Conservative Government Ready to Politicize Canada’s Immigration System Says Dhaliwal

SURREY, BC - The Conservative government’s proposed changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act will set Canada’s immigration system back decades, said Newton-North Delta MP Sukh Dhaliwal today. The changes, hidden in the Budget implementation legislation tabled on the last day prior to the Easter Break, aim to centralize power in the hands of a Minister determined to eliminate standardized rules and regulations.

“Canadians should be extremely concerned by these changes, which guarantees that applications will no longer be prioritized on a first-come, first-serve basis” says Dhaliwal.  “They will give Immigration Minister Diane Finley the power to arbitrarily decide who she wants to let in the country-which goes against the very idea of due process and equal opportunity.”

Under the changes, the Minister of Immigration will have the ability to cap the number of applicants “by category or otherwise” and to reject any applicant already approved for admission by immigration officers.  This means that many of the 900,000 applicants on the current waiting list could be stripped of their right to a visa.

In their 2006 federal election platform, the Conservative Party promised to “stand up for a fair and sensible immigration plan that works for Canada.”  After cutting hundreds of millions in funding that the Liberal government had invested in Canada’s immigration system, two years of Conservative rule have resulted in an additional immigration backlog of over 100,000 applicants.

We are increasingly becoming aware that our future prosperity will be dependant on immigration.  Recent Statistics Canada data shows that two-thirds of Canada’s population growth between 2001 and 2006 was fuelled by immigrants and, by 2012, immigration will account for all net labour force growth.  The Conference Board of Canada also estimates that Canada will have a shortfall of 3 million skilled workers by 2020.  

“The Conservative changes provide no assurance that the government won’t use these new restrictions as a way to favour certain groups at the expense of others, such as ‘economic class’ over ‘family class,’ or to discriminate on the basis of country of origin,” Dhaliwal warns.  “The government should know that we are in competition with other countries for the best and brightest in the world. This decision could create a chilling effect that could deter people from applying at all.”

“Canada’s immigration system should be free from the hands of politics, and yet these changes allow for interference from the highest levels” remarks Dhaliwal.  “We should be investing more resources to relieve the immigration backlog instead of trying to ‘fix’ it by reducing the number of applications we accept.”

Sukh Dhaliwal is the Member of Parliament for Newton - North Delta and the Opposition Critic for Competitiveness and the New Economy.

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For more information, please contact

604-506-0735
DhaliS1B@parl.gc.ca