Ottawa, ON – Today, the Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative Shadow Minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, and Brad Redekopp, Associate Shadow Minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, announced the Conservatives’ comprehensive package of constructive amendments to Bill C-12, the Liberals’ border security legislation, to restore order, fairness, and public confidence to Canada’s failing immigration system.
“Canada’s immigration system is in crisis. Public support has collapsed, housing is unaffordable, healthcare is overwhelmed, youth unemployment is soaring, and security screening has been compromised,” said Rempel Garner.
“Bill C-12, as written, offers limited measures that will be immediately tied up in court while the abuse continues,” Rempel Garner added. “Canadians deserve real solutions, and with Conservatives as a government in waiting, we will work with all other parties to propose constructive amendments to improve the Bill.”
In the United Kingdom, the Labour government this week introduced sweeping reforms to curb illegal migration and bogus asylum claims. Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had previously told a conference attended by Mark Carney that “the simple fact is that every nation needs to have control over its borders. We do need to know who is in our country,” and that it was time for governments to “look ourselves in the mirror and recognize where we’ve allowed our parties to shy away from people’s concerns.”
But as the UK addresses its migration crisis, Canada’s situation is proportionally far worse. Between January 2022 and October 2025, Canada received nearly 496,000 asylum claims, equivalent to 1.2% of the population, substantially greater than the absolute number the UK received.
As a percentage of our population, Canada received more than double the UK’s claims over the same period. At the same time, the Liberals have issued record numbers of Temporary Foreign Worker and international student permits without adequate monitoring or removal mechanisms.
The Liberals also allowed the asylum backlog to balloon from just under 10,000 claims in 2015 to nearly 300,000 today, a staggering 30-fold increase. Meanwhile, rejected claimants who await appeals – often for over 44 months – continue to access full federal benefits. Taxpayers have paid more than $3.3 billion for claimants just for health care since 2015, with $821 million paid out last year alone.
The volume of people the Liberals have allowed to enter Canada has also made security screening difficult. This week, it was reported that there are, at a minimum, hundreds of people in Canada with links to Hamas.
That’s on top of committee testimony on Tuesday, where an official stated that asylum claimants are given “documentation to complete on their own once they’re in the country,” using an app which limits vetting by a human agent.
Last month, the Liberals admitted they don’t even know how many criminals they have given citizenship to. Multiple stories have also revealed how Canada’s justice system routinely gives leniency to non-citizens convicted of serious crimes in order to allow them to avoid deportation.
That’s why, within the Bill’s scope, Conservative amendments will pursue two core objectives:
- Fixing the broken asylum system by:
- Ending federal benefits beyond emergency health care for failed claimants,
- Barring asylum claims from nationals of, or those who arrived in Canada having transited through, G7 or EU countries,
- Deeming asylum claims abandoned if claimants return home during processing,
- Rejecting claims made after a claimant is found to have lied to an officer,
- Shifting the onus onto claimants to prove timely filing,
- Requiring educational institutions who accept foreign students to share the cost of any bogus asylum claims made by foreign students they welcomed to Canada,
- Requiring asylum claimants arriving in Canada to immediately provide, on the record, their full grounds for seeking protection, preventing the later use of unscrupulous lawyers to game the system,
- Modernizing the asylum appeals, screening, and judicial review processes,
- Mandating transparent annual reporting on all benefits, warrants, and departure-order compliance, and
- Modernizing the Immigration and Refugee Board with merit-based and provincially balanced appointments.
- Strengthening border security and deportation of serious criminals by:
- Redefining “serious criminality” as any indictable offence or hybrid offence prosecuted indictably (closing the “six-months-less-a-day” loophole that has shielded convicted sexual assailants from removal),
- Barring repeat Pre-Removal Risk Assessments absent substantial new evidence,
- Modernizing and accelerating enforcement of removal orders.
“These common-sense reforms are rooted in evidence parliamentarians heard at committee and in recent news reports,” Rempel Garner stated. “They are designed to gain support from all political parties. Canada once had an immigration system envied the world over, but Liberal failures erode that trust every day.”
“Canadians expect their government to protect genuine refugees while swiftly removing those who abuse the system or commit serious crimes,” Rempel Garner concluded. “It’s time to restore Canadians’ trust and prevent the immigration debate from polarizing citizens, as it has in other countries. It is time to deliver.”
Conservatives will table these amendments during clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-12 at the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.