The House of Commons immigration committee will likely recommend the government grant an amnesty for up to 45,000 claimants in the refugee backlog.
“J would say that the committee is looking at it very hard,” committee member Dan Heap, the New Democratic Party’s immigration critic, said Wednesday.
Research done for the committee shows the backlog of roughly 45,000 claimants could be cleared if the government automatically accepts claimants from countries embroilment civil strife or with poor human rights records.
Such countries include Sri Lanka, Iran, El Salvador, Lebanon, Guatemala, China, Somalia and Nicaragua.
An amnesty for these claimants is favored by Heap, Liberal immigration critic Sergio Marchi and Tory committee chairman Jean Pierre Blackburn as the only way to salvage the $179 million backlog clearance program.
“There’s a high rate of (acceptance) for people from these countries anyway,” said Marchi.
“So let’s stop the charade and let’s save taxpayers’ dollars and let’s provide fairness” to backlogged claimants by speeding up the process.
The alternative, added Heap, is “to hurt a great many people” in the rest of the immigration system, which is bogging down while resources are plowed into the backlog program.
However, Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall has so far categorically ruled out an amnesty or partial amnesty, preferring instead to process each backlog case individually.
Under the program each claimant who arrived in Canada before last Jan 1 is to receive a hearing before a two member tribunal which will decide if there’s a credible basis to the claim.
The program was 01 posed to cost $100 million take two years to complete and result in the deportation of roughly 20,00 people. Plagued by delays due to a shortage of experienced personnel the program is already nine months behind schedule and the tab thus almost doubled. In the first 11 months of operation only 3,200 of the 124,00 Claims have been processed 41 of them have been rejected and 27 have actually been deported.
Meanwhile the committee has heard horror stories about how the program is draining resources from the rest of the immigration system.
“I’ve had complaints about two years delay with a very normal family reunification case,” Heap said.
“I don’t think we can afford to try the experiment of seeing whether they can (clear the backlog) in two years,”
Another option under consideration by the committee is to plow even more money and personnel into the backlog program in an effort to speed it up. But Heap said the committee is skeptical about the value of that option.
“They just hired a couple hundred people (for the backlo; You’ve got a couple hundred i experienced people there. What do you want 200 more inexperienced people?”
Article extracted from this publication >> December 8, 1989
