Michelle Rempel Garner
Calgary Nose Hill, Alberta · Conservative · Canada
“Mr. Speaker, non-citizens' committing serious crimes in Canada and then getting sweetheart sentences in order to avoid deportation, which the Liberals are letting happen right now, is undermining Canadians' desire for immigration.”
“Mr. Speaker, after a year, how can she put that falsehood forward in the House? People are getting sweetheart sentences in order to avoid deportation. There is a story every week.”
“Mr. Speaker, Conservatives proposed a law that would ensure that non-citizens who commit serious crimes in Canada do not get sweetheart sentences so they can avoid deportation, but the Minister of Immigration voted against it. It is her job to maintain order in Canada's immigration system, but the system is clearly out of control.”
“Mr. Speaker, last year, the leader of the Bloc Québécois said this, referring to Alberta: “I am not certain that oil and gas qualifies” to define a culture. A leftist Canadian podcaster recently claimed, “Alberta has ZERO culture. None.”
“The people who try hard to beat the culture of self-determinism out of my province do so to their own detriment and to the detriment of the entire country. A stronger Alberta in a united Canada means acknowledging and giving thanks for Alberta's culture, and praying hard that Alberta will be lucky enough to get more of it.”
“Of all of the human virtues, these qualities are hardest to master, and there is no harder place to learn them than in front of the screens of millions of Canadians while sitting in the pressure cooker that is the Ottawa bubble as an elected leader. I see my colleague.”
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“Mr. Speaker, regardless of political stripe, I am so glad and blessed that I get to work with people who chose Canada and came to Canada and migrated to Canada and that we have a diversity of perspectives in the House, but the value of Canadian citizenship should not be debased with bills like this. Did members know that the government eliminated the need for in-person citizenship ceremonies? One does not even need to go and gather with a group of people to get Canadian citizenship anymore. It is these measures that the government needs to get serious about. We are having a moment when the government needs to lead beyond whatever it is talking about in terms of economic measures and really atone for the fact that it said we were a postnational state with no identity and supported the desecration of Canadian national symbols.”
“Mr. Speaker, they should not table junky legislation. They should go to the immigration minister and say there was literally months and months of testimony that could have been included in this bill. She just pulled it off the shelf and then expected us to take it. This is not acceptable. I will never back down on my responsibility to hold the government to account on behalf of my constituents. I know people do not like hearing it, but that is why I am paid to be here. This is what close to 60% of the good people of Calgary Nose Hill voted for on April 28: me standing here holding the government to account. If the Liberals want to work collaboratively, they should not table junky legislation. It is easy.”
“Mr. Speaker, it is not fair. If the government was serious about addressing that point, it would have tabled a bill that had some sort of consecutive residency requirement. I do not think that is asking for much, particularly since that is international best practice. I do think that if the government was willing to accept an amendment to that point, it would solve all the problems. It would solve my Bloc colleague's problem about wanting to get on with the show. It would show the Canadian public that the House is serious about retaining the value of Canadian citizenship and not causing problems like what we were seeing without the first-generation limit. It would show some modicum of seriousness by the government to fix the immigration system it has so clearly broken.”
“Mr. Speaker, I refuse to accept that in order to litigate and hold the government to account for its endless failures in the immigration system, the House should have to accept a bill that is so deeply flawed as this and that extremely denigrates the value of Canadian citizenship. I agree with my Bloc colleague. I cannot wait to work with his colleague , who is the spokesperson for the immigration committee, and perhaps himself, to litigate the government on its failures. Giddy up, we are going to do it. At the same time, I hope my Bloc colleague would work collaboratively to come up with amendments that at least both of our parties can agree on. On the consecutive residency requirement, I heard my colleague from the Bloc earlier say he was worried about people being able to travel.”
“It would have been fast-tracked. However, the Liberals and the former NDP members stalled the bill at committee because they gutted it and then made it this endless chain migration bill. I need to hear from the government that it is going to amend the bill so that there is a substantive presence test that includes some sort of consecutive presence, as well as, at a minimum, security vetting for people this would apply to. The government has not signalled that, and every Canadian should be asking why. Conservatives will continue to press the Liberals on this issue because we will not let Canadian citizenship be devalued by poor Liberal legislation and the poor Liberal broken immigration system.”
“They broke Canada's asylum system so badly that they had to put the immigration provisions of Bill C-2 in there. That is another debate. I will have a lot to say on that in the future. There are people, “consultants” in loose quotations, who have made an entire industry of scamming people who want to come to Canada to build a better life. I think the Liberals are afraid to stand up to those people. I think what they try to do is talk out of both sides of their mouth on this issue. That is why the bill came in unamended. If the Liberals had come in with a bill with a narrow scope that looked a lot like our colleague's bill from the other place, in which she had very tight definitions to address the very real needs of some of the stakeholders who are considered lost Canadians, everybody could have supported that.”
“I cannot imagine how they feel looking at this bill. It is not right, and it is not fair. Again, I want to be very clear: I think one of the things that Canadians have always been proud of, and are proud of and open to today, is the concept of immigration that functions within the context of the pluralism of Canada. That does not work under what the Liberal government has done, which is increase immigration to a level that is so unsustainable that we do not have houses, we do not have health care and we do not have jobs to adequately address everybody in the country, newcomer or not. I think what has happened here is the Liberals have tabled the bill without amendments, partially because of an incompetent minister . However, they have also put the bill forward without amendments because they put Bill C-2 in place.”
“Let us think about what that means. If somebody looks up their ancestral food chain and finds an ancestor who held Canadian citizenship, even though that person has never been in the country, they could come, three years over some period of the course of their life, and then be granted Canadian citizenship without having been vetted for any sort of security risk whatsoever. There is an automatic get-into-Canada pass with the bill, and that is not right. I want to talk about fairness too because there are millions and millions of positive stories. Many people who now work and serve other Canadians in this place have migrated to Canada, played by the rules and played fair through Canada's immigration system. They checked all the boxes, waited for years, had security tests and had all of these different tests.”
“That point was brought up in the hours of debate, with witness after witness giving testimony in the last Parliament. The Liberals could have harmonized that with other jurisdictions around the world, but instead they purposefully tabled a bill with that missing. I think that they did that because, again, they want to have a devaluation of the Canadian citizenship. Let us think about it; it is literally like devaluing currency. If they want to refute me on this point, this should be their response: It should be that they will entertain an amendment to have a consecutive residency requirement, as a bare minimum amendment. That is what I think. That makes sense to me. (1230) The second thing that the bill absolutely needs amended is the fact that there is no security vetting requirement whatsoever for somebody applying for this.”
“I mentioned, in questions and answers, that the court ruling some of this applied to, which the Conservative bill and not the government tried to address, had a requirement or a definition for a substantial connection to Canada. How have the Liberals defined that? There is nothing. We heard that in the non-answer of the colleague who spoke just before. She could not really define that. What we need is a substantial connection to Canada. Precedent for this type of situation in virtually every other country around the world is something like five or 10 years in a set period of time. Earlier my colleague from the Bloc asked if it would stop somebody from leaving Canada. It is usually five or more years within seven years, and at least a chunk of that is spent in the country as an adult, over the age of 14 or over the age of 16.”
“Why would the Liberals propose a bill that would essentially allow mass chain migration to this country through automatic Canadian citizenship without any sort of substantive tie to the country? It really does speak to motive. Why are they doing this? They could have kept the Conservative bill with just a minimal scope, but no. They did this on purpose, and they have now done it twice. Instead of making amendments to the bill as were required, they have now done this twice. There are two things that are missing in the bill that absolutely, 100%, need to be instantly changed. The first is that missing requirement of a substantial connection to Canada.”
“The government could not say, over a 10-, 20- or 30-year period, how many people would be able to draw health care benefits in Canada, draw on the services of our country. We asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Again, he was kind of stonewalled in his analysis on the government, because I do not think it wants the public to know. I think the government knows how many people this could impact. Earlier my colleague said there is about four million people currently living abroad that have Canadian citizenship. We could start thinking about the exponential downstream impact the bill would have. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said that at a minimum it is going to be 100,000 people over five years. That is his best guess.”
“Part of the problem in this place, sometimes, is that people have to think about what a bill would mean in 10, 15, 20 or 25 years. Let us talk about how many people this could impact. In debate today, over and over, Conservative colleagues brought up the fact that in the last Parliament, for months, we tried to find out how many people this could impact. The now independent member, formerly NDP, lost massively in the last election because of policies like what this bill would support. Some hon. members: Oh, oh! Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner : Mr. Speaker, I am being heckled. Members are saying, “Well, the NDP is not in government.” I do not know why the Liberals would just support their bill. It is completely strange. Here is the thing: We do not know how many people the bill would affect.”
“It could be over 70 years, it could be over 80 years, but sometime, not consecutively, they just need to spend that amount of time in Canada, and then they would get Canadian citizenship. (1225) We have to start talking about the rights that these people would then obtain. Practically, they would be able to get access to the Canadian health care system. Right now, Canada does not have any obligation even for countries that have tax treaties for people to file taxes when they have a citizenship situation like that. I am not talking about double taxation here. They would not have any obligation, in their responsibilities as a Canadian with citizenship, to pay for those services. That is the way the bill is written right now. That is what it functionally means.”
“Again, it is because the Liberal government has focused entirely on some sort of false, broken understanding of the rights of Canadian citizenship and has done nothing about the responsibilities. Let us talk about the responsibilities. In the bill, there would be absolutely no requirement for somebody to live in Canada over consecutive days in order to receive Canadian citizenship. Practically, for a person living abroad, the bill would make it so that a great-great-great-great-great-grandma in the future, or somewhere in a person's ancestry chain, somewhere in their family tree, someone had Canadian citizenship, and then, sometime over their entire life period, they would only need to spend slightly over 1,000 days in Canada.”
“If we are tabling bills that would allow people with no substantial connection to Canada to, ad nauseam, forever and ever, pass on citizenship with no ties to this country, then that denigrates every person, including people who have immigrated to Canada and become citizens, started businesses here, worked as health care workers, paid taxes and become part of our Canadian pluralism. It denigrates citizenship for us all; it denigrates identity for us all. The beauty of our country, of course, is our pluralism, and it has saddened me as a Canadian to watch people across the country, Liberal, Conservative and NDP alike, lose faith in the value of immigration to Canada.”
“However, a now independent member, who lost party status in the last election, worked with the government to completely gut that bill and turn it into a chain migration bill, which is what we have here today, and that is not right. We need to have a conversation in this country about the responsibilities of Canadian citizenship, and the minister started her speech with those words, saying there are rights and responsibilities to Canadian citizenship. However, her speech was entirely about the rights and failed on the responsibilities, and that is why the Liberal approach to immigration has been so broken. Even on a macro level, members will remember the mantra of the last decade: Canada is a postnational state with no identity. Well, if we are a postnational state with no identity, what does Canadian citizenship mean?”
“It is tough to talk about conflict, but in this place we have to talk about what the obligations of the Government of Canada are to people who do not have substantive ties to Canada and then claim citizenship. To be clear to anybody watching this, I am not talking about the small number of people for whom the first-generation limit that was imposed affected. This is why a Conservative member from the other place did the job of the government for it in the last Parliament and tabled a private member's bill to close that loophole. We support those provisions. It is why a Conservative member from the other place put them forward.”
“For colleagues who want a little history lesson, this was precipitated by a situation that happened roughly 15 years ago, during the conflict in Lebanon, when there were what we would refer to as “Canadians of convenience”, or people who had no substantive ties to the country who all of a sudden claimed Canadian citizenship so that the Government of Canada would be obligated to evacuate them. At that time, that initiative, in 2006, cost the Canadian taxpayer almost $100 million, plus endless other ancillary benefits. Most of these people, the vast majority, had no ties to Canada at all. Most of them left and went back almost immediately thereafter. This raised serious questions.”
“(1220) With what colleagues opposite in the Liberal Party have been putting up in debate today, we can tell by their answers that they do not understand what the bill does either. They are going to just blindly vote for it without thinking through the enormous, non-partisan concerns that the bill would create for the value of Canadian citizenship. Essentially, the bill would eliminate something called the “first-generation limit”. This was a provision that was put in place by a previous, Conservative government to put restrictions on how Canadian citizenship could be automatically passed down to people who do not live in Canada anymore, for the most part.”
“She should have listened to the stakeholder feedback and endless debate in the previous immigration committee and fixed the bill such that it could have been something that could be passed through the House. Instead, I do not even think the minister read the bill, to be honest. I think she probably took a memorandum to cabinet with whatever the department gave to her and said, “Just table the same thing.” That is what she did. I bet if we had the ability to question her at length, she could not go through the provisions of this bill. To me, that is not responsible government, given the impact of this bill, so let us talk about what this bill would do, because it is really important for Canadians.”
“There was a court ruling that the government chose not to appeal and needed to address somehow. Rather than take an approach proposed by a Conservative member from the other place, which had a tight, narrowly defined solution that would have addressed the court ruling, the Liberals teamed up with a far left, now independent, member of this place to utterly gut that bill and extend Canadian citizenship, turning it almost into a low-grade frequent flyer program. It is basically like someone would need to scan once every five years to get their loyalty program. That is really what this bill is. A competent minister would have taken all stakeholder concerns and said that for the few people to whom the lost Canadian ruling applied, we should have a tight, narrowly defined bill to address it. That is what the minister should have done.”
“She was an immigration minister for eight years in Nova Scotia, and during that period of time, audits showed massive failures in vetting and setting levels and no response to Auditor General recommendations. She even said there should be no limits on immigration into her province. She said it in a CBC interview. She said there should be no limits, no caps. Now the Liberals have put that minister in here, and if anybody has been watching her performance in the House, it has been abysmal. She does not understand basic numbers on how many people are coming in and did not really have a grasp on how many people were leaving the country who were supposed to. Now she has tabled this bill. This is what I think happened. We have an incompetent minister who has to deal with this issue.”
“Instead of fixing those issues, instead of listening to the concerns of Canadians, they tabled an ill-thought-out bill that would enable intergenerational, without limit, chain migration without any consecutive residency requirements, any substantial presence in Canada. That is just so wrong and irresponsible. I am going to tell members what happened with this bill. This is what I suspect happened, because Liberals have come to talk to me privately about how incompetent they think the Liberal immigration minister is. They are shocked, and rightly so, that the Prime Minister would put someone so remarkably incompetent in that role on such an important file. Let me give proof of how incompetent the immigration minister is.”
“The consensus on immigration used to be universal. It used to be a non-partisan understanding that immigration was a good thing and that numbers should be set in accordance with Canada's capacity to do things like house newcomers, provide them with jobs, let them start businesses or have health care. Now we know, based on public opinion polling, most Canadians realize the truth: We are in a jobs crisis, we are in a health care crisis, and we are also in a housing crisis. Because the Liberals have increased immigration to such unsustainable levels, they are the ones who broke the consensus on immigration.”
“Mr. Speaker, we are here debating a bill today that the Liberals have proposed, which would give endless chain migration, the ability to pass down citizenship ad infinitum, to anybody. We just heard a speech, for those who are tuning in, that shows why this bill is so poorly designed. A member from the Liberal Party stood up and, over and over again in questions and answers, which will be interesting to watch back, did not know how many people this would apply to in the future. At a time in Canadian history when we are talking about what the value of Canadian citizenship should mean, that the Liberal government has proposed such a reckless bill without really thinking through the implications really speaks to the utter disarray and brokenness of a decade of Liberal failure in Canada's immigration system.”
“Mr. Speaker, what we have heard the member say in responding to questions is that she did not have a number, but then did have a number, but did not, and that it might be 100,000, which is small, but that it might also be 20,000 or maybe a dozen. The point here is that the Liberals are essentially, with this bill, enabling endless chain migration with no consecutive residency requirement, which actually devalues Canadian citizenship. The PBO said it would be over 100,000 people in five years. Why has the bill been presented in this way?”
“Mr. Speaker, the Ontario Superior Court ruling that ostensibly was the genesis of this legislation said it was unconstitutional for Canada to deny automatic citizenship to children born abroad to parents who were also born overseas but have a substantial connection to Canada. Could my colleague describe what her government believes “substantial connection to Canada” means, and where that is contained in the bill?”
“Mr. Speaker, as has been expressed in debate today, Conservatives have deep concerns with two omissions in the bill. First, there is no consecutive residency requirement in the bill, which means somebody way down the generational chain could claim Canadian citizenship with no significant ties to Canada and no obligations to the country. The second thing is that there is no security vetting prior to the granting of citizenship. Would my colleague entertain reasoned and smart amendments to rectify these deficiencies in the bill?”
“Mr. Speaker, one of the amendments that needs to be made to the bill to prevent endless chain migration, which the bill currently provides for without any sort of consecutive residency requirement, is to ensure that those who the bill applies to spend some sort of substantive length of time in Canada in a consecutive manner. The bill does not apply to that. Right now, ad infinitum, descendants could just apply for citizenship after having spent a thousand days in Canada over the course of their lifetime and then claim health care benefits. Does the member agree that there should be a consecutive residency requirement of some nature in the bill?”
“Why would the minister, knowing all the testimony that happened in the last Parliament on this particular issue, continue to devalue Canadian citizenship in this way?”
“Mr. Speaker, the minister spoke about the responsibilities of Canadian citizens, but those responsibilities include paying taxes to pay for services such as health care. The bill goes well beyond closing a loophole for a small group of people, which previous Conservative legislation and Conservatives supported. By contrast, the PBO estimated that the bill would grant citizenship to over 100,000 people in five years. There are no security vetting requirements for persons who fall under the bill, and the bill contains no consecutive residency requirements. Failing that, the bill contains no requirements for people without consecutive residency for any mechanism such as, let us say, paying taxes.”
“It avoids the creation and use of ubiquitous and overbroad mechanisms that would impinge on Canadian civil liberties. The bill is a non-partisan plea for the government and all colleagues in this place to abandon previously proposed flawed approaches to this issue and to pass smart measures to protect kids online. (Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)”
“Bill C-216. Introduction and first reading moved for leave to introduce Bill C-216, An Act to enact the Protection of Minors in the Digital Age Act and to amend two Acts . She said: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to introduce a bill that would protect Canadians online while safeguarding their civil liberties. The bill proposes a tightly scoped legislative duty of care for online operators as it pertains to children's online safety, would strengthen mandatory reporting requirements for online child sexual abuse material by Internet providers, would update existing laws to criminalize the non-consensual distribution of intimate images to include deepnudes and would modernize existing laws to provide more protections for victims of online criminal harassment.”
“Mr. Speaker, not only are the Liberals tolerating this behaviour; they are promoting the people who oversaw it. In the normal world, somebody who would have overseen $65 million going to scammers would have been fired. Instead, these ministers have been promoted. Today, we found out these ministers want to give even more money to consultants to manage web pages. Why is it that with the Liberals, incompetent politicians get promoted while Canadian taxpayers get stuck with the bill?”
“Mr. Speaker, the recent Auditor General's report revealed that GC Strategies, a Liberal insider company, was paid a whopping 64.5 million tax dollars by the Liberal government to do literally nothing. Think about how Canadians struggling to make ends meet feel about having to pay massive taxes just to enrich Liberal insiders. It is like reverse Robin Hood. Will the Liberals support our motion to get Canadians' money back from these scammers or will they keep robbing Canadians to pay their friends?”
“I just want to close with this: Given all of these failures and given the minister's failure tonight in question period, in debate this week and her failures in Nova Scotia, does she think she is going to make it past December? Most of her predecessors have averaged a tenure that is less than the asylum claim processing time.”
“The minister is right: Immigrants have built this country, and it is not the fault of people wanting to come to Canada in terms of who started this mess. What she has done here is admitted that this system is out of control. The Liberal government has completely debased our immigration system and the value of following the rules to come to this country, as so many other immigrants have done before. That is unacceptable. There are so many people who want to come to Canada. People who have come here through legal pathways want to bring their families and cannot because of backdoor loopholes that have abused the asylum claim system, #WelcomeToCanada.”
“Mr. Chair, tonight we have heard the minister not know how many people have left the country. She has claimed that the processing time for asylum claims, while people with potentially fraudulent asylum claims claim social benefits, is 18 months. Her department said it was 44 months in committee just a few short months ago. She will not answer basic questions about the file. She does not take responsibility for these jobs. After being an immigration minister in a different jurisdiction for over a decade, the minister knows the job. She is just not doing it. When the minister does not know how many people have left and whether there should be an immigration minister or not because people are not removed, that devalues Canadian citizenship. It makes a mockery of the process. There are so many immigrants in Canada.”
“Mr. Chair, however, the minister's purview is to set the levels plan. If she is setting levels with hundreds of thousands of foreign students and low-skilled labourers but does not know how many low-skilled labourers and foreign students who are not supposed to be in the country have left, how can she set levels if she does not know that number?”
“Mr. Chair, Canadians literally pay the minister's $100,000 top-up and give her a car to know the numbers. How many of the 500,000 people who were supposed to leave in December actually left? This is pretty simple: How many is it? Does she know?”
“Mr. Chair, here is the thing: The minister cannot set levels if she does not know how many people have left, so it is her job. I need to know how many people of that 500,000 have left. How about this: Does the minister even know? Does she have any clue?”
“Mr. Chair, the minister said earlier that they brought immigrants in because of COVID. All right, there is a lot to unpack here. There are 500,000 people, as of December 2024, who should have been removed from Canada. How many were removed?”
“Mr. Chair, during COVID, the federal government asked everybody to give up their civil liberties, and it shut down the economy to bend the curve to lower the impact, supposedly, on emergency rooms. Then the government added a hockey stick curve of immigrants to the strain on the emergency rooms. Why did it?”
“Mr. Chair, we were living in different times. It was a Conservative federal government and we had a balanced budget. I am thankful to the minister for acknowledging that. That is wonderful; it warms my heart. Earlier, the minister said that the economy would have collapsed if it had not been for immigration during COVID. Does she want to stand by that statement?”
“Mr. Chair, the minister claims she has been on the job for only a couple of weeks, but she was the minister of immigration in Nova Scotia for many years, close to a decade, I think. During that time, the Auditor General, in 2022, found that there was no process to determine labour market needs. The minister also asked for no cap on the number of people coming into her province. Is this what we can expect from the minister in her tenure as federal immigration minister: no cap and no process to determine labour market needs?”
“Mr. Chair, they are not being followed. Does the minister not understand that if we do not remove people who do not have a legal right to be here, the system is meaningless? Will the minister admit that the Liberals broke the system and that it is out of control?”
“Mr. Chair, let us talk about challenges. Our ERs are overflowing, people cannot find a home or a job and the levels report says immigration is going up. How many people have been removed of the 500,000 who are on deportation orders announced in December 2024?”
“Mr. Chair, I would ask the minister to say that to somebody who cannot find housing in Toronto right now. There are 500,000 people, at least, in Canada who have no legal reason to be here. How many have been removed since the report came out in December?”
“Let me contextualize it for you, Mr. Chair. The reality is that there were way fewer than 290,000 housing starts last year, and there are a lot more than 290,000 people waiting for a family doctor right now. Why is the minister persisting in raising immigration levels when people cannot find a doctor or a job?”