Thank you very much. It's an honour to be asked to appear before the House of Commons committee to speak on the amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which, strangely, are contained in this budget bill.
As I have been asked to speak before the finance committee, I will not comment at length on the serious problems I have from a human rights perspective with the amendments. I will only reiterate that these amendments will replace a fair hearing and appeal before an independent tribunal, the refugee protection division of the Immigration and Refugee Board, with something that is much less fair: a right to apply to an officer, who is not independent, for a risk assessment.
I note, as have my colleagues who appeared before the immigration committee, that the provisions in the legislation as currently drafted do not require an oral hearing, and notwithstanding the assurances by the minister that such a hearing will be provided for by regulations, we have not seen the regulations that will shape the so-called enhanced PRRA.
As this bill is a budget bill, it's important to consider the fiscal implications of the proposal. I for one will certainly admit that the Immigration and Refugee Board has in the past not been the most efficient tribunal. However, with the arrival of the new chairperson, Richard Wex, we have seen a remarkable improvement in productivity at the IRB in its processing of refugee claims.
During fiscal year 2018-19, the IRB finalized 35,000 claims, 10% above its performance target. The board also eliminated the 35,000 so-called legacy claims, those claims that were left hanging when the previous Conservative government did not provide the Immigration and Refugee Board funding to deal with the backlog when it amended the legislation in 2012. More importantly, a new task force has begun triaging less complex cases so that 5,000 cases will have been decided without a hearing before the end of May 2019. These are significant achievements that demonstrate that the Immigration and Refugee Board has the ability to deal with the claims in an efficient manner provided it has the funding to do so.
This budget bill is indeed providing $200 million to the Immigration and Refugee Board to process cases. If this is the case, why is the same budget removing 5% of the claims from the Immigration and Refugee Board to be processed through a separate, parallel process?
We are told that the new PRRA will be an enhanced PRRA, one that will be as fair as the Immigration and Refugee Board hearings and guarantee an oral hearing. We are told that the government plans to hire 80 to 100 new PRRA officers.
It should be noted that, up and until now, PRRA officers have, for the most part, been rendering paper decisions. Oral hearings have been extremely rare. If PRRA officers are going to hold oral hearings in almost every case, they'll have to hold thousands of hearings. New facilities will have to be organized. PRRA interviews, which had not been recorded, will now have to be recorded. There is no registry to schedule hearings. PRRA officers do not have the sophisticated support and infrastructure that exists at the Immigration and Refugee Board.
We know that the new PRRA will have to comply with the principles of fundamental justice if it's going to be the main decision-making process for refugees, so there will be a right to counsel, a right to disclosure and a right to know and meet the case. This will all result in new needs for new infrastructure for a new process. As a result, we have to ask: Why is the government creating a parallel hearing process just when the Immigration and Refugee Board has finally proven its ability to operate efficiently and when it has finally been provided the funding to ensure that it can handle the projected caseload?
I should also warn members of the committee that having dealt with hundreds of PRRA applications over many years, I can recall that prior to 2013 when all persons were entitled to a PRRA prior to deportation, the PRRA process became extremely backlogged so that there were often cases that were delayed for years as a result of people waiting for a pre-removal risk assessment.
There is no doubt that replacing the refugee protection division with the PRRA will be a significant waste of taxpayers' money. If PRRA officers are going to become a parallel tribunal, replacing the refugee protection division in a large number of cases, the government is going to have to spend a great deal of money to create a new infrastructure, with a new registry and new hearing rooms.
I want to comment briefly on something that was mentioned in the previous session about the support of the UNHCR. I had a lengthy conversation with the esteemed representative of the UNHCR in Canada about his support. All I can suggest to you is that, unfortunately, it's my view that the esteemed delegate really doesn't fully appreciate how the PRRA works. I can say that having represented through my office, where we have 10 lawyers, hundreds of PRRA applicants and having judicially reviewed dozens of PRRA decisions, I'm pretty well aware of how the PRRA operates and I can assure you that it is not as fair a process as the refugee protection division. My assumption is that the esteemed delegate of the UNHCR, unfortunately, really doesn't fully appreciate how the PRRA process has worked in the past.
Obviously, the promises that have been made in terms of what will be in the regulations are not promises that we can hold anyone to, because we haven't yet seen the regulations.
In terms of the suggestion that the U.S. is a country that respects the rule of law, I can only say that having seen the evidence of how refugee claimants are treated in the U.S., how they are subject to arbitrary detention over lengthy periods of time, and having seen some of the reforms brought in by the Trump administration that undermine the rights of many people to claim refugee status, I really sincerely doubt that the U.S. is a safe place for refugees at the present time. Even if it's true that ultimately the rule of law will be respected, people will end up spending months or years in detention while their cases go through the courts.
In conclusion, members of the committee, this ill-conceived amendment will deprive refugees of rights without any practical benefit. I predict the PRRA process will prove less efficient than the Immigration and Refugee Board and will cost millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to implement. As members of the finance committee, you should ask the minister why he's proposing to spend taxpayers' dollars so recklessly in the budget bill to proceed with an amendment that will deprive refugees of all the rights that they get at the Immigration and Refugee Board and replace them with a less-fair alternative that will cost millions of dollars to implement.
Thank you.