John Ivison: There’s blood in the water around the Liberals’ immigration minister

Immigration Minister Lena Diab was back as a witness before the immigration committee on Monday morning and it quickly became apparent why the Conservatives are licking their lips. Photo by HYUNGCHEOL PARK /Postmedia

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Like hungry wolves, opposition MPs look to isolate and target the weakest, the most awkward or the most bumbling in the ministerial herd.

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The Conservatives are currently launching coordinated attacks on Lena Diab, the immigration minister. In an unsentimental social media post, the party’s immigration critic, Michelle Rempel Garner, called for the minister to be fired, after her department recently granted travel documents to Mehdi Taj, a senior Iranian soccer official with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, a listed terror group.

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Rempel Garner noted the government’s lack of confidence in its own minister, when her question in the House was instead answered by one of Diab’s colleague.

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In committee last week, Diab acknowledged her own accountability but denied she was part of the decision-making process.

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The minister was back as a witness before the immigration committee on Monday morning and it quickly became apparent why the Conservatives are licking their lips. She was accompanied by her new deputy minister, Ted Gallivan, who acted like a lamppost for the teetering Diab, providing more support and illumination than is typical in ministerial appearance.

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It did not help that the minister was there to defend the indefensible: her department’s performance on the International Students Program, the subject of a highly critical report by the auditor general last month.

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The minister updated the committee on the whereabouts of those students. She said 64 per cent still had valid status; 14 per cent (or 21,420) have submitted asylum claims; while 22 per cent (33,660) “are presumed to have left the country but may have overstayed their permits.”

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Gallivan, the deputy minister, said no entry/exit system exists that would provide that information for sure, but the department is developing a pilot project with Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to find out exactly who is in the country and who isn’t. “It is a paradigm shift,” he said.

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It sounded more like an episode of Yes, Minister, where, typically, any given problem can be explained away by saying the figures are not comparable, the information is subject to privacy laws, or the government is conducting a pilot project that will ensure it never happens again.

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Conservative MP Costas Menegakis was in disbelief that, after being in power for 11 years, the Liberals have no such system in place.

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“I wondered the same thing,” mused Diab. “But it’s been the same throughout Canada’s history.”

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Almost by accident, she hit on a plausible excuse, as Menegakis should have known as a former member of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.

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In 2008, then auditor general Sheila Fraser pointed out that the Conservatives had no idea how to locate 41,000 individuals with enforceable removal orders against their names because Canada did not monitor the exit of travellers from the country (since 2020, CBSA has required commercial airlines to provide details for all passengers leaving Canada and receives information for land travellers from U.S. Customs).