“I want to talk about the positive things my department did instead of the fraud you asked about.”
What they said. What they meant.
Plain-language translations from the House of Commons.
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A bill to make many changes to Canada's immigration and border control laws. During debate, Conservatives asked questions about specific cases and raised concerns about fraud, while the Liberal minister responded but often discussed unrelated topics like Canada Summer Jobs and praised a Liberal colleague.
“You keep talking around my question. Did your government find any new fraud or not? Just answer the question.”
“I'm going to ignore your question about fraud. Instead I'll just say the Auditor General agreed with my party's decision.”
“You think no one is committing fraud anymore? That's naive. Consultants are still committing fraud. Are you even investigating the consultants?”
“You say you followed up on every case. But you're avoiding the question about immigration consultants. I think you can't defend that. I want numbers to show how many terrorist applications you approved.”
“I don't want to answer the question about terrorists. Let me change the subject and defend my rules. I want you to think I'm tough on immigration consultants.”
“That doesn't matter. I want to know permits are getting checked for ties to a regime.”
“You're worried about regime ties? I already said there's a ban. A total ban! Nothing to look at here.”
“How many did you boot out? You 'banned' them, but they're still here! The ban's not real if they're still roaming around.”
“We've canceled some visas. We're investigating some people. It's under control.”
“One bad guy got his visa cancelled. You blew it.”
“We banned those people. Trust us. Nothing to see here.”
“You are letting in the wrong people and doing nothing about it.”
“We are doing something about it. The previous speaker is wrong. My government is very effective.”
“You claim you're keeping terrorists out, but your own bill could let them in. Are you going to fix it?”
“You're imagining problems with my bill because you don't like immigrants. I'm going to ignore your concern and just praise the bill some more.”
“François-Philippe Champagne is mishandling citizenship. I want the government to look weak and wrong.”
“I'm dodging the question of security screening. Instead I'll just repeat buzzwords about the bill.”
“That's a loaded question. I already think I know the answer I'm fishing for.”
“I'm dodging the actual question about criminality checks. But I want you to know claiming citizenship through ancestry is hard. You have to prove every link in your ancestry chain.”