It could be a long, long summer

Last night, the Liberals helped the Conservatives pass the budget bill that contains controversial reforms to Canada's immigration system - specifically, changes that put more power in the hands of the immigration minister to say yea or nay to potential newcomers.

At least one Liberal out there isn't happy. Blogger James Curran is castigating his party for sitting on its hands on this one.

 

"I'd like to see how the Members of Parliament for the Liberal Party of Canada are going to explain to their constituents why we didn't stand up for new Canadians," Curran writes.

Dion more or less acknowledged yesterday that more and more Liberals are looking for an election sooner rather than later and there are reports that the mood is getting more tense within caucus. If it's true that Conservatives may stretch the summer break all the way until November or even December, then that means five or six long months back in the ridings. That's plenty of time to explain the still-not-fully-formed proposal for a carbon tax, Dion might argue.

It's also a long, hot summer (and fall) if you have constituents asking hard questions about why the Liberals are constantly propping up the Conservatives - hotter still if the Tories use the time to flood the airwaves with more anti-Dion attack ads.

Comments

[James Curran]

I'm a little upset.

Okay. Okay. I'm a lot upset.

;-)

[Wascally wabbit]

If they use the summer to finalize and publish their latest Red Book - hopefully containing fully fleshed out policies on other issues beyond a sound Environmental policy, long and short term responses to the changes in the economy, and a balanced immigration policy....then the procrastination will be worth while.
If it is more personality politics - Gna Gna Stephen Harper - Stephane Dion is nicer than you.....then they deserve to fall on their own swords.
The voters are more than wise enough to withhold a majority from Harper and his gang anyway!

[koby]

As Guidy Mamann of the immigration law firm Mamann & Associates notes, changes to immigration act are largely redundant. [http://thecanadianimmigrant.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=982]

"In an interview last week with CTV’s Mike Duffy, Finley confirmed that our backlog now stands at about 925,000 applications. The government maintains that the Minister needs these powers to cherry pick applicants who are needed here on a priority basis. She was asked by Duffy, if under the present system, the department was able to fast track, say a welder who was desperately needed in Fort McMurray. Finley answered 'The way the law stands now we have to process the oldest application first. If that person is number 600,000 in line we’ve got a lot of applications to get through before that.'

"This is simply not true. Our current legislation states that the federal cabinet 'may make any regulation ... relating to classes of permanent residents or foreign nationals' including 'selection criteria, the weight, if any to be given to all or some of those criteria, the procedures to be followed in evaluating all or some of those criteria… the number of applications to be processed or approved in a year' etc. In fact, in the case of Vaziri v. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the Federal Court held in September 2006 that our current legislation 'authorize[s] the Minister to set target levels and to prioritize certain classes of PR applicants' without even a regulation being passed. Accordingly, Finley has more than enough power under our current legislation to make virtually any changes that she wants subject to the Charter."

Which begs the question why all the hoopla?