Immigration System Needs Serious Overhaul

The Ontario government is following in British Columbia’s footsteps to establish a program to force sponsors of immigrants to reimburse the government for cost’s incurred on the public purse for welfare payouts to immigrants.

Some anti-poverty groups across Canada are crying foul, claiming that many sponsors and immigrants are among the “poorest of the poor” in our country. They claim this is unfair.

Immigrant sponsors sign a legal affidavit, affirming they will financially support relatives for the first ten years they are in Canada. In Ontario, which accepts most family-class immigrants, about one in ten sponsors renege on their commitment to support them. This has resulted in a multi-million dollar cost to the taxpayers, which apparently, the Dalton McGuinty government will attempt to recuperate.

The real question I have, if many of the people sponsoring individuals to come to Canada are the poorest of the poor, as these anti-poverty groups are claiming, then how did they even qualify to sponsor somebody in the first place? Does Immigration Canada not conduct basic due diligence to confirm they can reasonably live up to their ten year commitment?

In real numbers, about 7,500 family-sponsored immigrants fall onto the welfare roles of Ontario every year. This is an unfortunate statistic, and seems to go against the typical rhetoric which suggests that this type of thing doesn’t happen, and that the taxpayers are not supporting uneconomically viable immigrants. But if the problem is large enough that even the Dalton McGuinty government is saying “enough is enough”, then the problem is even worse than I thought.

It’s a sad reality that a growing number of immigrants are indeed a drag on the Canadian economy as anybody who lives in Toronto is probably starting to realize.

David Miller, the mayor of Toronto, has been appealing to Ottawa for financial assistance specifically to set-up programs for supporting immigrants in Toronto.

Predictably, I have a different question for Ottawa than David Miller; not how do we support these people, but rather, why are they here in the first place?

Everybody on both sides of the political spectrum agrees we need immigrants; there is no debate that we need a robust immigration policy. The problem is that our immigration policy is anything but robust, if more than 10,000 recent immigrants nationwide are ending up on welfare roles every year, and just between Ontario and BC, they are, does that not signify a serious problem with our immigration policy?

The Paul Martin government is in the process of implementing a sweeping review of our immigration policies, and the scandal-laden Judy Sgro is currently tasked with tabling recommendations over the next few months. We’ll see how that develops.

The immigration program, refugees excluded, is not a program of compassion; it’s a program that is supposed to be beneficial to Canada and Canadians. It’s a program that needs to be focused on attracting the best and the brightest from all over the world, not simply admitting people because they want to come. Amazingly, that’s exactly what many interest groups seem to be suggesting we do. It’s good to see they are largely being ignored.