"There's virtually nothing that a Conservative immigration minister can do without eliciting charges of being anti-immigrant or xenophobic from the Liberals and the NDP and I think that's really unfortunate," said Kenney.Read it all.
"One of the things we should recognize in Canada is that there's a very broad political consensus in favour of immigration. The reality is this: our record is much better than the Liberals on this issue. They imposed a $1,000 right-of-landing fee on every immigrant in 1995. We cut it in half.
"When the Liberals took power in 1993, they inherited a backlog from the Mulroney government of about 40,000 immigration applications. The Liberals drove that up to 800,000 and they drove the processing times from an average of six months to more than five years.
They froze settlement funding, whereas our government has tripled settlement funding and so I would argue theirs was a record of neglect.
Therefore, I don't take criticisms from them on this very seriously."
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RELATED: The more things "hopenchange"...
In turbulent times, it's good to know some things never change.*
After a week in which President Obama thanked himself for inviting him to the White House, compared AIG executives to suicide bombers, and did the first Presidential retard joke on national TV, I was impressed to find that Slate is bravely keeping up its Bushism Of The Day feature.
Four more years!