New federal immigration minister pressures Quebec to increase family reunification capacity | 24CA News

Canada’s new immigration minister has solely been within the workplace for just a few weeks and he’s already entered into his first conflict with Quebec.

For 5 years, he tried to enhance relations between the federal authorities and indigenous communities. Now, after final month’s cupboard shuffle, Montreal MP Marc Miller has been handed one other difficult job as Canada’s new immigration minister.

At his first press convention in that perform, he took goal at Quebec’s coverage on household reunification.

“Quebec controls a good chunk of its immigration policy, particularly on the family reunification envelope, which is capped at about 10,000 right now,” Miller stated. “There’s a backlog of of 30,000 families that want to come here and support their kids, and…Quebec says we need to cut it off.”

Under Premier François Legault, Quebec has been working to realize an increasing number of management over immigration from the federal authorities. The province does have a say on issues like financial immigration and  household reunification.

“The cap of 10,000 is not a lot of people,” stated immigration lawyer Patrice Brunet. “It’s very alarming because here we’re not in the context of economic immigration, we’re in the context of families waiting to be reunited.“

Brunet says because of Quebec’s family reunification limit, some files are taking two years to be processed, which is nearly double the delay in the rest of Canada.

“Two years to be reunited with your family is absolutely too long. It’s inhumane,” he stated, including he fears delays will solely get longer because the backlog grows.

Miller says household reunification is a subject he desires to deal with with the Legault authorities.

“We need to have mature conversations with provinces and territories about how we welcome newcomers, and that’s one that I plan to have,” he stated.

Political scientist Daniel Béland factors out Quebec has been attempting to get much more management from the federal over household reunification.

“There is a clear disagreement between Ottawa and Quebec City,” he stated. “I don’t expect Ottawa to cave on that really, in terms of powers to Quebec over immigration, but I think some fine tuning is certainly possible.”

In its quest to guard the French language, the Legault authorities lately introduced plans to simply accept solely financial immigrants who can communicate French.

Miller says he’s prepared to work with Quebec on preserving French.

“I think we have a role as the federal government and I would say primarily that is to make sure we are supporting the diaspora of French-speaking communities outside Quebec, to make sure that they are thriving,” he defined. “French is one of the largest languages in the world, but it is threatened in North America and we have to be vigilant.”

In a press release Quebec’s immigration ministry stated it has requested a primary assembly with Miller and hopes it takes place shortly in order that precedence points could be mentioned.