Michelle Rempel Garner: I’m going to amend the heck out of C-12 to fix Canada’s broken immigration system

Next week, the Conservatives will propose constructive amendments to Bill C-12 to improve the Bill and restore sanity to Canada’s immigration system, writes Guest Contributor Michelle Rempel Garner.

We’re a ‘small-c’ outfit here at Without Diminishment. That independence matters to us, as does the ability to criticize. But on fixing immigration, we’re a big tent, and at this vital moment for change to a system thoroughly out of control, Canadians have been well-served by a shadow minister and her team thoroughly fixated on restoring sanity to a programme that was only recently the envy of the Developed World.

Despite Liberal target reductions and a crackdown on a disreputable post-secondary ‘diploma mill’ stream, sky-high International Mobility Program applications continue, asylum fraud runs rampant, and our “morally shameful” temporary worker policies have been reduced, but not abolished — as they must be for all but the most difficult to find skill-sets.

More than half of Canadians still believe that immigration targets are too high, a sentiment shared more prominently among our immigrant communities, who came on points and shared values, and now struggle to make sense of the lowering of that standard, and with the apparent lack of effort to integrate.

Young voters in particular remain animated by concerns of mass immigration, as it routinely rates as one of their principal pocket-book issues, and carries massive second-order effects for their other concerns on that list: job security and unemployment, and housing affordability and accessibility.

If those concerns continue to go unaddressed by their elders and supposed betters, if younger conservatives are gate-kept from having these difficult discussions and from leading a policy push, if disloyal and haphazard business lobbies get their way on the continued march to a population of 100,000,000 — the majority being replacement cogs in the gaping maw of a GDP machine that worsens all around it and torpedoes our productivity — less than savoury forces who exist to prey on that animus and alienation will continue to grow, and no good-faith actor should wish for surging young conservatism to head down that path.

Here at Without Diminishment, we care about heading off that potential for trouble, and we’d rather offer a hand up than more middle fingers.

On that front, the week to come is an important one, and we’re thankful to have Michelle Rempel Garner join us today to share her plans.

Here’s to righting generational wrongs, and again respecting who we are as a nation.

-Alexander Brown, Managing Editor

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Michelle Rempel Garner is the Conservative Shadow Minister for Immigration.

Canada’s immigration system being a hot mess is a well-established fact, supported most notably by dramatically falling public support for more immigration.

In response to this crisis, the Liberals have embedded several immigration measures in their border security Bill, C-12. By all accounts during witness testimony, the measures they included are not sufficient to truly modernize and fix an utterly failed system.

So Conservatives will propose multiple constructive amendments to the Bill in an attempt to improve the legislation and fix the broken system.

Here’s what we’re going to propose and why.

This week, British news was dominated by sweeping immigration reforms proposed by the governing Labour Party in response to the ongoing illegal migration / bogus asylum claim crisis, a crisis that has triggered a massive surge in support for the right-wing Reform Party.

Those who think the situation is better on our side of the pond are profoundly wrong.

Between January 2022 and October of this year, the United Kingdom had around 375,000 people enter the country and make asylum claims, representing about 0.5% of their population. During the same time frame, Canada has had nearly 496,000 claims, or roughly 1.2% of our population today. Liberals have also paired the surge in illegal migration and bogus asylum claims with allowing record levels of Temporary Foreign Worker and study permits.

This situation has strained Canada’s public healthcare system and any other taxpayer-funded social programs past their breaking point, made housing unaffordable, caused a youth jobs crisis, and led to a heavier reliance on social programs. It has also begun to tear Canada’s social fabric, just as it has in the UK, because rapid, unsustainable immigration levels make pluralism harder to maintain.

The volume of people the Liberals have allowed to enter Canada has also made security screening difficult. An explosive news story this week claimed that there are, at a minimum, hundreds of people in Canada with links to a state-sponsored terrorist organization. At committee this week, an official stated that the government is screening asylum claimants using a “One Touch” application which limits vetting by a human agent. Last month, the government admitted that it didn’t know how many criminals it gave citizenship to. Multiple stories have exposed how Canada’s justice system routinely gives leniency to non-citizens convicted of serious crimes in order to allow them to avoid deportation.

All of this has led to a precipitous drop in support for immigration among the Canadian public. Without substantive system change and a return to first principles, as is already taking place in the UK, it is only a matter of time before Canadians lose their patience and the debate on immigration in Canada turns ugly.

And so Conservatives will propose a series of substantive reforms to prevent this from happening, presented as amendments to Bill C-12 during its clause-by-clause review at committee.

Given the Bill’s scope, our amendments will have two objectives:

• Objective 1: Truly fix Canada’s broken asylum system by reducing the incentives for people to make fraudulent claims, making it harder to make fraudulent claims to begin with, processing claims more efficiently, and making it easier to remove people with no legal reason to be in Canada.

• Objective 2: Strengthening Canada’s border security by modernizing the standards by which non-citizens convicted of serious crimes like sexual assault while in our country can be removed, and making the removal process for non-citizen criminals and those with no legal reason to be in Canada more efficient and transparent.

Objective 1: Truly fix Canada’s broken asylum system

Of the many areas that require urgent reform in Canada’s immigration system, one takes the cake: our profoundly broken asylum system.

Once an efficient and compassionate means for Canada to welcome and protect the world’s most vulnerable and truly persecuted persons, in the last decade, the system has morphed into a backdoor, lucrative means for illegal economic migrants who likely wouldn’t otherwise have a path to permanent residency to skip the line and stay in Canada.

The evidence is overwhelming: Canada’s asylum backlog has exploded from fewer than 10,000 claims in 2015 to nearly 300,000 today under the Liberals. Many stem from individuals who illegally crossed the border after U.S. rejections, spurred by Justin Trudeau’s 2017 #WelcomeToCanada tweet. Others surged from Mexico after the Liberals lifted visa requirements without safeguards against fraudulent claims. The system is also flooded with claims from temporary residents admitted under Liberal policies that lack functional removal mechanisms.

The immigration measures in the Liberals’ Bill C-12 fail to substantively address these problems.

Committee witnesses testified that the system changes Bill C-12 proposes are half-measures, certain to face immediate court challenges that will further clog an already overburdened justice system instead of curbing abuse. In effect, the Liberals are offloading their illegal migration mess onto strained courts and past the next election cycle.

Committee testimony exposed further flaws untouched by Bill C-12: it fails to disincentivize people from coming to Canada to make bogus claims and partake in the generous social benefits rightly afforded to legitimate claimants.

For example, rejected asylum claimants whose cases are under appeal continue to receive full healthcare, housing, and social benefits. With appeal delays now exceeding 44 months and federal healthcare costs for asylum seekers reaching $3.3 billion since 2015 ($821 million in 2024, up from $66 million in 2016), this constitutes a clear abuse of taxpayer money that must be ended.

The pedantic and loophole-ridden process for appealing a bogus claim and removing bogus claimants from Canada also begets system abuse, and needs reform which C-12 as written does not provide.

The asylum system also urgently requires greater accountability and transparency, an issue that hinders even MPs seeking basic information. Its main oversight mechanism, the Annual Report to Parliament, is outdated and must be modernized to disclose critical data, including outstanding warrants, and compliance with departure orders.

The Immigration and Refugee Board, the central decision-making body in the asylum system, requires urgent reform too. Deputy Chair positions must reflect current provincial demographics and immigration patterns, while Board membership should include law-enforcement expertise. The IRB currently faces no real consequences for flawed decisions or persistent backlogs that harm Canadians, and its appointments remain heavily politicized.

To fix these issues, Conservatives will attempt to amend Bill C-12 to undertake the following system changes:

• Removing the ability of migrants with failed asylum claims to claim any federal social benefits beyond emergency health care

• Disallowing asylum claims to be made by nationals of, or by those arriving in Canada having transited through a G7 or EU country

• Modernizing screening requirements

• Requiring educational institutions who accept foreign students to share the cost of any bogus asylum claims made by foreign students they welcomed to Canada

• Requiring that claims made by migrants who return to their home country while their claim is pending be abandoned,

• Rejecting claims made after a claimant is found to have lied to an officer,

• Placing the onus on a claimant to prove that they made their claim in a timely manner, not the government

• Requiring asylum claimants arriving in Canada to immediately provide, on the record, their full grounds for seeking protection, preventing the later use of unscrupulous lawyers to game the system

• Modernizing the appeals and judicial review processes associated with the asylum system

• Creating a new, transparent and clear reporting requirement for the government to disclose the amount of federal benefits received by asylum claimants

• Modernizing the content of the Annual Report to Parliament

• Modernizing the IRB appointment process to better consider the provinces, and include more merit-based candidates, particularly those with law-enforcement experience

Objective 2: Strengthening Canada’s border security vis-à-vis non-citizen criminals

Bill C-12 purports to strengthen Canada’s border security, but it leaves gaping holes open for non-citizens convicted of an indictable offence in Canada, such as sexual assault, to avoid deportation penalties. It does little to prevent human trafficking, or modernize the removal process for those who have been determined to have no legal reason to be in Canada.

Loopholes in the outdated Immigration and Refugee Protection Act allow for non-citizens convicted of serious crimes like sexual assault to avoid deportation if they are sentenced to 6 months less a day (or less). And so, over the last year, Canada has seen case after case after case where the justice system provides leniency to non-citizens convicted of serious crimes like sexual assault in order to prevent their deportation.

For a non-citizen, our laws and practices state that staying in Canada is a privilege, not a right. Most non-citizens understand this concept and play by the rules. That said, not being convicted of a serious crime should be a minimum standard that Canadian law enforces when it comes to deciding whether or not a non-citizen should be allowed in the country. Non-citizens who are convicted of an indictable offence like sexual assault in Canada should face deportation.

But even facing deportation isn’t enough. To be effective, those deportations should be carried out in an expeditious manner. Recent reports show that the Liberals have lost track of nearly 600 convicted criminals scheduled for deportation.

To fix these issues, Conservatives will attempt to constructively amend Bill C-12 and make the following changes to strengthen our borders:

• Clarifying the definition of “serious criminality” under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to be conviction by an indictable offence, or a hybrid offence where the Crown proceeded with an indictable charge.

• Prevent non-citizens ordered removed from blocking deportation by barring repeat Pre-Removal Risk Assessments unless substantial new evidence of changed circumstances is presented.

• Modernizing the time period and process related to the enforcement of removal orders.

All of our amendments are designed to be common sense, rooted in needs exposed by recent news reports, and designed to be supportable by all political parties - including the Liberals. Most importantly, they are designed to restore order, fairness, and public confidence to the immigration system.

Michelle Rempel Garner is the Vice-Chair of the Standing Committee on Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship, and is the Conservative Shadow Minister for Immigration.

The original version of this piece was first published on Michelle Rempel Garner’s Substack, and is running in syndication here with permission.