Conservative
Budget Leaves New Canadians Behind
By:
Omar Alghabra, Official Opposition Critic for Citizenship and Immigration
Immigration
is one of the most important challenges and opportunities facing our
country. According to
Statistics Canada, our labour and population growth will soon depend
exclusively on new Canadians. This
is why the successful recruitment and integration of immigrants into our
society is so critical and should be a priority for this government.
Unfortunately,
the release of the Conservatives’ second budget last week proved once
again that Mr. Harper’s government is more concerned with electioneering
than with the future of Canada.
The
second Conservative budget, just like the first one, contains no vision
for ensuring the successful integration of immigrants and places no
emphasis on the needs of new Canadians.
It offers nothing that would provide relief for new Canadian
families dealing with the growing backlog in immigration applications,
including family reunification, slow citizenship processing times and long
wait times for refugee claimants to obtain scheduled hearings.
Recognizing
this as a priority, the previous Liberal government announced a five-year
$700-million plan to reduce the processing backlog and to create the
In-Canada Economic Stream that would allow applicants with experience in
Canada’s labour market or educational institutions to stay in Canada.
Instead of developing this plan, the Conservatives simply
re-announced the initiative under a new name and cut the funding to a mere
$34 million over two years, with no funding allocated to reduce
the backlog.
In
terms of foreign credentials, this Conservative government has simply
broken yet another election promise.
In their last campaign and in their 2006 budget, the Conservatives
promised to create an agency
to assess and recognize credentials at the federal level.
The Conservatives made a clear, unambiguous promise that would fix
this quandary. Instead, the 2007 budget states
that a new foreign-credential office will only "provide immigrants
with pathfinding and referral services to identify and connect with the
appropriate assessment bodies."
Doesn’t this government realize that simply telling prospective
immigrants about the challenges they may face with credentials before they
come is not enough? Canadians
don’t want another office that is going to point the finger at another
office. They want solutions to obstacles they can’t control.
Mr.
Harper’s government must understand that the provincial government and
regulatory agencies depend on resources to help them implement the
programs necessary to integrate the credentials and training of new
Canadians.
The
Conservatives' approach to the immigration file reveals that at best, they
have no plan or vision to deal with immigration issues and at worst, they
do not care about voters who consider this file to be crucial for the
future success of Canada.
While
the Conservatives’ actions to date are disheartening and disappointing,
they shouldn’t come as a surprise.
After all, it was Stephen Harper who said “You
have to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are
dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent
migrants from Eastern Canada; people who live in ghettos and are not
integrated into Western Canadian society.”
Mr. Harper’s attempts to re-invent himself and his party have
been a dismal failure. His past will always haunt him and his actions
speak much louder than his rhetoric.
