Dear editor,
Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s callous treatment of people’s lives by hitting the “delete button” on the immigration backlog should make us all concerned.
Kenney will be cancelling and returning the applications of 100,000 people who applied before February 2008 and have been patiently waiting to immigrate to Canada under the Federal Skilled Worker class. The dependents of those workers will also have their applications returned; meaning a total of 280,000 persons will be affected. Some of these people have been waiting for over seven years and have planned their lives around moving to Canada. Now they are cruelly being told to start— if they qualify at all under new the rules—back at square one.
The Conservatives tried to sugar-coat this decision by saying they will refund fees paid to Citizenship and Immigration. That’s a sham. Many applicants will have spent thousands more on services for lawyers, employment agencies and consultants; money that they’ll never get back. And, other costs incurred by applicants on things like medicals and security checks will not be included in the refund.
The reality is that if the Conservative government had properly dealt with the backlog over the past six years, everyone would have been better off. But instead of putting resources into the processing of applications in a timely way to begin reducing the backlog, the Conservatives reduced permanent immigration in order to bring in more temporary workers. They kept our friends and family out in order to bring people in for months at a time. That’s not right.
Kenney tries to claim that the backlog was a Liberal problem, but the reality is that the Conservatives have allowed the backlog to swell to almost 1 million applications during their reign of incompetence.
The Liberal Party believes that new immigrants are essential to the Canadian economy and we should respect their rights, not callously slam the door in their face. Returning the applications of skilled workers is not an immigration plan.
Kevin Lamoureux, MP
Liberal Critic for Citizenship and Immigration
