It's a pleasure to be back before the committee, and I thank the committee for inviting me again.
When I was a young immigration officer, one of my first jobs was working in the minister's officer as a liaison between the political side and the department. One afternoon the minister summoned me to her office and asked if I could get her the figures for the number of temporary visitors from the Soviet bloc countries. I said I could certainly do that, and I was able to get the information within a matter of hours. I went back to her and showed her the figures. The number wasn't very large, 700 or 800 people.
She looked the figures over and then she asked the next logical question. She asked how many of them had left. I said it was impossible for the department to say, because we had no system of exit control. People could come in, but we didn't register them going out. No one could answer that question. She was astonished at this and looked over her glasses at me and said, “My God, I hope the opposition or the media don't find this out”. They never did find out, out nothing has changed. Today it's the same thing. Over half a century has passed and we still don't have an exit control system.
Unless we have an exit control system, the integrity of our temporary visa program is compromised very seriously. You have to find out who has left in order to do any of the things that we've been talking about before the committee. We're getting closer, and I'll mention more about that a little later.
If there is no system of recording departures, as I say, no temporary visa system is going to work, and ours isn't working very well. The only real instrument we have is the temporary visa, and we've heard all sorts of problems with that. But imposing visas on friendly countries has all sorts of implications. It affects our bilateral relations, damages our trade, and damages our tourism. The citizens of those countries and their governments are highly offended, as indeed we have found out from the ambassador from Mexico and the ambassador from the Czech Republic, formerly the ambassador to Hungary. We're very upset about that, but it's the only defence we have.
The Auditor General reported in 2007 that there were some 60,000 asylum seekers who had been found not to be genuine refugees but who were still in the country, and the whereabouts of some 40,000 of them was unknown. They had addresses for the other 20,000. But we had no way of knowing if these people had left, where they were, and what their intentions were.
One of the strongest recommendations the committee could make would be to encourage the government to press on with its plans to have an exit control system. Otherwise, the temporary visa system is going to continue to be a real problem.
To be fair, from the days of Ellen Fairclough, who was the minister I was talking about, some progress has been made. We've heard about the ETA. That's a major step forward, and I gather that by 2014 it will be established in some 96 countries.
The other major step forward for improvement is the reform of the asylum system and the designated countries of origin. That's had a tremendous impact. The greatest threat of abuse of the temporary visa system was people coming here to claim refugee status who knew that once they'd made that claim, they were in for the duration. It was something like the Eagles' song, Hotel California; you could check in but there was no possibility of checking out.
That has been corrected, at least initially. I have some figures here. In the first 10 months of this year, there were only 8,300 asylum claims. Of those, 600, or 8%, were from people coming from Europe or the United States. Eight per cent; that's a tremendous drop. In the previous three years, about 25% of all of asylum claims were from the European Union and the United States. That has made a big difference in terms of nervousness on the part of departmental officials about issuing visas to people who might possibly make refugees claims when they get here.
The most important step forward has been the announcement by President Obama and Prime Minister Harper in February 2011 of the beyond the border concept. I'm not sure how many Canadians are aware of this, but it's a fundamental step forward in terms of establishing an exit control system.
The concept is entitled “Beyond the Border: A Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness”. Among other things, it entails recording the departure of all permanent residents and temporary residents from one country and passing that information on to our neighbours in the U.S. They will have an exit control on temporary residents and permanent residents in the U.S., and vice versa. That's how the system is going to work, apparently.
Once that's in place, we will in effect have an exit control system, and our major problem will be resolved. We won't have to insult the Czech Republic or the Mexicans. We can eliminate temporary visas from a large number of countries, because if they are visitors, if they have a temporary resident visa, we'll now know when they leave. That's a major step forward. I would encourage the committee to keep an eye on that because it won't go ahead unless there's a bit of political push. My own reading is that the political push has slackened off a bit.
They have a committee that is supposed to be pursuing this objective, and by June 2014 all of the automated land posts along the Canada-U.S. border will have this system. There's a pilot project under way now with four posts, I think, to test the system. The initial reports say they're very successful.
By the summer of 2014, we should have an exit control system along the border, and that will then be pushed on to international air traffic, where all permanent residents and temporary residents will be recorded going out of Canada. The system is pretty well in effect. I think there is still slippage, though, at the political level. Whether or not the Americans are going to take enough interest in this to actually make it happen remains to be seen.
I'll stop there.
I do want to say that I agreed with everything Richard Kurland and Ms. Kane said in terms of their specific recommendations about what could be done.
I occasionally get asked to help someone come to Canada, and it's a dreadfully bureaucratic system. It's very slow, and it's not user friendly, and it's not transparent. Part of the reason, as Richard Kurland said, is simply lack of staff.
In addition to the massive number of visitors who need visas, so do all of the immigrants need visas, and—