OTTAWA — From newly elected MP to cabinet minister in two short years, Chris Alexander says it’s been both challenging and humbling to take on the immigration portfolio long-held by one of the Prime Minister’s closest confidants.
“It’s a pleasure to step into (Jason Kenney’s) shoes because there’s a record of achievement here and there’s real forward momentum,” he said in a year-end interview with Postmedia News.
“But what is the main challenge for 2014? It is delivering better, faster service to immigrants and to visitors to Canada.”
If Kenney’s job during the five years he served as minister was to transform Canada’s immigration system into one that’s more attuned to labour market needs and more selective of refugees, Alexander’s role will be to try to improve overall service delivery.
While he will table an important citizenship bill in the coming months, his main focus will be to bring down backlogs and wait times in the various economic immigration streams in anticipation of the government’s expression of interest system set to launch Jan. 1, 2015.
Under the new system, would-be newcomers will be invited to express their interest in coming to Canada by filling out an online form outlining their skills, work experience and language ability. Those who meet particular criteria will be placed in a pool of applicants and ranked according to current labour market needs. Federal and provincial governments, as well as employers, will be able to invite the best from the pool, including those with job offers, to apply for a visa.
The government will no longer have to process all the applications it receives and those expressions of interest that are not chosen from the pool will be removed after a period of time. It’s supposed to result in fewer application backlogs and lower processing times.
“We have to move at the speed of business in our immigration system,” Alexander said.
He said the goal is that by January 2015, it’ll take just six months for a successful economic applicant to get a visa and hopefully, not much more than that for their dependents, be it children and spouses or parents and grandparents, the latter of whom will be able to apply again starting Jan. 2 after a two-year hiatus to deal with massive backlogs.
Today, Alexander said, it takes about a year. And before the government eliminated the old federal skilled worker backlog in the Budget 2012, he noted it could take up to eight years.
“Whenever we accept more applications than we process, we’re basically divorcing our immigration flows from our economic needs and that doesn’t serve immigrants well and it certainly doesn’t serve the Canadian economy well,” Alexander said, adding backlogs should be manageable enough by the end of 2014 so as not to impact operations.
As for refugees, the young, ambitious, former Canadian diplomat and UN envoy to Afghanistan suggests his experience in the war-torn country has not made him more sympathetic to the plight of asylum seekers. If anything, it’s toughened his resolve.
The government has come under fire for sweeping changes to the refugee system in recent years, including its decision to cut health care services for pending asylum claimants, crack down on so-called bogus claims from countries Canada has deemed safe and get tough with those who pay human smugglers to get here.
He stands by his government’s decision on health care and suggests the handful of provinces that have fought back against the cuts and are now offering heath services to refugees themselves have a lot of explaining to do to taxpayers.
He maintains Canada’s tough stance on human smuggling has worked since it’s been three years since a boatload of migrants has arrived on our shores, argues the new refugee system is fair and that there’s nothing wrong with the government’s position that resettled refugees plucked from camps overseas is preferable to asylum seekers who make their claim upon arrival.
“I have absolutely no sympathy for people making unfounded claims,” he said. “I think those who come who have well founded claims are being recognized as such by the system but let’s be clear, the largest number of people who are truly in need (are) going to come from far away.
“The people who are truly in need in a refugee camp or a war zone or a remote dire rural situation without the ability to pursue a livelihood, far from buying a plane ticket or arriving on our shores by whatever means, they can’t even get to the capital of whatever country they’re in,” he said.
“Those are the people that are most in need and those are the people we want to focus on.”
tcohen@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/tobicohen
