more importantly we are saying it will no longer be possible for the government to revoke the citizenship of certain classes of Canadians.

Some of you have heard of this I guess. The general principle is there’s only one class of Canadian and a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.

I’m hoping that bill will be through the House before we break for the summer and Senate willing through the Senate as soon as it possibly can be. There are three traditional immigrant classes: refugees, family class and economic immigrants. I would like to describe each of these three classes in terms of what we have done and our plans looking ahead.

I can tell you from the start that I don’t really like the term economic immigrant. I don’t like the terminology economic immigrant because it implies there’s economic immigrants who are good and useful and productive and there’s everybody else over there who isn’t very useful, who we only let in because we’re nice.

That’s wrong. That’s wrong. Everybody is an economic immigrant contributing to the economy to one degree or another.  Family class even parents and grandparents who may not be in the labour force facilitate the entry of the mother and father into the labour force by looking after children.

One of the good things about our refugee programs over the years, yes it’s an act of humanitarian generosity in the short run but if you look at the previous waves of Vietnamese, people from Uganda, people from Hungary they pay the investment back and they turn into long term productive investment for Canada. All immigrants are economic to varying degrees.

It’s a terminology we happen to use. I can’t find a better word so if someone comes up with one let me know. It’s refugees, family class and question mark. Refugees for me it’s been more a labour of the heart than a labour of the mind or the dollars. It will cost a few dollars. I’m an economist and used to doing more dollars and cents things but the refugee initiative was a move that helped us to define who we are as Canadians.

As you know we changed the system so refugees now have access to healthcare again and we succeeded in admitting 25,000 Syrian refugees before the end of February. We achieved that objective. 99% of those refugees are now housed permanently but we still have work to do. It is progressing in terms of language training and jobs. I think the main thing is something amazing happened and I’m not sure why but when we started back in November the main concern among many Canadians was security.

It was at the time of the Paris attacks and naturally security was high on people’s minds but in a few short weeks it seems the attitudes morphed into a hugely welcoming project. It converted into a truly national project where Canadians from seniors to little children to everybody in between were on board to welcome these refugees.

For me that was a truly heartwarming experience and it says a lot about what our country is like, especially at a time of migration crises in much of the rest of the world. For me it was a hugely exhilarating and satisfying experience even though I know that challenges remain and there are lots more difficulties ahead.

I would also say as a consequence of this I probably have a problem that no other Immigration Minister has. I can`t produce refugees quickly enough to satisfy the incredible demand of all these generous Canadians who want to bring them in. That’s a good problem to have. It’s a problem other Immigration Ministers would long to have because it reflects the generosity of our people but it’s still a problem for me and for us.

What I have done is I have said all of those refugee sponsors who applied before the end of March will be guaranteed the refugees will be here by the end of this year or early next year. I can’t do more than that because we have agreed to admit 300,000. That’s absolutely our capacity. If I said 1,000 more Syrian refugees it would be 1,000 less of something else, refugees from Africa, spouses who have been waiting forever.  We’ve gone as far as we can go this year because we can’t put other well deserving people at further risk.

That is refugees. Listening to the media you’d think the Minister of Immigration might be better described as the Minister of Refugees Only because that’s what one hears about in the media. Minister of Refugees Only is an unfortunate acronym, MORON. I’m not a moron I hope. We do things other than refugees, important though refugees are.  The second element is family class. Family class we don’t do this because we’re nice.

We are in competition with the rest of the world for immigrants. If you want people, intelligent smart people like those sitting at this table to come to our country it’s better if you let their families in too or else they might not come. It’s partly a humanitarian gesture but it’s also an economic calculation that if we want top people to come here we want to let their families come too.

The family class system is in a mess because over the last ten years the processing times for spouses have gone through the roof to the point where they are at two years for spouses to come to this country. I don’t think it’s right for the heavy hand of the Canadian state to keep spouses apart for two years. That was our central campaign commitment.

You can’t turn a battleship on a dime. You can change rules about refugee health with the stroke of a pen. You can’t change processing times from two years to something less with the stroke of a pen. We’re really proceeding on two tracks. One is we have invested more money to hire more officials to process more people. We’ve created more levels space for spouses. We’ve increased the number of spouses allowed this year by 12,000.

Also we are becoming more efficient. You may have noticed we brought in the refugees quickly. We also did it well in terms of no sacrifice on security or health issues. What I am saying to the public servants, this is like punishment for good behaviour. If you were so fantastic on the refugees, just transfer that wonderful achievement from the refugees over to the family class and other immigrants.

Then we can do it fast and efficiently for the others just as for the refugees. I don’t think the civil servants regard that as punishment. They share my view that it’s better if we can let the people in quicker who are being reunited with their families. I can tell you the public service is working hard to transfer the lessons learned from our successful Syrian experience to replicate the speed and efficiency in the case of families and so-called economic immigrants.

Through a combination of more levels space, more money and more efficiency we are hoping to improve the situation on the processing time for family immigrants. I said I want to be mainly you asking questions and not me talking. I’ll give myself five more minutes and that’s enough to deal with economic immigrants.

I’d like to quote Christa Ross who’s the CEO of the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce who said very recently, bringing in and retaining more immigrants including refugees isn’t a social question. It’s an economic one. It’s required for our survival. Immigrants are not taking away today’s jobs. They’re creating jobs.

This is from the Maritimes. I’m using the Maritimes because I can tell you when I did the refugees there was no part of the country more enthusiastic to bring in refugees than the Maritimes. There was no part of the country more enthusiastic to bring in immigrants than the Maritimes. That quote from the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce says it.  It’s a question of survival.

The Maritimes is aging faster than we are. They are getting older faster than we are and there has been a radical change in the attitude of Maritimers towards immigration. Ten years ago they weren’t keen on immigrants. But now they’re super keen, the Premiers talk about nothing but immigration. It’s because they’re aging and they desperately need people to fill jobs.

The shape of the Maritimes today is the shape of Ontario and Canada ten years from now because we are also getting older. We should look at the Maritimes as an example of why we as a country will need more immigrants because of our aging population. I believe that is clearly the case. We also know other countries will also need immigrants. We are in competition with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia for immigrants. What we should do in light of this aging population, in light of the fact that Canada has always been built on immigrants, we should seek out the best and brightest acknowledging that we are in competition with those other countries.

Let me indicate three ways in which we will do this. One, we want to welcome more international students as permanent residents. The previous government’s system with Express Entry was international student unfriendly for reasons I don’t have to get into but it was. We want to give more points to international students so we have more of them coming in as permanent residents.

I speak to people across the country all the time. People sometimes disagree with me. I have not had one person disagree with me when I say international students are a very fertile recruiting stream for us. They’re young, educated, they speak English or French. They know something about our country. They’re exactly what we need for the future. That’s one project to bring in the best and the brightest.

Second, we have to get rid of stupid rules.

I’ll just give you one. I used to be a professor and we have things called tenure track professors meaning they are hired for four years after which they’re assessed for tenure. If they get tenure they stay. If they don’t get tenure they leave but we have a system in our immigration which says that the job has to be indeterminate. That’s civil service for permanent.

Unless you have a permanent job offer you don’t qualify. That immediately excludes all the tenure track candidates. Here we are excluding tenure track candidates for university professors. Not all of them get tenure but many of them could go on to be great contributors to Canada. That’s a rule shooting ourselves in the foot and it’s just one of many.  It’s to illustrate the kind of stupid rule we’re planning to change so that we can more effectively bring in the best and brightest immigrants.

The final thing I’d mention is we have these things called LMIA, labour market impact assessment where you have to prove you’re not taking away a Canadian’s job in order to get let in. Those are appropriate in some areas for temporary foreign workers. A parliamentary committee is studying that. I won’t get into that. But for some categories it’s not and so we will be evaluating that with the general objective of getting rid of the dumb rules, breaking down the barriers so we can have the ability to seek out the best and brightest at a time we want to grow our country, at a time we have to face an aging population.

To that end I will be doing consultations across the country about the appropriate levels of immigration not only for 2017 but for three years 2017, 2018, 2019 and we’ll be talking with groups such as yourselves, provincial governments, stakeholders in the refugee business, business groups and various other Canadians to get some assessment from our population as to where we want to go on immigration in the next few years.

Thank you very much. I should have spoken more in French. Thank you for your attention and I hope that you’ll have questions. Thank you very much.

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