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Liberals Hold The Conservative Government To Account In The House Of Commons For Broken Foreign Credentials Promise OTTAWA – The Conservative Government is again misleading Canadians about its failure to honour its promise to create a federal foreign credentials agency, Liberal Citizenship and Immigration Critic Omar Alghabra said today."It is becoming all too common to get different answers on issues from this Conservative government depending on who you ask,” said Mr. Alghabra. “Why does this government refuse to admit to breaking their poorly thought out promise to create a federal foreign credentials agency unless they are forced to under sworn testimony to a parliamentary committee?” Ed Komarnicki, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, denied breaking the Conservative promise to create a federal foreign credentials agency today in the House of Commons, even though the minister admitted to the flip flop while under questioning by the Liberal Opposition at the parliamentary committee. During the 2006 Election, the Conservative government promised to "create an agency for the assessment and recognition of credentials, to provide pre-assessment of foreign credentials and experience”. The commitment to create a federal agency was then enshrined in the Conservative's 2006 federal budget. However, while answering questions by Liberal members at this week's Parliamentary Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration Minister Finley admitted, “if we kept that promise, we wouldn't have been able to deliver what we did last week". After more than a year in government, the Conservatives recently announced the downgrading of their proposed agency to a referral office at Citizenship and Immigration Canada. “Converting their proposed foreign credentials agency into a referral office will do nothing more than refer new Canadians to the provincial offices that have always recognized foreign credentials and provide no assistance for the tens of thousands of people who have already made their way to Canada and cannot get their credentials recognized,” said Mr. Alghabra. "This referral office will only duplicate the work of the In-Canada Portal - an online resource to inform prospective Canadians about, and assist them with, the challenges they may face in coming to Canada - which was established by the previous Liberal government." Statistics Canada has recently confirmed that our labour and population growth will soon depend exclusively on immigration, so ensuring the successful integration of immigrants is essential for the future success of Canada. In April 2005, the previous Liberal government announced a commitment of $263 million to launch the Internationally-Trained Workers Initiative, to improve the integration of immigrants and internationally-trained Canadians into the work force. This plan was an important step in tackling the foreign credential recognition challenge. "How can this government claim the moral authority to govern when they make an admission under sworn testimony to a parliamentary committee, but then deny that same fact when questioned in the House of Commons,” said Mr. Alghabra. |
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