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

At a news conference to provide an update on the progress being made under the Action Plan for Faster Family Reunification

Mississauga, Ontario
November 5, 2012

As delivered

I’m happy to be here this morning to give you an exciting update on our immigration plan for family reunification, our Action Plan for Faster Family Reunification.

As you know, last week, I tabled before Parliament our plan for immigration for 2013, indicating that we will maintain the overall range of admissions of permanent residents between 240,000 and 265,000 permanent residents. This represents the highest sustained level of immigration in Canadian history. And it also represents the highest per-capita level of immigration in the developed world, adding the equivalent of 0.8 percent to our population each year through immigration.

Of course, our Government has placed a great emphasis on the need for Canada to generate maximum economic benefit from the talent and energy of newcomers, which is why we are reforming our economic immigration programs, and I spoke to that in various announcements last week.

However, as the Prime Minister indicated at his speech at the Davos World Economic Forum in January of this year, Canada will continue to maintain our tradition of family reunification and refugee protection as key elements of our immigration strategy, and that’s why I’m here today.

You may recall that about a year ago, I announced the first phase of the Action Plan for Faster Family Reunification. We did so because we recognized, based on feedback from grassroots Canadians, that our family reunification and particularly parents and grandparents program had become virtually dysfunctional, clogged with huge and growing backlogs and totally unacceptable wait times.

A year ago, when I launched this Action Plan, we had 165,000 parents and grandparents of Canadian residents and citizens waiting in the queue for eight years or longer for us merely to be able to look at their applications and potentially admit them to Canada as permanent residents. Had we not taken action a year ago, that backlog was set to continue growing year after year, and we projected that by the end of this decade we would see a total backlog approaching 300,000 parents and grandparents, with something in the range of 20-year wait times. So something clearly had to be done.

Now, why were the backlogs growing? Very simply, because every year we were getting an excess of applications over the number of positions available for admission as permanent residents. So, on average, over the past 20 years, we were getting 40,000 to 50,000 parents and grandparents for whom applications have been made for permanent residency. But, on average, over the past 20 years, Canada has admitted 17,000 parents and grandparents. So every year we were getting about twice as many applications for the program as there were positions available for admission.

Now, some people say, why didn’t the government massively increase the number of positions available for admission to parents and grandparents, to track the number of incoming applications? And the answer is very simple: it’s because there’s an overall limit to the number of newcomers that we can responsibly admit, who we can integrate, and in particular for the parents and grandparents program, while family reunification is important, we also have the very practical reality that most seniors who immigrate to Canada will not be in the taxpaying workforce but, rather, will be making very heavy use of our public health care and other social benefit programs. And so there’s a fiscal limitation in our view, and the view of, I think, the vast majority of Canadians, to how many seniors we can admit as newcomers, particularly given that the rationale for high levels of immigration to Canada is to counteract the aging of our population.

And so, for that reason, we brought forward the Action Plan for Faster Family Reunification. It involved four elements. Firstly, a huge increase in the number of parents and grandparents admitted, going from the 20-year average of 17,000 admissions per year to 25,000 admissions in 2012. That’s a 60 percent increase.

Secondly, the temporary two-year pause on new applications for the parents and grandparents program. These two measures, the 60 percent increase in admissions and the pause in new applications, will allow us, we believe, to cut the backlog in half by the time that we reopen the program for new admissions at the beginning of 2014.

The third element of the Action Plan was the creation of the very popular and successful new Super Visa for parents and grandparents, a 10-year multiple entry visa that allows authorized stays of up to two years for the parents and grandparents of Canadian residents or citizens as long as they meet the minimum income requirement and obtain private health insurance on their way into Canada.

And, finally, the fourth element of the Action Plan was the consultations with Canadians towards redesigning the program in the future so that we can avoid big backlogs and ensure that it works in a timely fashion and that it is fiscally sustainable.

So, today, I’m here to give you a report on the first phase of the Action Plan. First, let me tell you that we have succeeded in a dramatic reduction in the backlog in the parents and grandparents program – a 20-percent reduction. So in the past year we’ve gone from about 165,000 pending applications to about 132,000 by the end of this year in a few weeks’ time. That is a huge reduction and shows that we’re on track to meet our target to cut the backlog in half by the time that we reopen it for new applications at the beginning of 2014.

We’ve done this in part, as I said, by admitting this year an estimated 25,000 parents and grandparents, and I’m today announcing that in our immigration plan for 2013 we will maintain that high target, so in 2013 we will once again admit 25,000 parents and grandparents as permanent residents. That is once again a 60-percent increase over the long-term average of admissions in the program. So this represents the highest level of immigration for parents and grandparents in 20 years.

Now let me just say a word to some of my critics who have suggested that this Government has cut family reunification. The truth is that under this Government family reunification has actually increased. The number of sponsored parents, grandparents, spouses and children admitted on average each year has been over 64,000, whereas previously it was 60,000. So we’ve actually increased the average number, and that’s before including this huge increase in parents and grandparents for 2012 and 2013.

Now we’ve also, of course, implemented the Super Visa and I’m happy to report to you today that we have issued over 10,000 Super Visas for parents and grandparents, with an 87 percent acceptance rate, and that we are meeting our service standard of processing the vast majority of these applications in under eight weeks.

So, think about this. Between the 25,000 people getting permanent residency plus the 10,000 getting the 10-year Super Visa for extended visits, we’re talking about 35,000 parents and grandparents who’ve been able to come to Canada for either extended or permanent stays with their families. That’s more than twice the average number than was previously admitted.

And, finally, I can report to you that we’re making good progress on the fourth element of the Action Plan, which was to redesign the program. We’ve done public town-hall meetings, stakeholder roundtables. We’ve done focus groups. We have done online consultations. We received 6,400 responses to Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s online survey. And we have received some very good feedback. And I will be coming forward with our announcement about the new criteria for the program when we reopen it for new applications about 13 or 14 months from now.

So that, I think, is very good news, once again underscoring that we are maintaining Canada’s robust tradition of family reunification, but doing so in a way that fixes the problems of the past, that ensures that the program works quickly, that it does not tolerate eight or nine-year wait times any longer, and that we maintain it on a fiscally sustainable basis in the future.

So I’m happy to take any questions you have.

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