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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“The Liberals have allowed many backdoor immigration streams to happen, whether in the illegal border crossings at Roxham Road that led to a massive spike of crossings in Quebec or in the fact that we now have a multitude of student permits that were issued under the justice minister. This was a very bad period of Canadian history. Now that those permits are expiring, people either are not leaving or they are making fraudulent asylum claims. I would like to know from the government what happens now. I guarantee this was asked in committee. When the big immigration lobby challenges the provisions that are in this bill, what happens? I can tell the House what is going to happen: Nothing is going to change, and the system is going to get worse.”
“This is not a system that is in control. This is a system that is wildly, dumpster fire, out of control. Now we have a situation in which the Supreme Court has invited the big immigration lobby to invite further dysfunction into the system. To colleagues across party lines, I say that this is not fair to anybody. It is not fair to non-citizens who are making applications to enter the country through normal immigration processing streams and who are basically being put into “no-hope” queues of ever coming into this country, because the wait times are so long. Why?”
“For countries like Iran, there is a system called the file system in which the government virtually has no oversight. It is basically a rubber stamp for asylum claims. There are some other things too. The Liberals, in the last few days, have come under extreme fire. Again, colleagues do not have to take my word for it. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said that this was the most scathing report that has been issued by the Auditor General in recent memory. (1240) The Auditor General issued a report that showed over 150,000 cases of student permit fraud; the government had only followed up on a minuscule fraction of those cases. Then, of that tiny fraction, many of those cases, which were obviously fraudulent, went on to get permit extensions; worse, to get permanent residency; or, as we are talking about today, to make asylum claims.”
“Let us pray that his patience has boundaries and that the judiciary and big immigration do not further test the limits. While hope springs eternal on this front, data proves otherwise. Under the Liberal Prime Minister , over the last year, the asylum claim backlog has grown to nearly over 300,000 people. That backlog in 2015 was 10,000 people. Colleagues should think about that and think about the size of the backlog. These are just people currently in the queue, not people who have been processed. This is a years-long backlog, with a similar size to a sizable city. Three hundred thousand people is a lot. Eighty per cent of the refugee claims since 2019 have been approved with zero screenings. To this day, we have been trying to get the government to change course.”
“However, the Kanyinda framework shows that Canada's Supreme Court is willing to fixate on the increasingly tone-deaf voices of the big immigration lobby and directly challenge these foundational principles, which were the only thing that through the decades allowed the consensus for immigration to exist in our country. Those foundational principles are being actively eroded. The charter has a built-in fail-safe for extreme potential situations such as these, and the government and Parliament have other tools at their disposal to rein in an overzealous judiciary. It is now up to the Prime Minister to provide clarity on how much more judicially inspired immigration dysfunction his government will tolerate before he directs it to act.”
“In fact, colleagues, this concept is reinforced by Subsection 91(25) of the Constitution Act of 1867, which gives Canada's Parliament the main power to set immigration laws. We are supreme, and it should be our will in this place, not that of the courts, to set the processes by which non-citizens enter and stay in the country. The public expects that they can turn to and rely on the federal government and Parliament to both support a strong Canadian national identity and maintain a fair and orderly immigration system while securing our nation's borders.”
“Allowing this trend to go unchecked by the federal government will only further ingrain the Canadian public's sense that there is an overall loss of control in the immigration system and, in turn, further erode the consensus for Canada's immigration system, which we know is already in the abject depths of despair. It will also suggest that the federal Liberals' willingness to prevent asylum system abuse only goes as far as the court's willingness to accept the reforms. However, at present, Canadian immigration law and public support for immigration is predicated on the principle that it must be fair, legal and necessary to treat non-citizens differently from citizens for the purpose of immigration selection and entry into the country. That is a no-brainer. It is the fundamental principle of our immigration system.”
“This led to the now frequent practice of judges' giving more lenient sentences to non-citizens convicted of serious crimes in order to avoid consequences for their immigration status. Parliamentary committee testimony during the review of the immigration provisions of the current Bill C-12 suggests that its reforms would immediately be challenged in court, including the ones that we are debating today, by the big immigration lobby. They said this to us in our committees. Justice Wagner's tone, in his opinion in Kanyinda, suggests that this lobby will be successful should they choose to challenge the immigration provisions outlined in Bill C-12, so the government's talking points that this bill is going to remedy any problems are likely false.”
“Further legal erosion of the difference between citizen and non-citizen will only serve to continue to diminish the value of Canadian citizenship, which has been incredibly diminished under the Liberal government, and to accelerate the fragmentation of our already diffuse national identity. (1235) Perhaps most importantly, the Kanyinda ruling adds a thick layer of judicial overreach to an existing spread of rulings that have already seriously eroded both parliamentary supremacy in setting immigration law and the federal government's ability to enforce it. Changes in 2012, which prevented non-citizens who made fraudulent asylum claims from receiving taxpayer-funded supplemental health benefits like vision care while awaiting removal from the country, were almost immediately struck down by the federal court.”
“Blurred boundaries on who is eligible to receive benefits will, beyond the obvious sustainability problems, make it even harder to prioritize those truly vulnerable groups and, frankly, also to maintain consensus for immigration, which is already rightly in the toilet in the country because of the lack of trust in the government's ability to manage the immigration system in a fair and orderly manner. For many members of the public, this lack of distinction will be perceived as a lack of fairness. In return, there will be even less public appetite to extend benefits or welcome to truly vulnerable refugees, or for immigration writ large.”
“However, given the hull-buckling groans emanating from most Canadian social welfare programs, the deep deficits most Canadian governments are running and the disarray that Canada's immigration system is already in, the Prime Minister has a duty to prevent ideologically homogenous activists from using the Kanyinda framework to block reasonable reforms or to make the system even more dysfunctional than it already is. There are many other reasons to prevent further blurring of the distinction between citizen and non-citizen using the Kanyinda framework. It will be virtually impossible for any level of government to disincentivize the abuse of the asylum system if there are endless legal options for unverified claimants or outright fraudsters to access social services they were never intended to receive.”
“A simple check of the lobbying registry proves that big immigration has disproportionate levels of access to senior immigration policy-makers, and many individuals from this clique have gone on to occupy influential roles on the Immigration and Refugee Board or in the courts, which further dooms reform efforts. On that note, a former Liberal immigration minister, who bent to the will of big immigration to such an extent that he allowed nearly a million foreign students on work permits into the country in a two-year period, is now Canada's justice minister . The sheer volume of big immigration intervenors allowed in the Kanyinda case also illustrates this profound imbalance.”
“While there is undoubtedly a need for vulnerable non-citizens to have their rights advocated for, a major obstacle to enacting reasonable reforms to Canada's immigration and asylum systems has always been fierce resistance from a network of well-funded anti-reform lawyers, immigration consultants, lobbyists and non-governmental organizations profiting from Canada's overly permissive and enforcement-deficient immigration system. Big immigration rarely if ever acknowledges that in order to achieve social consensus for immigration, the system cannot be left in its current state of abject dysfunction. Big immigration's voices dominate immigration-related news stories and submissions to parliamentary committees.”
“That is a huge problem, so clarity is also needed about the extent to which the Kanyinda framework could be used to legally undermine specific rules within immigration processing streams that use neutral selection criteria such as age caps, language thresholds and education points. Under Kanyinda, any of these criteria, the cornerstones of Canada's immigration selection process, could potentially be argued to have discriminatory impacts on protected or analogous grounds and, if subsequently overturned, further undermine Parliament and the government's ability to set and enforce immigration rules. That is crazy. While some may argue that these scenarios are unlikely, history suggests the anti-immigration reform lobby, a.k.a. big immigration, will ensure otherwise. Canada's immigration lobby is arguably one of its most powerful.”
“(1230) These tests could include the legality of proposed copays that the government has put forward on the interim federal health benefit program, which of course is a program that has risen in cost by over 1,200% since 2015 and includes luxury health care benefits that many Canadians do not receive. The case and the ruling could also be used to test unfettered access to the Canada child benefit as well as old age security. Chief Justice Wagner's concurrence regarding recognizing refugee claimant status as an analogous ground under section 15 of the charter could also provide a hook for broader arguments against aspects of the criteria-based immigration streams.”
“In this she is right, but in the ruling, Chief Justice Wagner took the opposite position, suggesting that the charter should include asylum claimants as a protected identity group. Given the breadth of the ruling and what amounts to Wagner's issuing an open invitation to the activist legal community to test the waters further, it is not hard to imagine many well-paid anti-reform lawyers salivating at the prospect of doing just that, nor is it a stretch that the justice's arguments for intersectionality that the judges made in the Kanyinda case could be used as a test on whether unvetted and unapproved asylum claimants, particularly those without work permits, should be entitled to other taxpayer-funded benefits.”
“Therefore, in this specific instance, Quebec should not be met with the typical reactionary pearl clutching should it follow through with suggestions among its political parties that it may invoke the notwithstanding clause in the case of Kanyinda. However, the impact of the Kanyinda ruling has the potential to extend far beyond Quebec. Justice Suzanne Côté dissented from the majority opinion, saying that some of its findings had the potential to “unduly impede the state’s ability to act” in the public interest by limiting the range of policy choices available to governments in designing and administering social benefits programs. She concluded that refugee claimant status should not be recognized as what are called “analogous grounds” under section 15 of the charter to guarantee charter rights.”
“Since the years-long Roxham Road illegal border crossing debacle began, Quebec has experienced a massive spike in asylum seekers in recent years, many with unverified claims, and now hosts somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200,000. This influx, combined with the Liberals' years-long delays in processing asylum claims, which still exist under the Liberal Prime Minister , have strained Quebec's social services, including subsidized day cares. With many Quebec families already facing years-long waits for day care spots, and with an unplanned increase in demand enabled by a dysfunctional federal asylum processing system, it is reasonable and, frankly, should be expected that Quebec would enact changes to its welfare system to ensure sustainability.”
“Liberals must also commit to vigorously challenging any Kanyinda-related litigation that may impact federal jurisdiction in the meantime, including what is included in the immigration provisions of Bill C-12 . Here is why. Canada's asylum system should offer compassionate refuge to truly vulnerable persons in numbers that we can sustainably support, but Canadians believe that the asylum system should not be used as a back door by which migrants can quickly and easily end-run normal immigration selection processes. Today, data overwhelmingly shows that the asylum system skews heavily toward the latter, while the prioritization of benefits to those who most urgently need them falls under the former. It is the provinces that have largely been left to cover the costs of this failure of the federal Liberal government.”
“The broader potential impacts of this ruling should set off alarm bells in every province, across the federal government and to every member of the House. They certainly did for His Majesty's loyal opposition. Therefore, Conservatives affirm Quebec's right to pursue the use of section 33 of the charter in relation to Quebec v. Kanyinda in that ruling, should its government choose to do so. We also call upon the Prime Minister to direct his government to immediately review what impact the Kanyinda ruling may have on Canada's federal immigration and social welfare programs and to outline what actions may have to be taken in order to wrest power over immigration back from the big immigration lobby, as well as from overzealous judiciaries, and put it back into the hands of the Canadian people.”
“Mr. Speaker, today we are debating amendments that the other place has proposed to Bill C-12 , as well as the government's response to those amendments. I would like to use this opportunity to offer a word of caution to the government regarding developments that have occurred since the immigration measures in Bill C-12 were last debated here, as well as to suggest constructive remedies to restore parliamentary supremacy and repair the significant damage to Canada's immigration system that has been levelled by the Liberal government and, indeed, under the tenure of the Liberal Prime Minister . Since Bill C-12 was last debated in this place, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that unapproved asylum claimants in Quebec have a constitutional right to provincially funded, low-cost day care spaces.”
“Mr. Speaker, let us look at the plan. There were 150,000 cases of student permit fraud under the Liberal Prime Minister . They just bought an entire hotel for asylum claimants, with tax dollars. Bogus asylum claimants are getting better health care than Canadian seniors who have paid their whole life into the system, yet the immigration minister still has her job. Why?”
“Mr. Speaker, under the Liberal Prime Minister , the Liberals' immigration crisis is worse than ever before. They are giving sweetheart sentences to non-citizen sexual assaulters instead of deporting them. Bogus asylum claimants are getting better health care than Canadians, and there are over 150,000 cases of student permit fraud. There are millions of non-citizens with no legal reason to be in Canada, but there is no accountability. Three of the most incompetent and destructive immigration ministers in Canadian history are still in cabinet. Why?”
“Mr. Speaker, I actually think the immigration system is worse now than it was under Justin Trudeau, and that is quite a feat. Speaking of former immigration ministers, two of the previous ones said that issuing well over a million foreign student permits was good for our economy and did not think international students were taking away jobs from people. However, today we found out from Blacklock's that the employment ministry knew for certain that this is exactly what was happening. All of these people fail upward in cabinet. Nothing has changed and it needs to. Why are these failed immigration ministers still in cabinet in charge of important files and failing?”
“Mr. Speaker, by the minister's response, I think she thinks this is a joke. It is not. Canada has an unemployment crisis, and there are millions of non-citizens who do not have a legal reason to be here who are competing for Canadian kids' jobs. Today the Auditor General found out that there were 150,000 cases of fraudulent student permits. The minister's own team does not think she is up to the job and I agree. Why does she still have her job?”
“Mr. Speaker, there are nearly three million non-citizens in Canada on expired or expiring work permits, and Canadian kids cannot find jobs. Today in a report that shocked no one, the Auditor General found a whopping 150,000 cases of foreign student permit fraud. Worse, we found out that the minister is only investigating 2,000 of them, while allocating resources to purchase an entire hotel for asylum seekers. What a dumpster fire. Is the minister content with putting fraudsters in the driver's seat of Canada's immigration system?”
“If my Bloc colleagues maintain the right for Quebec to assert its jurisdictional rights on certain grounds, then I would ask them to pay specific attention to what I have clarified here, because what has happened is that federal courts have started to overcome provincial jurisdiction in these matters. That is also part of the reason why I put this bill forward. What we are seeing is that the spirit of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act has been overturned. This bill will correct that. I encourage all colleagues in this place to vote in favour of it and to stay tuned to my social media.”
“Therefore, I would say this: We need to reassert our right in this place over the judiciary to make laws when it comes to the immigration system. Members can expect to hear more from the Conservative Party of Canada on that. On the specific concerns that some of my Bloc Québécois colleagues raised with regard to the Pham decision, I would note this. The court ruling explicitly ruled that this consideration does not constitute a charter right, a remedy or a charter breach. In fact, the ruling did not even mention the charter once. Furthermore, the ruling also made it clear that the flexibility of our sentencing process should not be misused by imposing inappropriate and artificial sentences, and that to do so would be circumventing Parliament's will.”
“The Supreme Court ruling that was issued on Friday, as it relates to Quebec's decision to restrict benefits to certain classes of non-citizens, is problematic for not just the province of Quebec but every province across the country. It is also problematic for federal immigration law. Federal immigration law is predicated on the Constitution Act of 1867, which states that not only does this place have the right to make laws over immigration, but the provinces in some aspects do as well, and that non-citizens are treated differently than citizens in Canada. That is what our entire immigration system is predicated on. The Friday Supreme Court ruling, which overturned a Quebec government benefit decision, which was put in place in order to manage a decade of Liberal mismanagement, completely upended that.”
“Therefore, if members would like to, they can tune into my Substack or any of my social media feeds, where her quote that there is no evidence will be strongly featured over the next week. They should stand by as it will be very awesome. I want to comment very substantively on some of the concerns from my Bloc colleagues. They talked about the balance between the judiciary and the legislative branches of government. I am concerned that when it comes to immigration law, we have seen a disproportionate influence, particularly at the federal level of the judiciary, and interference not just at the federal level but also at the provincial level.”
“If there are immigration officials watching in the lobby, I would ask them to tell the member for Davenport to get ready, because she said there was no evidence showing the need for this and I will be strongly refuting her as many times as possible over the next week before the vote to show how much evidence there is, which colleagues have brought forward during this debate, so she can giddy up on that. Here we go. The second thing is that the member for Davenport said that non-citizen criminals face the consequences of their actions. We know that is not the case. In fact, just to strongly further refute her comment that there is no evidence of this, I will also be refuting that over the next week.”
“Mr. Speaker, I will begin by responding to the member for Davenport . I wholeheartedly look forward to using every ounce of my media reach to refute her position that there is no evidence showing the need for this bill. Much like the government House leader , who said that there was no evidence that rapers had not used these loopholes to remain in the country, I would say to her that I am so looking forward to using that quote over and over again to show how many instances of evidence there are to show the need for it. In the next week, I will be taking that quote from her and repeatedly showing her how many times she is so very wrong.”
“Mr. Speaker, I would say this. What the IRB has done is interpret the provision under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act around senior officials in a way that would exclude, and did exclude, a man named Mahdi Nasiri, who was the supreme leader of Iran, the Iranian regime's key representative at its propaganda newspaper, the political deputy of the policy council of Friday imams and the deputy at the supreme leader's representative outlet at the U.A.E. Would my colleague agree that it would be incumbent upon the government at this point to at least review the law and come back to Parliament with suggestions on how to strengthen the provision that is within the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to ensure that men like this do not continue to be admissible to Canada?”
“I am just wondering if my colleague on the other side would agree and perhaps would also offer some encouragement to colleagues in the other place to respect the will of the House and to get on with it.”
“Mr. Speaker, I am hoping that some agreement can break out in this place tonight. I would just like to note that colleagues in the House of all political stripes spent a lot of time debating Bill C-12 , which includes some measures that I think need to pass quickly in order to begin to restore some order to the immigration system. However, I have been closely following some of the proceedings in the other place, and I am becoming concerned that colleagues in the other place may be unduly holding up proceedings on the bill, which has been substantively amended by the House. We came to agreement. We sent it over there in December, I believe. It has been several months at this point. I would like to see some movement from colleagues in the other place.”
“Mr. Speaker, the reality is that this number was reported by a credible Canadian news outlet. The minister will not answer how many are here. There is a loophole in the law that allows senior propagandists and senior officials of the Iranian regime, like Mahdi Nasiri, to stay in Canada. The Liberals are just letting this happen. They are letting the IRB say that yes, senior propagandists and Iranian officials who subjugate women stay in Canada. The law needs to change. Will the minister agree to our common-sense Conservative proposal to table, within a week, a plan to review these loopholes and ensure that officials are—”
“Mr. Speaker, Mahdi Nasiri ran the Iranian regime's hardline propaganda newspaper and held other very senior positions within the Iranian regime, yet the Liberals let him enter Canada on a visitor visa, and then they let him stay here. Earlier today, the minister claimed that the Global News reporting was false and that there are not 700 Iranian agents in Canada. I will ask the minister to be clear. How many senior Iranian officials like Mahdi Nasiri are in Canada?”
“Okay, Mr. Speaker, he said he has removed one, and now he says he disputes the 700 number. Is it 1,000? Is it 2,000? What number is it? An hon. member: Oh, oh! Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner: No, no, this is serious. Mr. Speaker, we have members of the Persian community who are seeing their businesses shot up. People are living in fear in the street, and the Liberal immigration minister has done nothing to change the law, nothing to keep her officials in line. Why does she still have her job?”
“Mr. Speaker, can I just recap what is in the public safety minister's QP binder? He just said that of the 700 Iranian regime officials and human rights abusers, one has been deported. Why has he not asked his department officials to at least update the garbage that is in his QP binder?”
“Mr. Chair, my colleague is asking me to put my mind into the minds of my Liberal colleagues. That is something I do not feel like doing tonight. There is a motion in front of the immigration committee. There are already media stories on it. I intend to make this a big issue. I ask all members here to take this back to their colleagues at their caucus meetings on Wednesday morning. This should be supportable, and we should have government action on this to ensure that Iranian regime officials are deported. They should not be allowed to stay in Canada. Their identities should not be protected because their lawyers asked for privacy. They should not be given asylum. It is just bananas. Let us get them out of the country.”
“Under the auspices of the current law, we are asking for things like a review. There is no reason why we should not be supporting these measures and keeping Canadians safe.”
“Mr. Chair, the Liberal government needs to be doing more. It is patently crazy that it is saying things such as that it has deported only one because there are no flights to Iran, and that it should protect their identities and let them claim asylum. That is just craziness. Frankly, the minister needs to go to her officials, tell them to read the room, that people are unsafe, that these are human rights abusers and that maybe we should deport them as the law says we should do. This is why Conservatives have put forward a common-sense motion at the immigration committee. We will be triggering a very publicized debate on this. My colleagues will have Wednesday caucus meetings. I would ask my Liberal colleagues to take this seriously. I tried to write the motion so that it was politically palatable.”
“Mr. Chair, here is what I know. The Iranian regime did not consult the Jewish people when it murdered 1,200 people who were innocent, on October 7, 2023. It did not consult the dozens of Canadians who were blown to smithereens in an attack in January 2020. I could stand here for hours and talk about all the regime's human rights abuses for which it did not consult the international community and that, frankly, the lefty Squish-Os in the international community let it get away with for years. Therefore, I support the right of Israel to defend itself against the terror that it has experienced from the Iranian regime, and I would like the Liberal government to do more to deport Iranian officials who see Canada as a safe haven due to Liberal inaction.”
“It would be a way for Canada to strike a blow at the heart of the regime and to say, “No, Canada is not a safe destination for human rights abusers who have been involved in this regime.” If we do not do this, I suspect that in a very short period of time, some prime minister will have to stand up and make an apology.”
“The law clearly needs to be updated and, frankly, shame on the IRB for allowing him to stay here. (2125) We have other measures in here as well. One is to create an exemption for non-refoulement protections for Iranian regime officials who have been deemed inadmissible due to human rights abuses. We would also like the government to table, with Parliament, the identities of known Iranian regime officials who are currently present in Canada, especially those under deportation orders. These are common-sense measures that would keep Iranian diaspora and, frankly, all Canadians safe, and the government could do them today.”
“We would like the Liberals to undertake a comprehensive review of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act with an eye to modernize it to prevent Iranian regime officials from avoiding deportation by clearly ensuring that non-citizens who are deemed inadmissible, if they are involved in regime-linked businesses, spreading propaganda or human rights abuses, are deported. For example, an Iranian official was able to evade deportation, even though he ran a regime-funded propaganda distribution newspaper, even though he was a deputy general in the supreme leader's office in the U.A.E., and even though he held a senior position in the Friday imams policy propaganda, because he said he was not a cabinet minister, so he should be allowed to stay here.”
“I will put it this way: If I were the immigration minister, I would have called all of these officials into my office, raked them over the coals and given them a plan on how to do better. Public safety is at stake and there are members of the Iranian diaspora in Canada who feel deeply unsafe. We are not just opposing the Liberals' failed approach here. Conservatives are also proposing a constructive path forward. Today, the government, actually all members in this place, can do something material and concrete to oppose the Iranian regime with the strokes of a few pens. Conservatives will be provoking a debate in the immigration committee over the following motion, which we gave notice of today.”
“The government is letting its officials just say, “Okay, this is fine.” The Liberals need to exert political will and say that things have to change. The reality is that Canada is becoming an attractive destination for Iranian regime officials to flee because they know that lax screening procedures allow them to enter undetected, and even if they are detected, they are not going to be deported because they have endless appeal processes available to them. They can claim asylum, and there are loopholes in the laws and in the processes. I would like to think that nobody in this place would like to see this continue to happen. What we saw today at our committee was one of the worst exercises in bureaucratic incompetence that I have seen in almost my entire tenure in this place.”
“In fact, today there is a significant Globe and Mail story, I believe it was, that showed that there was only one person who fit this category who was deported. I would just say this. Today we had officials in front of our immigration committee and we asked them, essentially, why this was the case. These are reasons that were cited today: that there were no flights to Iran, that they needed to protect the privacy of Iranian regime officials and that there were pending asylum claims. That is bananas. The reality is that hundreds of senior Iranian officials who are complicit in human rights abuses have come to Canada and remain here, and the Liberal government is not really doing anything about it.”
“Madam Chair, the Iranian regime is, as my colleague has said, a brutal dictatorship that is directly responsible for the death of Canadians, never mind countless Jewish people and others. It has engaged in a reign of terror over its own people. I think of Mahsa Amini and the women in Iran. This is a brutal dictatorship. After much pressure from the Conservatives for years, the Liberal government finally designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization. The problem is that there has not been a lot of enforcement on what that means in terms of Iranian officials. These are people who are senior officials directly involved in human rights abuses. There has not been a lot of action taken by the Liberal government to deport the over 700 people we know are in the country who would fall under this category.”