Conservatives say
Volpe has tainted citizenship investigation of Tory
Grewal
OTTAWA, June 09, 2005
CP
Immigration Minister Joe Volpe is under fire from
Conservatives for telling reporters that investor
class immigrants who are found not have met their
conditions "don't usually get to stay" in
Canada.
The comments were prejudicial to embattled Tory Gurmant
Grewal, his colleague Jason Kenney charged Thursday
in the Commons.
Media reports this week aired allegations that Grewal,
the B.C. MP at the centre of an ethics controversy
involving secretly taped conversations with senior
Liberals, didn't invest $50,000 in a Canadian business
when he emigrated as an entrepreneur in the 1990s.
A former business associate told the CBC that Grewal
gave him the money but got it back the day after the
transaction.
That prompted Volpe to tell reporters Wednesday that,
while he couldn't comment on specific cases, investor
class immigrants to Canada must meet "a series
of performance makers."
"They don't usually get to stay," if they
fail to meet those criteria, added the minister.
But officials at Citizenship and Immigration said
Thursday there's no record of any Canadian being stripped
of citizenship or permanent resident status due to
failure to meet investor criteria, because statistics
are not compiled that way.
Since 1977, only 50 Canadians have been stripped
of their citizenship after investigations showed they
had gained it in an improper fashion.
Department spokesman Greg Scott also said that prior
to changes in the law in 2002, there was no specific
investment dollar threshold that entrepreneurs had
to meet.
Kenney is accusing Volpe of issuing thinly veiled
threats of booting Grewal out of Canada as retribution
for a messy failed defection that involved Grewal,
his MP wife Nina, and senior members of Prime Minister
Paul Martin's government.
Grewal's surreptitious tapes of those negotiations
now form the basis for an investigation by Parliament's
ethics commissioner and a complaint to the RCMP.
"Does threatening to deport a member of Parliament
whom the Liberals have failed to buy not reflect more
the politics of a banana republic than a modern democracy
like Canada?" Kenney charged Thursday.
Volpe responded that he's removed himself "from
any consideration of that member's case, in part because
it has now become a specific case and in part because,
as we know, I have already submitted something to
the ethics commissioner on another related matter
. . . ."
Volpe earlier requested an investigation by ethics
commissioner Bernard Shapiro into Grewal's controversial
practice of demanding surety bonds from people for
whom he was vouching visitor visas to Canada.
That controversy was part of Grewal's negotiations
audible in the taped negotiations with Martin's chief
of staff Tim Murphy and Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh.
Kenney said the government, having failed to secure
Grewal's support on a crucial budget vote last month,
"then . . . try to destroy that person."
Immigration officials said privacy policy prevents
them from even saying whether there's been a formal
complaint against Grewal, let alone whether there's
an active investigation.
