Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Dec. 5th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Are you sure?

Okay, Mr. Siksay and Ms. Fry.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

It's nice to see Dr. Fry and Mr. Temelkovski, some alumni of the committee, joining us this morning.

I want to come back to the analysis of the 48% of private sponsorships that are deemed ineligible, and the analysis of those. I think you said there was no specific report, but I wonder if you could just expand on where the information comes from.

[Janet Siddall]

The information comes from our missions abroad, which are processing these applications. They report on their acceptance and refusal rates, the characteristics of the cases they're able to accept, and the cases that do not qualify. It also comes from our discussions with the sponsorship agreement holders, who freely admit that they are responding to people in their community who are asking them to help them bring their family members from abroad. We know from the outset that there is a family connection in Canada, but one can't assume that just because there's a family connection the relative living abroad was also a refugee in need of protection.

So it's through those two things: what we learned from our sponsorship agreement holders and other private sponsorship groups, and the analysis that's provided by our visa offices abroad when they interview and process the privately sponsored refugees.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

But has nothing been put together as a comprehensive analysis of that? I want to characterize it as anecdotal, but is there anything that says this is the long-term analysis of that refusal rate?

My concern is that we're making a judgment on the success or failure of a program. We've cast it and we've seen a number of ministers raise questions about the program, which has been a very key program in our refugee regime in Canada, and one that's internationally respected. Yet there are questions that are picking away at the credibility of the program.

What I'm trying to get to is whether there has been a significant piece of analysis done, or if these are just not necessarily random but occasional reports from overseas or anecdotal reports from conversations with sponsors.

[Micheline Aucoin]

The refusal rates are different from mission to mission. At our mission in Nairobi, they will see specific patterns for why they would have to refuse cases. That information we want to pass on to the sponsorship agreement holders, to look for these trends that are happening. Our missions in other places will have completely other issues that they would deal with in terms of—

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Can you provide us with any of those kinds of reports that show the analyses that have been done at missions overseas?

[Micheline Aucoin]

Sure we can, yes.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

That would be helpful.

Do we have any sense of how many of the failed people in this program, the failed applications, are actually resident in refugee camps or how many of them have relatives in Canada?

[Micheline Aucoin]

Most of them, and often this is why they're refused. For example, when they're in refugee camps, it's a lot easier to verify their bona fides—

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

But we don't know what percentage of that 48% who fail in the private sponsorship program are resident in refugee camps.

[Micheline Aucoin]

I don't know if we have that information, but we can—

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

If you do, I'd appreciate receiving it.

[Janet Siddall]

I've certainly seen reporting from our missions abroad—and I'm thinking of Nairobi, for example—stating that in their government-sponsoreds, most of the applications are coming from the camps and they're referred by the UNHCR. In the privately sponsored ones, no, they're living outside the camps.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Mr. Siksay.

Ms. Fry.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to ask you two questions. One of them has to do with refugees.

Given what is happening in Iran right now, we still don't have Iran as a country from which we consider bringing in refugees in large numbers. I want to know why not. Why has this not happened?

The second question I want to ask is with regard to something Mr. Wilson brought up. It has to do with the fact that if you look at Canada in terms of our population growth, our population growth in the next twenty years is going to come nowhere near meeting our requirements for the workforce. In the next five years or the next two years, it's not going to meet our workforce demand. There had been a great deal of work done over the last three years by the last government—I was the person in charge of it—where we had developed, with fourteen departments, an internationally trained worker initiative. There had been money put through Citizenship and Immigration in order to facilitate this, including a portal that was eventually going to allow people to be able to be assessed before they got here, so that when they got here, they would be able to go straight into a job.

I just want to know whatever happened to that. I hear nothing more about it. I hear about kiosks being put up all over the place, which really doesn't resolve the problem. This is a huge problem. If we're going to be at all productive and competitive in the 21st century in a global economy, we need to do this not only today, but yesterday, because we know we will be dependent on immigration for 100% of our net labour market by 2011.

What are we doing with that program, and what are we doing to encourage not just immigration, but immigration based on the types of people we see ourselves needing here, going all the way from trained construction workers to physicians? Could someone tell me what happened to that program?

[Micheline Aucoin]

On your first question, I'm not exactly sure what your question is. We have a global resettlement program, so certainly we would take Iranians from outside of their country.

Are you asking specifically if Iran should be put on the source country list?

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Yes. I've been asking this for the last three years. I want to know why not, given that every day we can see what's happening in Iran.

[Micheline Aucoin]

The “source country” definition is in subsection 148(2) of the IRPA regulations. Certainly Iran would meet some of those criteria. But there's a criterion by which we say it has to be a country where an immigration officer works or makes routine working visits and is able to process visa applications without endangering their own safety, the safety of applicants, or the safety of Canadian embassy staff. So it is difficult for some countries to be put on the source country list, but we do recognize that the source country list has not been as flexible as we would have liked.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

The very fact that we cannot have our own immigration officials in Iran tells us how very unsafe it is.

[Micheline Aucoin]

Or getting permits or visas if they were to—

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Exactly, but we still return failed refugee claimants to Iran, which is something we should not be doing.

Anyway, can we move on to the internationally trained worker initiative?

[Janet Siddall]

I can give you a fairly high-level overview again, but we didn't come prepared to answer questions on that aspect of the program.

You are aware that Minister Finley leads an initiative on foreign credentials recognition, with the support of Minister Solberg. That work is progressing.

The work on the portal is also progressing. The portal exists. It is being expanded, and we have provided funding to the provinces to also feed into that.

For a status update on initiatives that are underway to support the entry of foreign workers into Canada, we could provide a briefing, or perhaps it could be dealt with in another committee meeting.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

You have 45 seconds if you wish to comment.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

I am not a permanent member of the committee, but I would like to request a special briefing on that, because it is my information and sense that this has ground to a halt. All of the fourteen departments that were necessary to make this whole initiative occur have been taken off, and that fourteen-department meeting is no longer there.

[Janet Siddall]

What I would propose is that perhaps CIC officials could organize a technical briefing for the opposition parties on what we're doing on temporary foreign worker initiatives.