As the government draws attention to the considerable increase in the number of legal immigrants being admitted to Canada, Olivia Chow, New Democratic Party immigration critic in the House of Commons, has spoken about the quotas for parents and grandparents being cut to half.
"Data shows that if you are sponsoring your parents you have to wait close to eight years because the quota in terms of number of parents coming to Canada has dropped from 22,000 in 2005 to 11,000 in 2011," she told rediff.com a day after Jason Kenney, minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, announced the increase in the number of immigrants. "While there are a lot of independent immigrants coming to Canada, if they want to bring their parents to Canada once they become Canadians, they have to wait five to eight years. That's not fair."
In 2010, Canada admitted 280,636 new immigrants, most of them in the independent class category. Chow compared this to the family class immigrants.
"If you are an applicant in New Delhi, it takes three years to get sponsorship applications approved," she said. "It takes another three years to get the visa approved at the New Delhi office. You are looking at a total of at least six years before you can hope to get visas for your parents or grandparents."
Revealing that the number of visas for parents and grandparents in the Canadian immigration office in Delhi had "dropped dramatically," she added, "Conservatives are not respecting family values because immigrants having parents live with them is a tradition. The family is not complete without your parents and grandparents who want to meet their grandkids. The families rely on kids to take care of their parents. To make them wait five to eight years to be united is unfortunate, unfair and un-Canadian."
Liberal Members of Parliament Navdeep Bains and Sukh Dhaliwal are equally critical of the Conservative government's immigration policy when it comes to reunification of families. Kenney has announced a cut in family reunification visas from 16,000 a year to 11,000.
This 30 percent reduction will compound the existing wait time, Bains said. "It means keeping families apart for up to 13 years," he added. "We should be looking at ways to bring families together; the Conservatives are out of touch with what new Canadian families need. These cuts will affect Canadian families across the country and will reverse decades of immigration policies from governments of different parties. We have a moral obligation to give our new citizens a fair start. I don't see how keeping a family apart for 13 years helps anyone."
Stating that families and communities across Canada had benefitted by the stability and anchor that the family reunification policy offered to new Canadians, Dhailwal said, 'The Conservatives have got the economics backwards, as immigrants admitted under family reunification have been proven by Statistics Canada to be less likely to fall into poverty, placing lower demands on our social safety net, and yet once again, this government is choosing to ignore the numbers.'
Image: Olivia Chow
