ARCHIVED – Speaking notes for The Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism

It’s a real honour for me to take to this august podium of the Empire Club. This is a club whose history goes back over a century, 109 years. It makes the Canadian Club seem like a mere recent upstart, right?

And it’s a club that keeps alive a real part of our identity and our history. And that has a particular resonance for me as the Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, because it was really the genius of what many call a British liberal imperialism that led to Canada’s approach toward pluralism, toward accommodating differences, and openness toward the world.

Your club is named after an empire that spanned every corner of the globe and where people cultures, and customs mixed, but all within the framework of the rule of law and parliamentary democracy. And so I think really, in a way, your club keeps alive an identity and a tradition which has kept Canada open as a land of opportunity for newcomers from around the world.

That’s what I’m here to talk to you about today. We can be very grateful that in this country, we have been maintaining historically high levels of immigration – in fact, the highest sustained levels of immigration in Canadian history: admitting over a quarter of a million new permanent residents through each of the past six years; adding the equivalent of nearly 0.8 per cent to our population each year through immigration; doing that without a nasty public debate about immigration; and doing it while maintaining a pretty broad and fairly deep public consensus in favour of immigration and the diversity that it brings.

But I don’t believe we can take that public consensus for granted. I think we must very intentionally avoid the kinds of divisive debates around immigration, integration and diversity that we have seen in other Western liberal democracies. We can see in the rise of the voices of xenophobia in parts of Europe, and in the anti-immigrant sentiment that is regrettably fairly widespread in the public discourse in the United States, how easily a society can lose a focused and mature debate about immigration. And we must be very intentional about avoiding that here in Canada.

Now, increasingly we hear scholars and commentators talk about the concept of social license in areas like resource development. It’s important for resource companies to have buy-in from the public in order to exploit natural resources. I’d like to apply the concept of social license to immigration levels, because I believe that it would be irresponsible for us to maintain an immigration program that does not have broad and deep support amongst Canadians. And that’s one of my guiding principles in the reforms that we are undertaking.

And what do I mean by social license? Well, I can tell you now, having been the government’s liaison with our diverse cultural communities for the past several years, that new Canadians in particular – and I think most Canadians in general – feel very strongly that we can only maintain high levels of immigration with two essential caveats, one of which is that our system should be characterized by fairness and integrity, in other words, by the consistent application of fair rules. And secondly, that we must see immigration working for Canada’s interests, which of course also means working for the interests of newcomers.

I think Canadian rightly expect that our immigration programs will lead to successful economic integration, as well as cultural and social integration for people who come here from around the world. And I think that Canadians, particularly the new Canadians that I’ve met over the past several years, have a sense that integration is a two-way street – that there is, to quote former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, a duty for newcomers to integrate. There’s also an obligation on the host society, on us as Canadians, to do everything we can to make it a welcoming society where equality of opportunity is not just a slogan or a cliché, but is a practical reality for newcomers seeking economic opportunity.

And so, I’d like to address those two themes: one, the idea of the integrity of the system and the fair, consistent application of fair rules; and secondly, the idea of how we create an immigration system that leads to true equality of opportunity.

Now there’s a columnist in the New York Times – a pro-immigration, liberal columnist named Thomas Friedman. He’s written a number of bestselling books, and he wrote a fascinating column about immigration, politics and the United States a couple of years ago, which really caught my eye, in which he said that in order to make, maintain and sustain a social license for immigration, an immigration system must have a strong fence but a wide gate. And I think that’s an interesting metaphor by which he meant that if there are no rules, if there is no integrity, then there really is no gate. If you don’t have a regulated system, people can jump the queue and abuse the country’s generosity – people who have no intention of integrating can come into the country too easily.

And so in order to maintain public confidence, you must maintain the integrity of the system so that there’s an orderly system with a fair and consistent application of rules. Now, I know that new Canadians feel particularly strongly about this and perhaps I’ll make a confession. I didn’t fully understand that when I became responsible for immigration in 2008. Perhaps, like many of my predecessors, I had a misunderstanding about the perspective of many new Canadians towards our immigration system. But I have learned, by talking to literally thousands of people struggling to make it in this country, that they are ambitious for us to have an immigration system that puts Canada’s interests first, that is based on integrity and the fair application of consistent rules. And most new Canadians are completely intolerant of those who would abuse our country’s generosity or violate our fair rules.

What do I mean by that? Let me give you some specific examples and concrete actions that our government has taken to reinforce the fairness of our system. One very common example would be immigration marriage fraud. Now every year, we welcome about 50,000 to 60,000 new permanent residents who have been sponsored as spouses, or their dependent children, from abroad. That’s in addition to those who come with primary economic immigrants upon arrival, but it’s a huge number of spouses who come.

Now, my department actually rejects about two out of every ten applications for spousal sponsorship and regrettably, there is – in some parts of the world – a large and developed industry of immigration marriage fraud. And this is an open secret, in fact a terrible scandal, in some of our immigrant communities. This issue came to my attention, not from my officials, not from our law enforcement agencies, not from the mainstream media, but from the South Asian community in particular who beat down my door saying we need to address this abuse of the privilege of sponsoring spouses into Canada. And I became aware of some egregious situations.

There’s a well known case in Brampton of a young lady who is paraplegic. She sponsored a man from India who arrived at the airport, got stamped in as a permanent resident, took off, and never met her. And we know thousands of situations like that have caused great shame, enormous pain and exploitation of Canadians. We also have commercial marriages, where people sell the right to come to Canada by being sponsored by a Canadian resident or citizen.

So this was raised as a very serious problem, and that’s why we took action. We’ve now put in place, after widespread consultation, a new two-year period of conditional residency for foreign sponsored spouses – like Britain, the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand have – so that when someone comes to the airport, they don’t immediately get stamped in as a permanent resident. We need to see whether or not they actually are a bona fide spouse. There is an exception for people who might find themselves in abusive domestic situations, but this is just common sense.

We’ve also stopped what we call the five-year revolving door, where people would come in as a foreign sponsored spouse, having paid a Canadian to bring them in, and they would immediately divorce, turn around and sponsor someone else in for payment, thereby recouping their initial investment in the proposition of marriage fraud. Now we put a five-year bar on the ability of people who came in as sponsored spouses to subsequently do that. And so we’ve stopped the revolving door. Now, this is an interesting case study in how we’ve improved the integrity of the system, responding to a popular demand from new Canadians. And I’ll be honest with you, my officials weren’t very keen on this policy because they thought it would just involve more work for the bureaucracy, which I understand. But new Canadians have been thrilled that we’re finally saying that we take seriously the privilege to sponsor foreign spouses into Canada.

Similarly, when I became Minister, we became aware of an industry of crooked “ghost” immigration representatives, people who were basically exploiting prospective immigrants and visitors with the false promise of guaranteed visas and guaranteed immigration status, taking sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in cash payments from immigrants who didn’t really understand perhaps how the system worked, and then just disappearing with the money or perhaps worse, often submitting bad applications with counterfeit documents and creating real problems for the integrity of our system. So we’ve cracked down on that widespread abuse.

We brought in the Cracking Down on the Crooked Consultants Act – provocatively named, but truth in advertising – and we’ve now made it a criminal offense to operate as an unlicensed, unregistered immigration consultant or lawyer in representing someone on an immigration matter, and actually helping them to immigrate or visit Canada. We’ve made this an enforcement priority. We’ve seen many more cases of criminal charges being brought to bear. We created a new regulatory body for immigration consultants that is now transparent, well governed and taking very seriously its disciplinary mandate. In fact, in the past year, they’ve already begun pursuing over 100 cases of disciplinary action, where the previous and discredited regulatory body had done none in the course of seven years.

That’s another example of where we responded to a demand amongst new Canadians to reinforce the integrity of the system, and have made huge progress in that respect. And I’ve also lobbied overseas governments. I’ve spoken to the Prime Minister of India, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, the President of the Philippines, and the Public Security Minister of China to get them and their governments to co-operate more closely with Canada in combating this industry of underhanded criminals posing as immigration consultants around the world.

Thirdly, we’ve taken measures to better protect vulnerable workers such as caregivers, otherwise known as nannies, who come in through our Live-in Caregiver Program and Temporary Foreign Workers Program. We’ve created a new blacklist, so if there are abusive employers who don’t respect their workers’ rights, who take away their passport, who make them work unreasonable hours or have bad living conditions, we now put those bad employers on a blacklist so they cannot access workers in the future. And we’ve also made other changes in our nanny program to ensure that the employer pays recruitment fees, health insurance and travel costs, so that low-income workers aren’t paying for the privilege of working. And that again has been extremely well-received.

Another area that’s perhaps more controversial in terms of reinforcing the integrity of our system has been to end the somewhat widespread abuse of our generous refugee asylum system. Now Canada has a magnificent tradition of being the land of protection for those who have faced persecution, violence, warfare and ethnic conflict. In fact, this goes all the way back to the United Empire Loyalists, who were victims of persecution during the American Revolutionary War and came north to seek the protection of the Crown in this country, to the black Loyalists and those who came north to Canada through the underground railroad, to the more than one million refugees we’ve accepted in this country since the Second World War.

But it’s also true that there are people who seek to abuse our generosity. In fact, we now see that about two out of every three asylum claims made before our Immigration and Refugee Board are deemed not in need of protection. And increasingly, we see a wave of almost entirely unfounded asylum claims coming from the democratic, rights-respecting European Union. If you can believe it, we now get more asylum claims from the EU than we do from Africa or Asia. And I mentioned that at the UN Refugee meeting in Geneva last year. I could hear audible gasps around the audience, because it’s so manifestly ridiculous.

Virtually none of those EU asylum claimants even bother showing up for their own hearing at the IRB. More than nine out of ten abandon or withdraw their own claims, admitting of their own volition that they are not bona fide refugees. But in the meantime, they benefit from welfare payments, federal social benefits, a very generous federal health-care insurance program, public housing, and an open work permit. I remember asking one of these European claimants why they had come to Canada and they listed some of these benefits. And I said, “Well, are you coming as a refugee or are you just coming for these benefits?” He said, “Well, you let us do this so why shouldn’t we?” A very good question. It was one of those eureka moments.

And that is why, in part, we are bringing forward fundamental improvements to Canada’s asylum system. Let me be clear. Our reforms now before Parliament in Bill C-31, the Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act, will continue our tradition of providing protection to anyone who comes to Canada who has a well-founded fear of persecution from any country, regardless of how they arrived in this country, without exception. Every asylum claimant will continue to receive a full, fair, fact-based, independent assessment at an oral hearing in front of a highly trained adjudicator at our quasi-judicial Immigration and Refugee Board – a hearing that’s governed according to the principles of due process and natural justice, in a manner that exceeds the requirements of the Charter of Rights and the 1951 Convention on Refugees – every single claimant without prejudice to the country of origin or their mode of arrival.

However, the system will be significantly faster. It will be fair, but fast. We will send a message to those who are merely coming here to abuse our generosity that they will no longer be able to stay in Canada for several years abusing that generosity of our system. And that’s what it takes us now – typically five years or more – to remove even manifestly unfounded asylum claimants, even those who have withdrawn or abandoned their own claim, as they use a very cumbersome, slow-moving, redundant process of administrative appeal. So we’ll be collapsing those administrative appeals into a full fact-based appeal at a new Refugee Appeal Division at the Immigration and Refugee Board.

I’ve received some criticism from friends of mine in the Opposition for these reforms, but I remind them that no government before ours was prepared to actually create a full fact-based Refugee Appeal Division at the IRB. This is an improvement in terms of due process and natural justice. We will, however, say to those claimants coming from countries that we designate – countries that, for example, have an IRB rejection rate for asylum claims of over 80 per cent – that they will not get appeals. They’ll get a full fact-based hearing without prejudice to the country they come from, but they will be subject to removal if their claim is rejected.

Now, I’m here to say that if we want to maintain public confidence in our tradition for refugee protection, we must demonstrate to Canadians that our system does not invite abuse of our generosity. And we believe those are balanced reforms that will reinforce public support, while also maintaining our humanitarian obligations.

I’ll also make a couple of other points on the integrity front. We are combating the scourge of human smuggling. You may see, I think on the front page of the National Post today, a story about a large fishing vessel that has been detained by Canadian authorities off the coast of Ghana. It has been part of a complex investigation by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies in West African countries over the course of the past year, in which we identified a dangerous syndicate of human smuggling criminals who sought to obtain a vessel and transit customers from Thailand and India, through Ethiopia, to West Africa, where they hope to push a thousand people on a dangerous fishing vessel to bring it off the east coast of Canada.

Friends, every year, thousands of people die in smuggling operations around the world. It is the most dangerous form of migration. We must do everything within our legal power to discourage the smugglers from targeting Canada and clients from paying up to tens of thousands of dollars to the smuggling syndicates that target this country. And that is why Bill C-31 includes robust measures to change the business model of the smugglers. One of the more contentious elements of the bill says that if someone comes to Canada in a smuggling operation and is subsequently deemed to be a bona fide refugee, we would maintain our responsibility to give that person protection in Canada, but we would not give them the privilege of permanent residency for five years, because with that comes family sponsorship. And we know from our intelligence and from our research that people who pay the smugglers up to $50,000 to come to Canada are doing so because they are banking that as a cost that will be spread out over additional family members, who will subsequently be sponsored into the country.

So the measures that we take in this bill are not arbitrary, they’re designed based on a close analysis of what’s happened in Southeast Asia and in Australia. And we are confident that these measures, together with the strong and effective enforcement activities that we’re taking in co-operation with countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, will stop or significantly reduce the pressure from human smugglers. And I should also say in that respect that when we saw two large vessels arrive in smuggling operations off our West Coast a couple of years ago, we saw a huge decrease in general public support for legal immigration. This goes back to my earlier point. To maintain social license for immigration and refugee protection, we must combat those who would abuse our generosity.

A couple of other points. We are strengthening our immigration security measures by orders of magnitude, particularly in the context of the Beyond the Border Action Plan signed by President Obama and Prime Minister Harper last year, through which we will be implementing a new biometric visa requirement that is again before Parliament in Bill C-31. This would require, as in Australia, the US, the UK and other countries, visitors – initially from higher risk countries and eventually from all visa countries – to provide fingerprints so we can actually identify who they are.

You might say, “Why is this necessary?” Well, I have a briefing book full of examples of convicted foreign criminals who were deported from Canada but came back as many as 13 times under fake documents, because as long as we depend on biographic paper documents – which are, in this day and age, easily forgeable – we’re almost inviting them to come back. Biometric visa requirement will be the single most important improvement in our immigration security efforts – well, basically, in the history of our system.

We also will eventually implement an electronic travel authorization system, which is sort of like a light and quick online virtual visa available to people coming from visa-exempt countries. This is something the US and Australia have already done. Eventually, we’ll have an exit-entry information system with the United States, so we will be much better able to track folks who are on the continent and in Canada illegally and out of status, thereby significantly improving our integrity efforts.

We’ll also be coming forward with legislation shortly to accelerate and streamline the removals process for convicted foreign criminals. It has taken us, in some cases, more than ten years to actually remove dangerous convicted foreign criminals who are in Canada. I believe they should have their day in court in terms of their criminal conviction, they should have their day at the IRB in terms of removal, but they shouldn’t have ten years of delays. That’s an abuse of our generosity.

We’ve also cracked down on citizenship fraud. I’m giving you the truth of things that we’ve uncovered in the past few years, including some of these unscrupulous immigration representatives who provided a service of creating fake proof of residency in Canada, if you can believe it, for applicants for citizenship. So they were living abroad, not paying Canadian taxes, but they would make a citizenship application with a fake proof of residency in Canada. We’ve identified thousands of cases like this, which we are now acting on. These give you an example of our ambitious efforts to reinforce the fairness and the integrity of the system.

Now, I’ll say briefly that the second part to maintaining the social license for immigration is to demonstrate that it works for Canada, that it works for our economy, and that we as a host society are making every real effort to create that equality of opportunity so that newcomers can enter the cycle of prosperity in this country. When I spoke here at this hotel six weeks ago to the Canadian Club, I did a press conference right afterward. The very first question was from the editor of a South Asian newspaper who said, “Mr. Kenney, why are you maintaining immigration when immigrants face double digit unemployment? When my son is an engineer and he can’t get a job in Canada?”

And I hear that question more and more. And the reason I hear it is because we see an unemployment rate amongst immigrants that is about twice as high as the general population, an unemployment rate for immigrants with college degrees that is three times higher than amongst Canadian-born citizens with college degrees. And for three decades, we have seen declining incomes and higher levels of unemployment for newcomers. And so people naturally ask that question. Like Jean Augustine, who is the Fairness Commissioner in Ontario, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve stood before who broke down in tears because they came to this country from the highest socio-economic status of their country of origin, highly trained professionals, and have found themselves stuck in survival jobs at the bottom of the Canadian labour market.

We are failing them. We cannot continue to do so. As Bill Clinton said, one definition of insanity is to keep trying to do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome. Well we’ve been doing the same thing for too long and for too long, too many highly trained foreign professionals have been stuck in those survival jobs, frustrated and often ashamed in front of their families that they brought to this country. And too many have actually left Canada. I met an Iranian radiologist in Vancouver recently who said after three years, she and her husband, who’s a surgeon, are no closer to getting their license to practice. They’ve given up on Canada and they’re moving back to Iran so at least they can have an income to put their kid through UBC so that he can become a doctor. We let her down.

We’ve let too many people like that down. And we need them. Here’s the paradox. Here is an economy with huge and growing labour shortages and yet, we’re bringing in over a quarter of a million newcomers, many of them to face unemployment and underemployment. It makes no sense for them or for Canada. We must fix this system. And that is the inspiration of our transformational agenda for immigration reform, so that we can move from the slow, rigid and passive system of the past, with deteriorating economic results for newcomers, to a fast and flexible system that connects the newcomers who we bring to Canada with the jobs that are available. There are 250,000 unfilled jobs in Canada right now. We expect that number to triple by the end of this decade, because of large and acute labour shortages.

We need to address some of that through domestic labour market reforms such as the announcement yesterday on Employment Insurance, but we also must do a radically better job of connecting newcomers with the jobs that exist. And that’s why our new system increasingly will empower employers to work with us in selecting newcomers who they know can work at their skill level upon arrival, fully realizing their potential and contributing to the Canadian economy. This is not based on ideas we picked out of the air. This is all based on data and research, study after study.

For example, the data tell us that immigrants who arrive with a prearranged job, after their third year, are making $80,000 on average, twice as much as those who arrive without a prearranged job. It’s just intuitive, because businesses know better who is going to be able to work at their skill level upon arrival. So our new system will be fast, meaning that employers can bring people in more quickly. It will be flexible – for example, we’ll be creating a skilled trade stream so that people that don’t have advanced university degrees or perfect English- or French-language proficiency will be able to come in to provide skills that we need.

It will be better geographically dispersed, through our expansion of the Provincial Nominee Program. It will retain more and more foreign students, through our Canadian Experience Class. In the past, we used to tell them to leave the country after their degrees. Now we encourage them to stay after their degrees or diplomas. It will, I am confident, result in higher levels of income and higher levels of employment for newcomers, so we can say that this country truly is realizing our special vocation in the world as a land of potential, as a land of opportunity for people from around the world.

So I want to thank you for your interest in these issues. As you can see, I am passionate about them. I believe that the position I’ve been given by the Prime Minister in the past three and a half years is an enormous privilege. There are so many ministries that deal with systems and things and concepts and programs. This is a ministry that deals with human beings. I’m going right now to a citizenship ceremony, and like every other one I do, I’ll probably end up getting choked up as I look out over the audience and see people joining the Canadian family, filled with promise. And I look at those young children in particular, and I realize that notwithstanding the problems I’ve discussed, in this country, anything is possible for those who come here wanting to work hard and play by the rules.

We want to keep that promise alive for future generations, just as we have throughout our entire history. So thank you very much for your interest in these issues. Together we will do everything we can to ensure that Canada offers itself as a land of opportunity to those from around the world who want to help us to build this country and keep it the true north, strong and free.

Thank you very much.