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

At the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong
Hong Kong, China, September 13, 2010

As delivered

Thank you very much for this kind opportunity to meet again. I had a chance to speak with members of the Canadian Chamber of Hong Kong in 2007 when I came here in my then-capacity as Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity. The purpose of my trip at that time was to get a sense of the civic responsibility and activism of the 200,000 Canadians who make Hong Kong home. It is delightful to be back following in the steps of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. I spoke with him shortly after his trip to Asia and to Hong Kong last year and he particularly remembered the warm reception he received from you all.

As you know, Canada has maintained the tradition of being an open country that accommodates differences who believes that immigration fuels the prosperity of our future. That is why we were one of the only countries in the developed world that going into the global economic downturn decided to maintain, in fact slightly increase, historic high levels of immigration at about .8 percent of our population while Australia, the United States and others were cutting theirs. 

This reflects a unique political consensus in Canada which generally transcends political, ideological and geographic divisions. It’s a consensus in favour of immigration. Canada alone amongst the major democracies does not have a political formation that gives expression to anti-immigrant sentiment. And that is one of the things that I think makes us unique. 

And one of the places that has been pretty central in the story of building prosperity through the talents of newcomers is of course Hong Kong. So it is a real pleasure to be back here working with our robust immigration team at the Hong Kong consulate under the leadership of, I think, one of the most impressive heads of mission that I’ve ever met in our Consul General.

But I should also say at the outset that I want to, on behalf of myself and on behalf of Prime Minister Harper and the Government, express our condolences to the families of those members of the Hong Kong community who tragically lost their lives in the recent developments in Manila, in particular the Leung family, who were Canadians living in Hong Kong. I know that our Consul General has presented Mrs. Leung the formal greetings and condolences from the Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, recently, and our hearts go out to that family and hope that they recover. I will be in Manila next week and certainly intend to raise our concerns about those events with the Filipino authorities. 

On a happier note, I have to mention that 220,000 Canadians live here in Hong Kong and 500,000 people of Hong Kong descent currently live in Canada and help build our country every single day. For example, my parliamentary secretary, Dr. Alice Wong, who came to Canada from Hong Kong in the late 1970s, went on to get her Ph.D. and is now a Member of Parliament. You know, often in the story of immigration, it takes families one or two generations before they have fully entered into the mainstream of economic, cultural or political opportunity. But that can’t be said about Hong Kong and the broader Chinese community who are so hardworking, so industrious, that they have risen to the top in every domain of Canadian life, most clearly typified by Hong Kong immigrant Adrienne Clarkson, our last Governor General. 

And so we’re proud of their achievements and this is a relationship that we want to continue to benefit from in the future. Although immigration from Hong Kong in particular has slowed down a bit we continue to receive many of the some 30,000 Chinese immigrants who choose Canada as their new home every year, making China the number one source country for immigration to Canada.

When we went into the 2009 downturn, I was doing our levels plan for immigration and we were looking at the debate in Australia, which became all about how much they should cut immigration by. It was the same thing in the United Kingdom, and you know the nature of the debate in the United States. I went to the Prime Minister and said, you know, this is a little bit tricky. I said there’s some concern for the labour market. Typically when there are fewer jobs to go around support for immigration goes down because people say they don’t want foreigners getting Canadian jobs. And I said that politically this may be difficult. A lot of people are suggesting to us that we cut immigration levels going into this downturn.

And he said, you know, Jason, that would be the wrong thing to do. He said, first of all, I don’t really believe that Canadians will buy into that idea, but more importantly, there continue to be labour market shortages that we need to build today in Canada and when we hit the growth cycle in the economy we are going to need newcomers here to fill the jobs of the future. And he was absolutely right. 

I’ll give you an example. Some of you may be from Manitoba. That would include our Consul General. Manitoba 10 years ago was only getting about 1500 or 2000 immigrants a year. The population was in decline and its economy was relatively stagnant. We worked, the federal government worked, particularly in the past five years, with Manitoba, and other provinces, to see a much better economic distribution of newcomers across Canada. Those of you who have followed immigration debates in Canada will know one of the complaints has been that 85 percent of people went to Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal when there were huge job opportunities going unfilled in the regions in Atlantic Canada, Western Canada and northern Ontario. And finally we’re starting to get that right.

Because of the time and work and the flexibility that our government has demonstrated through, for example, the expansion of the Provincial Nominee Program, we now have over 10,000 immigrants a year coming to Manitoba, a ten-fold increase. And I think it’s no coincidence that Manitoba is leading the country in economic growth. And so we’re working to make the overall approach to immigration faster, more flexible, and to focus on better governance for those who arrive. Because one of the challenges we have is highly-skilled people coming in and facing long-term under and unemployment. You know, we don’t need people with post-graduate degrees in Canada driving taxicabs and working at convenience stores. We need people who can fill jobs now and the jobs of the future upon arrival, and we’re seeing that increase.

And so we’re very excited with some of the improvements that we’ve made in the immigration system. I’m not going to go through and detail all, I’ll just give you a couple of examples. 
Before our government took office – well, actually four years ago – it was taking about six years for my ministry to process an application for permanent residency for an economic immigrant worker in the federal skilled workers program. Because of changes that we’ve made that we got through Parliament in a tough fight, and because of the hard work shown by our public servants, we are now giving those people an answer on their applications in about seven or eight months. 

Many of the best and brightest who in the developing world were thinking of emigrating were choosing Australia and New Zealand, who were giving them answers in a few months, while they looked at a Canadian queue taking several years. Now we’re in the game competing for those best and brightest. For example, through the provincial nominee program, we are welcoming newcomers who otherwise in the past were unable to immigrate to Canada. 
Our government also tripled our investment in settlement services, which help newcomers gain confidence.

We’ve had some real problems in our asylum system that Parliament recently corrected with fundamental changes to the way that Canada maintains its tradition of protection for those who are victims of persecution. It was taking us several years to process applications for asylum, and this was attracting people, false claimants, seeking to abuse Canada’s generosity. Because of legislative changes which we introduced in Parliament this year which have been adopted unanimously, a minor miracle, we will now be able to give protection to those who need it in a few months and remove those who are seeking to abuse our generosity within a few months. 
And you may know about the recent emergence of the issue of people-smuggling because of vessels coming from Southeast Asia, I’m actually headed to Australia later this week to meet with Australians about how we can cooperate with other jurisdictions in Southeast Asia in combating the scourge of human trafficking.  

So as you can see, we’ve been extremely busy in our ministry and one issue that we put on the table is the issue of citizenship. Our government has taken measures to strengthen the meaning of Canadian citizenship, the value of Canadian citizenship. We have the highest naturalization rate in the world. So get this: We welcome more newcomers than any other developed country in the world, .8 percent of our population, 250,000 to 265,000 newcomers.  Of those, nearly 85 percent go on to become citizens. Canada has the lowest bar, if you will, for naturalization: three years of residency, basic language knowledge, basic knowledge of the country. That’s in the Citizenship Act passed by Parliament.

But I was of the view that it didn’t have much meaning because there was no objective assessment of people’s language ability. And, after all, if you’re going to join a political community it seems to me you’d be able to communicate in that language. And there was no real substantial knowledge part of what Canada is, what its history and traditions are, what its core political values, not partisan but core political democratic values are. 

And so we’ve come up with a new citizenship test, and new materials to support it. This is exciting. We’re offering people much more information on the story that they are joining when they come to Canada. Previously, you could become a Canadian citizen, if you can believe this, without ever having heard about the role of Canada at Vimy Ridge, at Juno Beach, the liberation of Europe, the defence of Hong Kong. You could become a Canadian citizen without knowing what the red poppy and Remembrance Day represent, or what the historical roots are of our parliamentary system, or what universal suffrage means. That’s ridiculous! But there were two pages in the old citizenship study guide on recycling.

Now, I’m all for recycling, don’t get me wrong, but I’m even more for basic knowledge of the valued symbols and institutions of our country that are grounded in its history, so many of which we share with the people of Hong Kong. And yesterday I visited Sai Wan Cemetery, as did Prime Minister Harper in December, we saw the true cost of defending those values. I want you, immigrants from China coming to Canada, to know that those people were defending Canadian values in a sense for them as well. So these are some of the steps that we’ve taken to deepen the value of Canadian citizenship that have been extremely well-received.  

One of the measures that was taken by Parliament before the last election, in 2008, was a bill to address the problem of the so-called lost Canadians, people who, because of the complex amendments of our citizenship laws over the decades, fell between the cracks, thought they were Canadians, but turned out legally not to be. We’ve since resolved that. We proposed a legislative solution, it got it through Parliament, and 95 percent of those people have now received Canadian citizenship. 

At the same time, Parliament decided unanimously, all four parties in the House of Commons, both parties in the Senate, 300 MPs in the Lower House, 110 Senators in the Upper House, unanimously decided to support a reasonable limitation on the ability to pass Canadian citizenship on for people who never lived in Canada. And that was the one who was born abroad rule. Now, I understand this has hit here. You can come up with what you think is some kind of a compromise remedy or a remedy that addresses the concerns that Parliament has about the value of Canadian citizenship.

Let me be clear. The objective of Parliament was not to penalize ex-pat Canadians; it wasn’t to create so-called two-tier citizenship. The objective was to address the phenomenon that Canada, almost alone amongst the countries of the world, our laws were unintentionally, I think, allowing people to pass on Canadian citizenship ad infinitum to endless generations. And it’s Parliament’s view that citizenship requires some meaningful ongoing connection and attachment to Canada.  That it’s not just a legal status that can or should be passed on without an ongoing connection to Canada. 

And so it’s not easy to craft policy that gets exactly what you’re trying to achieve, but the solution adopted in Canada’s Parliament, and in polling that I’ve seen endorsed by about 80 percent of Canadians, endorsed by every major newspaper in the country, from the Globe and Mail to the Toronto Star, has been to say that Canadians can pass their citizenship on to their children born abroad, but beyond that generation there has to be some reestablishment with Canada. And there are all sorts of ways of doing that. Back to Canada, sponsoring children, there are other ways of doing it. 

But here’s the reality that Parliament and the Government were facing: 3.2 million permanent non-resident Canadians, we estimate, all across the world. Some of them short-term, some of them long-term, some of them are people who just came for as long as it took to get their Canadian passport, some of them who didn’t even stay long enough for the requisite legal period but hired a crooked citizenship consultant, and there are some, not in this room, but there are some out there, on the dark side of the industry who will, for example, to get your money say we’ll sell you a package deal if you fake proof of residency in Canada.  You just show up, we’ll give you the codes about how to write the citizenship test. Bam! You’re in. Subsidized university education for kids, free health care provided, and a salary bump! I’m sorry, Canada cannot be and is not an easy mark. We are not going to be taken for granted by people who do not have an ongoing commitment. 

Again, our objective is not to penalize bona fide ex-pats who have children born abroad. I understand the commitment of ex-pat Canadians. My parents lived in the Middle East for some years and I have a brother who is now fifteen years abroad. So we understand that. People who live in Hong Kong understand dollars and cents, they understand fiscal incentives. So, you might understand that those 3.2 million permanent non-resident Canadians represent, at least notionally, on our public services. And at some point we need to rationalize the obligations that we have as taxpayers to people who are not fully participating in our tax base. 

And so to say to the great-great-great-grandchildren of someone who spent three years in Canada that you’re going to be able to go back, after inheriting citizenship, go back to Canada and collect OAS and benefit from the most generous public health care system in the country is a principle that government does not accept, and nor do the Canadian people accept it. And so I’m putting it to you, I’m trying to be frank and transparent into what motivated the Government and Parliament. So this is where we stand.

Let me just say in closing, because I mostly came to hear your questions, that because this is the Chamber you’re focused on business. You represent the capital of Canada in Asia, as it were, with the regional headquarters that operate in this country, the financial institutions and the investment institutions. Let me just say a word about the economy, because those of us who are Canadians, you know, one of the general characteristics of Canadians is to be demure and humble and apologetic. When someone steps on our foot, we apologize. You know, that’s the Canadian temperament. We don’t boast. We’re not great boasters.

But we should be boastful. We should be boastful because for the first time that most of us can remember, we are leading the developed world in economic growth. We were the G-7 country that went into the global economic downturn last and came out of it first and had the lowest, shallowest recession and that has had the strongest labour market. It’s remarkable. I mean, people lost their jobs. That was tragic, that was very unfortunate, but we have now regained all of the jobs lost during the recession and have a substantially more vibrant labour market, for example, than the United States. 

Canada, since December of last year, has created a net 440,000 new jobs. And because of having some very prudent fiscal management, we are exiting the global downturn with the strongest fiscal position in the G-7 and one of the strongest fiscal positions in the OECD. As the World Bank just reasserted the other day, we have the strongest financial institutions in the world. We have the lowest overall tax burden in Canada since 1964. So for those of you who left Canada 20 years ago to avoid taxes that were then consuming 46 percent of GDP, welcome home, we’re down to about 33 percent tax burden. And we have the lowest deficit by a long shot, I mean, amongst the G-7 and most of the OECD, the lowest of the debt levels. We have taken enormous steps towards productivity. And, as I say, we’re maintaining our tradition of openness and building on the hard work of newcomers. 

So it’s a great story. We are leading and our world leadership in part is thanks to the hard work of many of you representing great Canadian companies here in this tremendous city. So thank you very much for your kind welcome