Liberals Reject Step Towards Fairness
Ottawa, ON – For too long, the Liberals’ reckless open borders policies let more people into our country than we had homes and opportunities for, leaving Canadians with disjointed job and housing markets, and hundreds of thousands of temporary residents with no long-term prospects. Now, with no credible plan to ensure these visa holders leave when their permits expire, Canadians can see how the government’s policies fail to undo the damage and how new problems arise in turn.
Today, the Liberals voted down an opposition motion that would have ended the unacceptable practice of rejected asylum claimants getting better taxpayer-funded health care than Canadian citizens.
Conservatives’ recent efforts have shed light on the money wasted on deluxe benefits for fake refugees. We now know that the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP) will cost Canadians over $1.5 billion annually by 2030, due to sheer mismanagement and the expansion of the program to include supplementary benefits not typically covered by public health plans.
The Liberals expanded the program and forced taxpayers to fund services, such as vision care, physical therapy and home care, that people who have paid into the system their entire lives don’t even receive.
Among the IFHP’s users are asylum claimants who had their claims rejected, taking advantage of the current 44-month backlog at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada and a lenient system that only cuts these benefits when the claimant has exhausted all avenues of appeal, typically many months later.
Last year, IFHP usage was up an astounding 377 per cent from 2016, all while 6 million Canadians cannot find a family doctor and are stuck waiting an average of 30 weeks to see a specialist.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent IFHP announcement means that Canadian taxpayers are still footing the rest of the bill for 70 per cent of asylum seekers’ “supplemental health benefits” – including those appealing rejected claims – another case of this government’s half-measures that fail to deliver results.
All of this is made even more shocking when we consider the nearly 25,000 refugees accepted by Canada’s immigration bureaucrats without ever meeting an official face-to-face, reaching an astounding 80 per cent acceptance rate that far exceeds that of our European peers.
It’s simple: rejected “refugees” who had their claims denied should not get better healthcare than Canadians.
That’s why Conservatives introduced a motion to reduce waste in a program that has more than quadrupled in cost since 2020. Canadians deserve a healthcare system that gives them priority over false asylum claimants, and this motion aimed at restoring fairness by:
- Reviewing federal benefits provided to asylum claimants in order to find savings for taxpayers;
- Restricting federal benefits received by rejected asylum claimants to emergency lifesaving healthcare only;
- Providing transparency on federal spending on the IFHP by providing an annual report to Parliament, particularly regarding supplemental benefits which Canadian citizens do not have access to; and
- Passing policies to immediately expel foreign nationals convicted of serious crimes in Canada.
Years of bad policy motivated by extreme agendas has left our once-proud immigration system ripe for abuse. Yet, when the government had the chance to join with His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to close just some of these unacceptable and costly loopholes, the Prime Minister chose instead to defend the status quo, saying they “have the immigration system under control”.
Canadians know that that is far from the truth, and Conservatives will continue fighting for immigration policies that are truly responsible and fair.