Winnipeg, Manitoba
March 17, 2016
As delivered
Thank you very much. And good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
It’s a real pleasure for me to be back in Manitoba, and I don’t say that everywhere I go because it’s a fact that my first full-time job was in Manitoba, way back in 1974, before many of you were probably born, so it makes me feel a little old.
But what I’d like to do, and I don’t want to talk too long because I like the questions better, is to give you a little account of the voyage we have been on as a country and for myself on the refugee excursion and then I’d like to say a few words about a few other things we do in immigration because refugees are important. They’re in our name now, thanks to our Prime Minister, but we also do other things.
But first, perhaps I could say that for me this is a different kind of experience. You heard my CV, all these boring economic studies on this and that. Mostly, I’ve done dollars-and-cents things, but this thing is more from the heart. This business about bringing 25,000 refugees from one of the world’s worst civil wars, across the ocean to welcome them here in Canada. This is a matter of the heart. It speaks to who we are as Canadians, and I am very, very proud as a Canadian that so many of us from all walks of life who have stepped up forward to help in this cause.
And I must say I am particularly proud because the rest of the world has noticed and that photograph of Justin Trudeau at the plane went around the world to the point when I met young little refugee children in Jordan who’d never heard of Canada, they came up to me and said, Oh, your Prime Minister welcomed us here at the airport. So they knew. Many knew.
And I am not happy necessarily with how the whole world is going, but I am pleased that at a time of this terrible refugee crisis that when so many countries seem to be shutting their doors to refugees, we in this country are opening our doors wide and saying, Welcome, come on in. Subject of course to proper security and medical checks.
So we had two stages in this journey. The first was to get the machine up and running and that was a challenge at the beginning, especially for the public service. One definition of real change is you do something you’ve never done before. If you’ve done it before, it isn’t real change. And this, for the civil service, was real change, to bring 25,000 properly verified refugees over here so fast. So it wasn’t easy at the start, but they got the job done, they got the machine running. And once the machine was running, it was no sweat.
So I have huge thanks to all the public servants who got this very difficult job done.
But once all these people landed in Canada, it was no longer mainly a job for the federal government. Getting them from A to B was mainly our job, but preparing them for success in Canada was everybody’s job, and that includes housing, that includes jobs, that includes language training, and that has included thousands and thousands of Canadians across the country, not only federal governments, provincial governments, municipal, although they have been active. And when I met the settlement agencies, some of them from here this morning, it was commented, and I totally agree, none of this would have happened without those settlement agency people sitting around the table. So my congratulations to all of them for their wonderful work.
As well, we are very grateful to the business community. I was honest throughout talking about the ups and the downs, like when we had exit permit issues possibly in Lebanon, when we had housing challenges. I told Canadians that. And one of the reasons ways we’ve dealt with the housing challenge is to solicit funding from the business community, and the business community has delivered in a big way over $30 million in total, $5 million from CN alone, $500,000 announced today for Winnipeg alone. So I thank them all for that.
And I also thank this Chamber of Commerce and some of the business leaders who are here for all the work they are doing and are about to do. After this lunch, we’re going to have further meetings about how employers might employ some of our refugees and that is a critical job.
We’re making good progress on housing. As of yesterday, 72 percent of the refugees from Syria are already permanently housed and Manitoba is 80 percent. So well done, Manitoba. Eighty percent already have permanent housing.
And something on the order of 800 have already arrived and there are more to come, so I congratulate you on all of that, but I am saying that there’s a lot more work to be done on language training and on jobs because let me tell you something about the demographic of this refugee group that our government assisted.
They are vulnerable, and we sought vulnerable people, we got vulnerable people. Generally speaking, they speak not a word of English or French. Generally speaking, they have very little education. Generally speaking, they know no one in this country. So they are vulnerable, that’s one definition. And we are welcoming them. But the other side of that coin is when people start in those conditions, they do need more help to make themselves successful in Canada, and that is why they need your help, and I know this organization has reach out in this way for many, many years. I know you will in the future, so I am confident that these refugees starting from a difficult place will succeed and their children will succeed even more.
And I know that refugees from the past have done well. Priti Mehta-Shah right here, your Chair, is herself a refugee. One of my cabinet colleagues who’s only 31 years old is herself a refugee from Afghanistan. Two of our former Governors General were refugees. Peter Munk, a very successful businessman, was a refugee. So refugees do well in this country and what starts as a humanitarian act turns into a long-run investment for Canada’s own good and I am confident that the Syrian refugees will also go in this direction.
Let me now turn to a few of the other things we’re doing, and I’ll be fairly quick because, as I said, I want to have time for questions.
We have reinstated health care for refugees. Thank you. We have introduced a law under which it will no longer be possible for a government to revoke the citizenship of any Canadian who has committed certain crimes. We believe all Canadians are equal. There is one class of citizenship, not two. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian and the place for a terrorist is in jail, not at the airport.
I have said that we’re not being fair to international students. They got the short end of the stick on Express Entry, and I cannot think of a group of people that we should be more welcoming towards than international students to become future Canadians because they know the country, they’re educated, they speak English or French. Who better would we want and who better would other competitor countries want as we face aging populations than international students to become future Canadians?
So we’re going to work on that. We haven’t got the job done yet, but the provincial governments were in agreement on this point and we are determined to be more welcoming to those international students. We’ve already restored their 50 percent credit for time in Canada for purposes of citizenship. When you’re courting somebody, you don’t punch them in the nose. When you take away their 50 percent credit, you are punching them in the nose, so we are de-punching them and giving them that credit back. But the permanent resident part is more important and we’re on to it, but it isn’t yet solved.
Finally, levels. That means levels of immigrants. We’ve announced for 2016 300,000, which is the biggest level since 1913, which tells you something which tells you something about how many immigrants they let in then, given how small the country was. But it’s only fairly modestly bigger than the previous year 20 or 30 thousand but it’s the maximum capacity of the department. I cannot make the number higher than 300,000, no matter how much more money I had for this year. There are at capacity.
So look at it this way. You have a maximum 300,000, how do you divvy it up? Well, we had refugee commitments, so we honoured those. We have a huge issue where it takes forever for spouses to reunite with each other two years, which is unacceptable, absolutely unacceptable. It should be six months. So we let in some additional spouses. So that meant for so-called economic immigrants we had to go down marginally, but the number is approximately the average it’s been over the last decade.
But I would say more importantly, we are working now towards levels in 2017, 18, 19. I am working to increase the capacity of the department so we could let in more, whether it’s spouses, whether it’s economic immigrants or whatever, we want to increase that capacity.
But I would also say I don’t like the term economic immigrants because it implies there are two kinds of immigrants economic ones who do some good for the country and the other ones who are pure altruism and are a waste of time as far as the economy is concerned, which is absolutely and totally wrong because within the things, the people called economic immigrants, there are some spouses of principal applicants who don’t work. Amongst refugees, most of them will work and contribute to the economy. Amongst family members, many of the spouses will work, it’s 2016, and many of the parents and grandparents, even if they don’t work, will make it easier for both husband and wife, mother and father to work. So all immigrants contribute to the economy in different ways. All immigrants make a contribution economically, socially, cultural. And so just as we don’t want two classes of citizen, we don’t want two classes of immigrants. All immigrants are useful in this country.
So I want to close by just saying one last thing and that is I’m slow to say that Canada is a leader in areas A, B, C, everything under the sun. I hear Canadians saying this, and clearly, often we’re not. We’re not. Maybe we’re mediocre. Maybe we’re middle-of-the-pack. We’re not leaders in everything, but I’ll tell you one thing I think we are leaders in and that is leaders in integrating people of all different races, all different religions, building a successful multicultural society. And you look around the world, you look what’s happening in the world and then you look at us, and I think we are doing a good job. I could even go so far as to say we are a model for the world.
And my riding of Markham is extremely multicultural. And one indicator of this is ministers from Germany came to Canada seeking a meeting with the Mayor of Markham a little place to ask him how we built a multicultural society. So it’s something that I think our experience with these refugees is showing that we have done well in this area. I think it’s an area in which we are an example for the world. The world has noticed us. We are in the middle of a global refugee crisis. I think there are ways that Canada can contribute in terms of what we’ve done with private sponsors, in terms of how we’ve built a multicultural community and in terms of how we’ve set up a machine that can bring many refugees to our country in a fast order of time. So I am proud of what we have done.
I am proud to be Canadian. Thank you all.
I thank all Canadians for the wonderful, wonderful work we have all done in allowing these 25,000 people to come to our wonderful country.
Thank you very much.
